“A guide rope?”
“Yes. Don’t be making those faces. Do you think I’m going to hang you?”
“Oh no—no,” said Gray, with a nervous smile. “No—certainly.”
“I wouldn’t do such a ungentlemanly thing. Poke your head through.”
The man accompanied these words by seizing Gray by the hair and thrusting his head into the noose, which then he passed over his shoulder down to his waist.
“There you are now,” he said, “as safe as if you was a diamond in cotton. Now, mind you, I go first, and you follow arter. You keep coming on in the line of the rope, you understand, as long as you feel me tugging at it; you are sure to be safe if you follow the rope, but so certain as you don’t down you’ll go either into some of the yards o’ the houses, or into some o’ the open courts.”
“I understand,” said Gray, who felt anything but pleasantly situated with a thick rope round his middle, by which he was to be hauled over roofs of old houses. There was, however, no alternative, and he strove to assume an air of composure and confidence, which sat but ill upon him, and the ghastly smile which he forced his face to assume, looked like some hideous contortion of the muscles produced by pain, rather than an indication that the heart was at ease within him.
The housebreaker now took the coil of rope in his hand, leaving a length between him and Jacob Gray of about three yards merely, and then he nimbly got out at the window.
“Follow,” he said to Gray, “and mind ye now, if you say anything until you are spoken to by me, I’ll let you down.”
Trembling and alarmed, Gray scrambled out at the window, and found himself standing, or rather crouching in a narrow gutter, full of slime and filth, and only protected from falling by a narrow coping, which cut and scratched his ankles as he moved.