“Nine long, weary months passed after this and not another human being crossed our threshold except the head jailer. When we bombarded him with questions about the fellow who had passed himself off as the American consul, and who had stolen our letters and had never shown up since—damn him!—we had all learned to speak a little Spanish by this time—he pretended not to hear and, his inspection over, locked the door behind him. Pretty soon we fell into the ways of all disheartened prisoners—each man following the bent of his nature. I warded off sickening despair by carving with my pocket-knife—which they let me keep as being too small to do them any harm—little figures out of the beef bones I found in my soup. That’s how I came to recognize those in Monsieur Lemois’ cabinet. When I was lucky enough to get hold of a knuckle bone with a rounded knob at the end, I made a friar with a bald head, the smooth knob answering for his pate. Other bones were turned into grotesque figures of men, women, and animals. These I gave to the sentry, who sent them to his children. Often he brought me small pieces of calico and I made dresses and trousers for them. When I got tired of that I trained two fleas—and they were plenty—to play leap-frog up my arm.
“When these little diversions failed to drive dull care away, we passed the time cursing the gentleman in the immaculate cotton ducks. He had either lied to us, or was dead, or had been transferred—anyway, he had gone back on us and left us to rot in jail.
“At last we determined to escape.
“We had made that same resolution every day for months and had planned out half a dozen schemes, some of which might have been successful but for two difficulties—the double guard on the outside of the building and the two dogs in the jail-yard. There was now but one chance of success. We would dig a hole in the dirt floor clear under the wall, watch for a stormy night, and make a break for the town and the coast, where we might be able to signal some trading craft and so get away.
“So we started to digging, beginning on the side opposite the door—our utensils being a sharpened bone, my pocket-knife, and a bayonet which had dropped from a sentry’s scabbard, and which I managed to pick up on our exercise walk in the court-yard and conceal in the straw on which we slept. This straw too helped hide the dirt. We rammed the wisps up into each end of the pallets, put the excavated earth in the middle with a dusting of loose straw over it, and so hid our work from view. At the end of a month we had a hole under the wall large enough to wriggle in. I could see the daylight through the loose earth on the other side. Then we waited for a storm, the rainy season being on and thunder showers frequent. Two, three, four nights went by without a cloud; then it began to pour. We determined to try it just before the guards were changed. This was at 2 A. M. by the church clock. The outgoing sentry would be tired then and the new man not thoroughly awake.
“When the hour came I crawled in head first, worked myself to the end of the tunnel, and, putting out my hands to break away the remaining clods of earth, came bump up against a piece of heavy board. There I lay trembling. The board could never have rolled down from anywhere, nor could our opening have been detected from the outside.
“Somebody had placed it there on purpose!
“I wriggled back feet foremost, whispered in my companions’ ears what I had found, and we all three sat up the rest of the night wondering what the devil it meant. When morning broke, the head jailer came in. I noticed instantly a change in his manner. Instead of a few perfunctory questions, he gave a cursory glance around the cell, his eyes resting on the pile of straw, and turning short on his heel left without a word.
“There was no question now but we were suspected, so we held a council of war and determined to keep quiet—at least for some nights. What was up we didn’t know, but at all events it was best to go slow. So we stuffed most of the dirt back in the hole and waited—our ears open to every sound, our teeth chattering. You get pretty nervous in jail—especially when you have about made up your mind that the next hour is your last.
“We didn’t wait long.