None of the prisoners spoke. They understood the plan of Phil Bray before a word of it had been uttered. Now they reached through the bars and tried to catch hold of the leg and the foot of Bergman that was nearer to the cell.
Bray and Mantry could not get a grip, but the long arm of the penman enabled him to get his clutch on the flap of the trouser leg. He closed his fingers like the talons of a bird. Then, pulling back, he swayed the leg in toward the cell.
Instantly Bergman kicked himself free!
He got to his feet with a groan and an oath. He had a gun in his right hand now. The good Havana had been smashed, and the cinders had burned and blackened all one side of his face, yet he still kept the cigar well gripped between his teeth.
He cursed as he swayed to his feet. It had been a double shock—the fist against his jaw and the back of his head against the floor. The result was that when he regained his feet he stumbled suddenly forward toward the bars of the cell.
Bray was not quick enough to seize the opportunity. Perhaps he was not quite swift enough in his reactions to take advantage of the chance. But the long, skinny arms of the penman plunged through between the bars at once. He caught Bergman by the coat collar, jerked him violently forward, and crashed his forehead firmly against a steel bar.
The revolver slid down his trouser leg and clinked against the floor.
Bergman stood with staring, idiotic eyes. He put out one hand and took a mild grip on the bars. And the penman, a whine of impatient and savage joy in his throat, beat the head of the warden again and again against the bars.
They cut the flesh right through to the bone. Blood gushed down the face of the warden. Horrible wounds multiplied. His knees had buckled. But the frenzy of Dave Lister gave him strength to hold up the loose, bulky weight and still crash the head of Bergman against the bars.
At last the burden slid out of his numb finger tips.
He stood there gasping, shaking, looking down at his hands. Blood was spattered over his fingers, and smeared over the sleeves of his coat.
“That was a good one,” said Phil Bray. “I guess you cooked the poor bum, Dave. Got ‘em, Joe?”
Joe Mantry’s hand was fumbling in the coat pocket of the warden. He found the keys, jumped up with them, and, reaching his hand through the bars of the door, started trying keys in the lock.
Phil Bray went back to the table, poured out a good shot of whisky, and let it run slowly down his throat.
“I was just thinking,” he said in a meditative voice. “What you suppose that Jimmy Lovell could feel like if he could see what we’re doin’ now?”
The penman stared at his chief.
“You’re as cool as anything,” he declared. “I don’t care what Jimmy would feel like. I know what I’ll feel like once I get on the outside of the guard wall.”
“Sure,” agreed Bray.
“They won’t get us alive the next time,” said Dave Lister, trembling from head to foot.
“Sure they won’t. They won’t get us at all,” answered the chief.
“Take those keys yourself—lemme take ‘em—Joe’s wasting time—and they’re coming! The guard’s coming back,” breathed Lister.
“Easy, Dave,” said the chief. “We don’t know nothing about locks—not compared with Mantry. We ain’t got no fingers—not compared with him.”
Something clicked softly. The door of the cell opened, and the three, lost in a moment of panic and joy that carried even big Phil Bray away with the enthusiasm, rushed out into the corridor.
They were still far from freedom, but this first step seemed half of the distance.
What should they do next?
There were two revolvers—one in the coat of the warden and the other which had slid from his hand to the floor. Bray took one of them. The penman took the other, cursed, and reluctantly passed it across to Joe Mantry, as to a greater genius with firearms.
He said to Joe: “You know me, kid.”
“Yeah. You’ll get a pill before I do, if the pinch comes,” said Mantry.
They had agreed through the mere interchange of mute glances that they would not be taken. If it came to the final stand and shooting, they would save three bullets for themselves.
“You’re the best doctor. See if the warden’s dead, Dave,” ordered Bray.
So Dave kneeled beside the warden and put his ear over the heart of the big fellow.
“Dead,” he said. “I must ‘a’ bashed in his skull for him. Now what?”
“That’s the right double cross,” said Mantry to the chief.
“Yeah,” said big Phil Bray. “That’s a double cross that done us some good. How do we get out of here? If we go down the stairs, we’re sure to bump into somebody.”
“Yeah. Try the back door of the death house, and then over the roof. When we done our last turn in the yard I seen a ladder against the west side.”
“I remember. Where the masons got their scaffolding,” said Bray to this suggestion from Mantry. “But they’d take the ladder down by night.”
“They wouldn’t,” said Mantry. “They wouldn’t take it down. Because that’s our only chance.”
They looked at one another for a split part of a second. Then Bray said:
“All right, Joe. Try the back door.”
It stood at the farther end of the corridor. Mantry found the right key for it almost at once, and they slipped through the door onto the roof. It was almost flat. A little distance away that roof dropped two stories to the level of the rest of the building. They could see three walls of the prison in part. On those, to the south and east they could see the sentinels walking their beats. They could see the gleam of the rifles. Beyond the walls were the guard-houses, the little circular redoubts, with strong searchlights^ mounted in the top of each, throwing sweeping rays over the blackness of the ground.
How could a man do anything unseen?
Well, they were to die in the morning, anyway.
Bray ran back to the cell, got two blankets from a cot, and came out again, knotting the comers of the blankets together. That made a rope of some length. They hurried out to the edge of the roof, crawling. A strong drain projected. Bray tied an end of the blanket rope to the drain and let the rest of the length dangle. It came about eight or nine feet short of the roof beneath. A wind was blowing. It fanned the blanket out and swung it to the side across the field of one of the little barred windows.
Behind that window was some fellow who called himself unlucky—some one who had a little stretch, a fiver or so, to do. A fellow who wasn’t due to die in the morning, who didn’t have to come out by night and try to run the impossible gantlet of the walls, the guards, the guardhouses beyond the walls.
The three had their shoes off by this time, and Bray went down first. The others followed. It was not a very jarring drop to the roof below. So they left the blanket dangling, hanging like a Ump, pale-gray flag to attract attention. Then they stole across the roof to the place where the scaffold for the masons and the ladder had been placed that day.
The scaffold was gone, and the ladder lay flat in the yard far below!
VI—ON THE ROOF
There was a nest of three chimneys that rose in a close cluster out of the slope of the roof near the side of the prison. The fugitives took shelter there. The greatness of their danger made them small as insects. The guards that could be seen striding along the guard walks on the southern and eastern walls were great giants. Sometimes as the guards came to the end of their beats, they would speak for a moment with the relief sentinels who kept post in the little towers that were placed here and there on the walls. In each of those towers there were two machine guns. One pointed in on the prison yard, and one swept the country beyond the walls. The men who worked those machine guns had to practice constantly. They knew the exact range of every spot of ground beyond pointblank. They were experts.