“I’ll drill a hole through the first man who enters this room,” he cried loudly, hoping that the threat would cause the men outside to hesitate for a few moments longer before battering down the door. Then, placing his feet on the sill, he centered his efforts on the horizontal bar at the top.
A quick glance through the window revealed a broad-shouldered man in uniform standing with his back to a shed. Evidently the cordon was tightening. Even if he succeeded in getting through the window, he would have to fight his way through a human barrier. The outlook was almost hopeless, but he persisted with the tenacity that comes of despair. He sprang from the sill, turned the electric light switch, plunging the room into darkness and hiding his movements from the eyes of the man outside, then leaped back to his former position and tugged frenziedly at the horizontal piece.
Of a sudden his hand slipped and a metallic protuberance scratched his wrist. With habitual attention to detail, he wound his handkerchief around the injured surface, stopping the flow of blood. If by a miracle he should succeed in getting out, he did not care to leave behind any clews to his movements. Another sharp glance through the window satisfied him that the man at the shed was not looking in his direction. Then he ran his fingers along the horizontal frame, found the object that had wounded him, and discovered that it was a nail.
The hubbub outside the door had ceased momentarily. Suddenly there came a loud crash, as if a heavy body had dashed against the door. The Phantom, a suspicion awakening amid the jumble of his racing thoughts, fingered the nail, twisting it hither and thither. It occurred to him in a twinkling that it was an odd place for a nail, since it could serve no apparent purpose. In a calmer moment he would have thought nothing of it, but his mind was keyed to that tremendous pitch where minor details are magnified.
Another crash sounded, accompanied by an ominous squeaking of cracking timber. He bent the nail to one side, noticing that its resistance to pressure was elastic, differing from the inert feel of objects firmly imbedded in solid wood. An inspiration came to him out of the stress of the moment. He twisted the nail in various directions, at the same time tugging energetically at a corner of the frame.
Once more a smashing force was hurled against the door, followed by a portentous, splintering crack. Quivering with suspense, his mind fixed with desperate intentness on a dim, tantalizing hope, the Phantom continued to bend and twist the nail at all possible angles. He knew that at any moment the door was likely to collapse, and then——
He uttered a hoarse cry of elation. Of a sudden, as he bent the nail in a new direction, it gave a quick rebound, and in the same instant the frame yielded to his steady pull, as if swinging on a hinge, revealing an opening in the side of the uncommonly massive wall. For a moment his discovery dazed him, then a terrific crash at the door caused him to pull himself together, and in a moment he had squeezed his figure into the aperture.
He drew a long breath and wiped the blinding, smarting perspiration from his face. Thanks to an accidental scratch on the wrist, he had discovered Sylvanus Gage’s emergency exit. And none too soon, for already, with a splitting crash, the door had collapsed under the repeated onslaughts of the men outside, and several shadowy forms were bursting headlong into the room.
The Phantom, wedged in the narrow opening, seized the side of the revolving frame and drew it to. A little click signified that a spring had caught it and was holding it in place. Excited voices, muffled by the intervening obstruction, reached his ears. He smiled as he pictured the consternation of the detectives upon discovering that once more the Gray Phantom had lived up to his name and achieved another of the amazing escapes that had made him feared and secretly admired by the keenest sleuths in the country.
He had no fear that the police would follow him, for his discovery of the secret exit had been partly accidental and partly due to the accelerated nimbleness of mind that comes to one laboring under tremendous pressure. To the police the nail on the top of the window frame would be nothing but a nail. It is the hunted, not the hunter, whose mind clutches at straws, and they would never guess that the nail was a lever in disguise. The Phantom, as he contemplated the ingenious arrangement, found his respect for the dead man’s inventiveness rising several notches.