“Thank you, and now good-bye! Stop: here’s a kiss to take to my dear mistress. They shan’t hang me, my dear.”
The girl went out, sobbing, and lock’d the door after her.
I sat down for a while, feeling doleful. For I found myself extremely young to be hang’d. But soon the whang—whang! of the hammer below rous’d me. “Come,” I thought, “I’ll see what that rascal is doing, at any rate,” and pulling the file from my pocket, began to attack the window bar with a will. I had no need for silence, at this great height above the ground: and besides, the hammering continued lustily.
Daylight was closing as I finish’d my task and, pulling the two pieces of the bar aside, thrust my head out at the window.
Directly under me, and about twenty feet from the ground, I saw a beam projecting, about six feet long, over a sort of doorway in the wall. Under this beam, on a ladder, was a carpenter fellow at work, fortifying it with two supporting timbers that rested on the sill of the doorway. He was merry enough over the job, and paused every now and again to fling a remark to a little group of soldiers that stood idling below, where the fellow’s workbag and a great coil of rope rested by the ladder’s foot.
“Reckon, Sammy,” said one, pulling a long tobacco pipe from his mouth and spitting, “’tis a long while since thy last job o’ the sort.”
“Aye, lad: terrible disrepair this place has fall’n into. But send us a cheerful heart, say I! Instead o’ the viper an’ owl, shall henceforward be hangings of men an’ all manner o’ diversion.”
I kept my head out of sight and listen’d.
“What time doth ’a swing?” ask’d another of the soldiers.
“I heard the Colonel give orders for nine o’clock to-morrow,” answer’d the first soldier, spitting again.