Suddenly he remembered the scratching and scraping in the night, and his eyes sought for some tool with which it might be possible to break a hole through a wall. He noticed the strong iron trestles which supported the bed when it was let down; it might perhaps be done with one of them. But no. Up by the window the thickness of the wall could be seen; it must be close on twenty inches.
And yet Findeisen had escaped!
Necessity had quickened the wits of the dull lad, and had made him inventive. When they confronted him with the corpse of the sergeant, he realised that he had committed a murder; and from that moment he felt his head no longer safe on his shoulders. The fear of death lent him a subtlety of which he would never otherwise have been capable.
He had, as Wolf guessed, used the iron bed support as an implement. He had at once recognised that it would be impossible to break through the principal external wall; the other walls, however, might be expected to be considerably less strong, and they sounded hollower when he tapped them. Findeisen knew that one of them merely divided his cell from another, and so was useless for his purpose. But beyond the other wall lay a shed in which the fire-engine was kept. Its window, he knew, was only covered with wire-netting, and opened on to a field.
And as soon as all was quiet in the guard-house he had set to work, listening anxiously in the direction of the corridor during the pauses of his boring and levering. The wall was only the length of a brick thick, and after the first stone had been broken out bit by bit, it cost but little labour to widen the hole enough to let a man pass.
The night sentinels declared that they had not remarked anything unusual. Besides, they had an excuse in the regulations; for in such pouring rain they were permitted to take shelter in the sentry-boxes. So it was not even known when the prisoner had escaped.
A warrant for his arrest was sent out, but in vain. Gunner Findeisen had disappeared.
Later during the same morning on which Findeisen, avoiding all frequented paths, had slipped away through undergrowth and thickets to the frontier, Wolf, a prisoner awaiting trial, was removed to the house of detention in the capital.
The train in which he and the soldier who guarded him travelled passed another at an intermediate station. Reservists were looking out of every carriage; men from every branch of the service were mixed together, and all were alike in the wildness of their spirits.
The two trains started again at the same moment, and the reservists began to sing: