They had plenty of time in which to consider ways and means. Immediately deciding that nothing could be done or attempted in daylight, they wore out the long afternoon plotting and planning—to mighty little purpose.
Their prison was a makeshift, to be sure, but it was pretty effective. There were no windows; what little light they had came through the unbattened cracks in the walls. There was but the one door, and that was padlocked on the outside. And while there were plenty of excellent tools for digging a tunnel, the heavy plank floor securely nailed down made that expedient impossible.
For hours they were completely ignored. Nobody came near their end of the building, and apparently there were no camp activities of any kind going on outside. Larry guessed at the explanation, which proved to be the right one.
“Those men we saw are only the Overland Central engineering party,” he hazarded. “They’re waiting for their working force to come in from somewhere up the line. That is why everything is so quiet.”
In the plotting and planning they soon discovered that their tool-room prison was partitioned off at the end of the commissary or store. Through the cracks in the partition they could see into the other part of the building. It appeared to be locked up and deserted, and was half filled with canned stuff, sides of salt meat stacked up, a lot of hams in their canvas covers, a wagon-load or two of flour in sacks, barrels of potatoes and cabbages—provisions of all sorts.
“If we could only get through this partition some way,” Dick suggested, “the rest of it would be easy—with half a dozen windows to choose from.”
They had been gradually working down to this through the afternoon; like the man, who, after looking in all the likely places for his lost cattle, began to look in the unlikely ones; and being the mechanical member of the partnership, Larry set his wits at work. The partition was built of up-and-down planks spiked to two-by-fours at the bottom, in the middle and at the top. The two-by-fours were on their side of the wall, and while daylight remained, Larry made a careful inspection of the different planks, one by one, to ascertain if they were all nailed solidly.
His search was finally rewarded. One of the planks was not nailed quite home, or perhaps it had warped a bit after the nailing was done. Anyway, there was a little crack between it and the two-by-fours; and with a pick taken from the tool pile Larry cautiously pried the board loose at the bottom and in the middle, leaving it hanging by the two nails at the top. Then—the Donovan thoroughness coming into play again—he bent the projecting nails flat so that the board could be pulled back into place until the time should come for it to be pushed aside.
“Somebody might happen to come into the storeroom and see it bulged out,” was the explanation he gave Dick while he was twisting and toiling over the nails. “I don’t mind jamming my fingers a little. There’s no use sweating your head off making a chain, and then leaving one link in it so it will pull in two at the first jerk.”
With the way of escape to the larger room thus provided, they waited to see what would happen at suppertime. Much to their relief, the thing they were hoping for did happen. A little past sunset the door was opened and a substantial camp supper was thrust in to them. After that, there was another wait for darkness; and when they were able to see the stars through the wall cracks they swung the hanging plank aside and squeezed through the narrow slit into the store-room.