The boy could hear them battering the oak door of the cell they had so recently occupied.
"Let 'em batter away," muttered Pete. "I shot the bolt on the inside."
To his amazement, Jack actually heard his companion chuckle. What could the cow-puncher be made of, steel or granite, or a combination of both!
And now Pete began to wriggle along the ledge, pressing with all his weight against the wall.
"Come on," he breathed to Jack, "throw all your weight inward and don't look up or down."
In mortal fear of finding his body hurtling backward into vacancy at any moment, the boy followed the intrepid cow-puncher along the narrow footpath. Perhaps it needed more pluck on his part to proceed along the insecure ledge in the pitchy blackness than it did on the part of the nervy cow-puncher. Who shall take the exact measure of courage?
At last they reached the angle of the tower, and Pete stood still. To proceed round the sharp angle, on no wider pathway than that which they trod, would be manifestly impossible. Yet go on they must. Suddenly Pete gave a cry of joy. Looking down into the darkness, he had seen, not more than ten feet beneath them, the sharp ridge of an addition to the old Mission church. If they could reach that he knew, from calculating the height of the tower, they would not be far from the ground.
Behind them the yells and shouts were growing louder.
To think, with Pete, was to act. With a muttered prayer, one of the few he had ever uttered in his rough life, the cow-puncher crouched as well as he could on the ledge. Putting over first one leg and then the other, he deliberately dropped downward, till his hands gripped the edge of the ledge on which a second before he had stood. His muscles cracked as the sudden strain came on them, but he held fast, and a second later let go. He landed to his intense joy, on a rough tiled roof, after an easy drop of not more than four feet.