We listened at the window. Bailey's Harbor, after its great excitement over the captured burglars, had gone home, and gone to sleep. Everything was quiet as a graveyard. We could hear the slapping of the water against the timbers of the wharf, and somewhere, a rooster, disturbed by the moonlight, crowed once. It was a dim and sleepy sound, and it was not repeated. The fog had nearly gone; the moon shone clear.
One by one, and as quiet as mice, we crawled through the window, and dropped to the earth below.
CHAPTER VII
BUT WE DECIDE TO GO
Mr. Daddles stood on a ledge of the building a moment, and quietly pulled down the window.
"It wasn't locked," he muttered, "so there'll be nothing to show how we got out."
We were in a little yard at the rear of the jail. There was a large empty building,—a barn, or a boat-builder's work-shop, on the next lot. It cast a deep shadow over one side of the yard, and we kept in this shadow, as we stole toward the fence. A short alley ran down the hill on the other side of this fence. In a moment or two we were tip-toeing through the alley. It seemed to me that I had been going on tip-toe for hours,—I wondered if I would forget how to walk in the usual way.
Everything was quiet; we met no one, and heard nothing. Turning up the street we kept on, silently, until we reached the open space near the water. There was the tent, white and still in the moonlight. We looked in at the flap of the tent,—two dim forms lay wrapped in blankets, breathing heavily, and both sound asleep.
"Look at 'em!" said the banjo-man, in a low tone, "sleeping like babes, while I was languishing in jail."
"Wake up!" he said, in a slightly louder voice, prodding the nearest one with his banjo.