“You know nobody would hurt you, because you are a cripple,” he replied, “or you wouldn’t talk that way.”
“And you,” I retorted, “who never went into danger enough to lose a limb, can well afford to lounge about a hospital, and bully over the cripples!”
No reply was made: I heard them going down stairs, and I was alone in my prison!
Fortunately, during my youthful days I had not neglected one important branch of my education. I had read, with deep interest, minute and graphic accounts of the daring adventures and hair-breadth escapes of Claude Duval, Dick Turpin, and Sixteen-string Jack, contained in a series of twenty-four octavo volumes, of one hundred pages each, handsomely bound in orange-colored paper, and illustrated with numerous spirited lithographic engravings, done on brown stone.
There is no sort of learning that will not come in play at some time or other; and, with my extensive theoretic knowledge of prisons, it is not to be supposed that an ordinary hotel-room, with the lock on the inside of the door, would hold me very long. I looked about me for means of escape. The window was too high to think of taking a jump from it, as it will be remembered I had led Thomas to believe I was in the habit of doing, and as Chris. Miller had threatened to do; so I resolved to force the door open or die in the attempt.
There was a stove in the room, without fire, of course, and I opened the door and peered in. It contained about eighteen quarts of ashes and cinders, and——a small iron shovel with an iron handle. I seized it with joy. I saw liberty beaming all over it. First I tried to insert the handle between the lock and the iron “catch,” into which the bolt went, which was only secured by a couple of one-and-a-half-inch wood-screws. The crevice was too small, or the shovel-handle too big. I next tried a corner of the shovel itself: it entered the crevice, but it proved too pliable—it bent. Then, with some effort, I wrenched the handle from the shovel, and tried that end. It was smaller than the other end, and success stared me in the face. I inserted it in the crevice, and, with a reasonable expenditure of strength, pried the “catch” off, and it fell to the floor, in a somewhat bent and dented condition. The door swung open. I was free.
Thus liberated, I walked calmly down stairs, and went out on the piazza, where the Doctor and a number of the boys were sitting, airing themselves.
“Doctor,” I said, coolly, as I boldly confronted him, “I am not accustomed to sleeping in the fourth story: couldn’t you give me a room lower down?”
CHAPTER V.
Accommodated with a “Room Lower down.”
I NEVER saw a man stare with such pure unalloyed astonishment as the Doctor did on this occasion. Not five minutes had elapsed since he had had me locked up in the guard-house, and yet, there I was—free. He stared at me for a moment as though I were an apparition from the dead, then stammered: