But I would not allow the King's cause to be hopeless, and showed him my chronogramma, not without complacency.
He took the paper in hand, and was holding it close to the lantern, to con it, when at that instant Jack Trecarrel started up on his straw pallet into a sitting posture, and nudged Grylls—who, with the rest of our comrades, lay in a sound sleep; but, feeling his elbow jogged, he opened his eyes.
Having wakened Grylls, Trecarrel motioned to us both to do as he did without questioning, and began very cautiously to pull off his boots. While he did this a new thought seemed to strike him, for he puckered his brows awhile, and leaning towards me whispered across the back of Carminowe (who still bent forward, studying my scrap of paper), "Rouse the men on your side—softly as you can! They may all be useful." He turned to Grylls and whispered (as I suppose) the same order: for Grylls at once touched the shoulder of the trooper lying next him, and put finger to lip as the fellow stirred in his sleep and blinked up at him.
I on my part, having pulled off my boots obediently, began to rouse the men nigh me with similar caution; so that presently we had the whole ring awake and staring, their eyes asking what we intended. "Heaven help me if I know!" I muttered to myself, but endeavoured to answer the looks bent upon me by looking extremely wise.
"Most ingenious!" said Carminowe aloud, who all this while had been working out my riddle, observant of none of these preparations. He turned to me. "May I ask, Sir——"
"Hist!" commanded Trecarrel, laying a hand on his arm and peering into the space of darkness between us and the chancel, where three stable-lanterns shone foggily—one tilted on the cushion of the pulpit-desk, the other two set side by side on the altar itself. In the choir-stalls and on the floor between (where the altar-step, with a coat laid upon it, served for their pillow) maybe a score of rebels lay snoring. These did not belong to our regular guard, and indeed by night I never discovered that we had a guard: but some four hundred soldiers bivouacked, as a rule, in the churchyard outside, with sentries posted; which from the first had been a dead-wall to all our projects of breaking prison.
After peering for half a minute or so, Trecarrel raised himself to a kind of crouching posture, Grylls, at the same time, imitating him. They beckoned to a couple of our troopers to follow them; and, backing out of the lantern's rays, in a trice all four made a sudden dart across for the shadow of the belfry arch.
Then in a trice I understood what was forward; and, pointing to Carminowe's feet, signalled to him to slip off his shoes. The tower of Lestithiel church rises to a spire, and its belfry chamber stood then on a raised floor, approached, not as in most belfries by a winding stair, but through a trapway by a ladder reaching up from the ground. During our captivity this ladder had been removed and perhaps cast down outside in the grass of the churchyard. But now I followed Trecarrel's guess that the same had been found and carelessly brought back for Carminowe's hanging on the morrow. I knelt and unlaced the old man's shoes. He suffered this, eying me as if to ask what it meant, but making no protest.
One by one our comrades slipped away into the shadow under the belfry. I heard the ladder raised softly and then a light scraping as its upper end touched the stonework aloft. It seemed to me, too, that I heard a footstep mounting the rungs; but of this I could not be sure. Our enemies in the chancel snored on.