“This time ’twill be different!” O’Malley promised, smacking his lips.
“Why?”
“They don’t know where we’re burrowing.”
“How many times before haven’t they known?” Gerry asked cautiously.
“Many times,” O’Malley admitted. “But this time they don’t. We’re working at two they know about, of course; but the third—” he checked himself and looked about cautiously, then spoke more closely to Gerry’s ear. “’Tis well planned now. Ye’ve seen the tennis court in the courtyard?”
“Certainly,” Gerry said.
“Did ye note the fine new grandstand we built about it?”
He referred, obviously, to the tiers of steps, or seats, to accommodate the spectators at the match games for the championship of the camp which then were being played.
“Under the stands where they run up against the side of the canteen building,” O’Malley confided, “is a fine, empty space for hiding dirt which the Huns don’t yet inspect—that not yet being listed for inspection, nothing yet having happened beneath. So there we’re digging the true tunnel—besides the two that everyone knows about. Now that you’re here, we’ll use it. We’ve been only awaiting—while wishing nobody any hard luck—for a flying man. For we’ve been beyond the wire many times,” the Irishman repeated. “But now with you here, we’ll go farther.” And he gazed away to the east, where airplanes were circling in the clear sky.
They had risen from an airdrome about two miles distant from Villinstein, Gerry learned, where the Germans were training cadet flyers. O’Malley had managed to learn something of the arrangement of the airdrome and had observed the habits of the cadets; he had a wonderful plan by which the party of prisoners, who should use the secret tunnel to get beyond the wire, should surprise the guards at the flying field and capture an airplane. Thus Gerry began his prison life with a plot for escape.