“All in the bunk-house, and the punchers are sleeping out near the corral.”
“Yes, I seen ’em. Now you go back to bed an’ wait till I hiss through the window. Then we’ll have yuh out o’ here in a jiffy.”
The herder’s form vanished in the darkness, and Larkin, his heart beating high with hope and excitement, returned to his bed. Before lying down, however, he dressed himself completely and strapped on the cartridge belt and gun.
The minutes passed like hours. Listening with every nerve fiber on the alert, Bud found the night peopled with a multitude of sounds that on an ordinary occasion would have passed unnoticed. So acute did his sense of hearing become that the crack of a board in the house contracting under the night coolness seemed to him almost like a pistol shot.
When at last it appeared that Sims must have failed and that dawn would surely begin to break, he heard a heavy sound in the dining-room and 182 sat bolt upright. It was merely the cow-puncher there preparing to go out and waken his successor. Although the man made as little noise as possible, it seemed to Bud that his footsteps must wake everybody in the house.
The man went out of the dining-room into the mess-room of the cowboys, closing the door behind him softly, and after that what occurred was out of the prisoner’s ken.
After a while, however, Bud’s ears caught the faintest breath of a hiss at the window, and he rolled softly out of bed on to the floor in his stocking feet. Sims was there and another man with him, and both were prying at the bars of the window with instruments muffled in cloth.
“Did you get him?” asked Bud.
“Shore! He won’t wake up for a week, that feller,” answered Sims placidly.
For a quarter of an hour the two worked at the clumsy bars, assisted by Bud from the inside. At the end of that time two of them came loose at the lower ends and were bent upward. Then the combined efforts of the three men were centered on the third bar, which gave way in a few minutes.