“Yes, but the ones below are nailed from the outside but these are done from within. Consequently the nails are all in plain sight.”
“You mean——” I jumped up. She was right. “How clever of you to notice that,” I exclaimed. “But do you think we can ever get ’em out—they look awfully deep in and they’re rusty besides?”
“I’m going to try anyway,” she returned. “Let’s go downstairs and take a look for some tools.”
For the first time since I had heard that back door close, I felt a faint glimmer of hope. In a little room off the kitchen filled with all manner of household odds and ends, we found a tool box and in it a hammer, brown and rusty with disuse, but still a hammer.
Well, it was exactly a quarter of three when Eve set to work on those nails. It was five minutes past before the first one even budged. And it was nearly four before we got the second one out. Then followed a long struggle with the window itself. “I’ll bet those old Cravens never did have any fresh air,” I panted. “No wonder they’re all dead—” I was pounding the sash with my fist in an effort to loosen it.
“How d’you know they’re all dead? Here, let me have another try.” Eve pushed me aside.
At last with a groan of protest, it moved—an inch, two. I reached through and unfastened the blinds and the sweet warm air rushed in. My, how good it smelled!
The window opened onto the gently sloping tin roof of a narrow side porch. After we had succeeded in raising it far enough, we climbed through. It was not at all clear to either of us what we were going to do next. But anything, we felt, was better than staying cooped up in that house any longer.
Making our way cautiously to the edge of the roof, we saw that it was, as I had anticipated, a goodish drop to the ground. Moreover, there were no adjacent tree branches or any of those convenient trellises that are always so handy in the story books.
We sat down with our feet braced against the gutter to consider the situation. “Marooned on a tin roof!” giggled Eve. The spirits of both of us had risen enormously with our escape from the house. Some one was bound to pass along the road sooner or later, we decided. And though the house stood a considerable distance back from it, still our lung power was good.