“He has refused it,” Martin answered. “He refused it with scorn, almost with insult. ‘I need neither food nor drink,’ he said, ‘only the engineer, who is my sole passion, now that my wife has fled with the lodger.’ ”
Sard would have been very glad of a tamale and a drink of water, but neither was offered. The men moved off and closed a door behind them. Soon after that, the hooter-whistles blew at three different mines. A trumpeter, taking the time from them, blew a call in the patio of the barracks. For a few minutes Sard could hear the shuffling of many feet, hurrying to those calls to dinner and siesta. “No one will come to me now,” Sard said, “for three hours. I am locked in till they choose to remember me, and nobody who knows me knows where I am.” He tried the door, which was locked, as well as barred across: the upper and lower panels of it were metalled. He tried the walls: they were made of a kind of adobe which had been furnace-burnt: they were brick. The roof he could not easily reach, except at the back of the cell. The floor was of clay which had been puddled and beetled.
Of all these four barriers, the floor seemed to him to be the most easy to remove. He hung the handkerchief, “A present from Bradford,” over the grating in the door, lest some spy should pull back the shutter. When he had done this, he knelt down close to the back of the cell, took out his knife and began to dig bare the lowest courses of adobe.
His knife had been given to him years before as a keepsake by his second in the port main; it had been with him in his first voyage in the Venturer, and ever since, in all his sea-going. It had not been taken from him by the soldiers, because they had not expected that any man would carry a weapon where a sailor carries his knife. They had tapped his side, breast and hip pockets, but not the middle of his back. The knife was of the common type of sailors’ sheath-knife. He had cut nicks on the handle, a nick for every passage completed between port and port; thirty-six nicks altogether. The sheath was not the original sheath, but a gift from a sailor called Panther Jack, who had made it for him in the Pathfinder out of an old boot. The knife-blade was worn away to a thin crescent of steel by repeated sharpenings at the grindstone. It was as good a knife as a man might hope for in work aloft, cutting stops or ropes’ ends, but it was the poorest kind of trowel. In his eagerness, he put too much weight upon it and snapped the blade across about an inch from the handle.
He was disheartened by this, but continued to scrape till he discovered that the pounded clay on the floor had been laid on a spread of pebbles set in mortar. The mortar was queer stuff, very hard near the pebbles, but soft between them. It took Sard one hour to clear out three pebbles. Under the third was an iron bolt, or nail, the length and weight of a marline-spike. It had been bent a little. In its day it had had a good deal of battering. It was rusty, but very well fitted to be a punch to drift out other pebbles. Using a pebble as a mallet, Sard was making good progress when a low voice called him:
“Kid!”
“Who’s there?” he asked.
“Say, Kid, don’t make any noise, but come right up to the hole there.”
Sard came cautiously, half expecting a missile through the hole. He saw that the hole was blocked by a man’s face, which so shut out the light that he could not recognise it.
“Say, Kid.”