Port Argent: A Novel

by Arthur Colton

It was half-past one by the striking of the city clocks when he finished stripping off the first thickness of bricks. If the ends of the bars were buried more than two layers downward, there would not be time to strip them all before daylight. He forced up those on the sill, which were opposite one of the bars, and felt with his fingers. He felt the end of the bar, and knew that at that rate he would be out by three o'clock.

He worked on. His black hair hung wet against his forehead. He watched intensely for the loosened fragments of cement. He grew more skilful, more noiseless. The loudest sound in the cell was his own breathing, and except for that, only little rasps and clicks.

When the last brick was out and laid in its place, he moved the grating, which came out easily with a little scraping noise. It was heavy, and he rested a corner of it on the mattress, so that the ends of the bars caught in the sides of the window. Then he brought his blanket. In lifting the blanket he noticed the short iron braces on the cot bed. They suggested an idea. He took out the screws of one of them with the chisel, carried it to the window, and scratched it on the bricks until its black enamel was rubbed off one end; then laid it on the floor. Whether possible to do so or not, people would think he must have loosened the bricks with the brace. He wasn't going to mess “old Al” again, he thought, no, nor meet him in St. Louis for that matter, nor be led around the rest of his life by a string.

“Not me, like a damn squealing little pig”

He slit one end of the blanket into strips with his chisel, tied each strip to the bars of the grating and dropped the other end of the blanket through the window. Leaning out, he looked down and saw that it reached the grating of the window below. He put his shoes into his side coat pockets, the chisel into an inner coat pocket, and felt in his vest for the money Alcott had left him. He pulled his cap on hard, turned off the gas jet, and climbed over the grating.

He gripped with both hands the corner of it which projected into the window, opposite the corner which rested on the mattress within the cell, and let himself down till his feet caught on the grating of the window below, slipping his hands alternately along the edges of the blanket, and so down step by step, feeling for the bars with his feet. When his feet reached the stone sill below he felt the top bars under his hands. He stopped to catch the lower bars in order to lower himself to the ground, and his face came opposite the upper half of a partly dropped window. The lower half of it was curtained. A gas jet burned inside.

The room was like the cell overhead, whitewashed, but larger and furnished with ordinary bedroom furniture. The gas jet was fixed in the same place as in his own cell. The light fell flickering across the wide bed. A man lay there asleep on his back, his thick beard thrust up and in the air, his feet toward the window, where Allen clung like a spider. The sleeper was Sweeney. Allen slipped to the ground, sat down, and covered his face with his hands, and shivered. He had not known that Sweeney slept underneath him.

He pulled on his shoes, stood up, and went out under the maple tree to the sidewalk. He was glad he had not known that Sweeney slept underneath him. The sky was nearly covered by clouds, a few sparkling spaces here and there.

The blanket hung from the dismantled upper window, and flapped in the night wind against the wall.

As he climbed the bank to the sidewalk the clock in the church tower across the street struck three. It frightened him. It seemed too spectacular a place to be in, there under the great arc light that poured its glare down upon him, while the bells above the light were pealing, shouting in their high tower, clamouring alarm over the Court House Square, over the little old jail, the grim, small, dingy jail, low down in the sunken land, jail of the one ungrated window and flapping blanket, jail of the sleeping Sweeney.