At the disappearance of the householder into the cellar, the Harmony Hustler got quickly on his knees and began sounding the piano’s big wooden legs with his knuckles. Working quickly, he passed to the third leg, the one in back on the right-hand side. Here he seemed to find what he was searching for. We heard him excitedly catch his breath. And his hands trembled as he [[161]]locked them around the big leg, giving it a sharp twist to the left. We saw the leg turn. He was unscrewing it!
Following a tinny rattle of furnace pipes in the cellar, heavy steps sounded on the stairs. Jumping nimbly to his feet, the queer acting one was dreamily running his snaky fingers up and down the keyboard when the other man came into the room with the recovered thimble and wrench.
As I have said, it was my earlier belief that the warty-nosed thief’s visit to the house had been occasioned by our presence there as prisoners. But now I was made to realize, from what I had just witnessed, that he was more interested in the marked piano leg than he was in us. It was to get a chance to secretly inspect the piano’s legs that he had tricked the instrument’s owner into the cellar.
Here was a new mystery. What was there in connection with the marked piano leg to attract the thief to the house? In what way did the marked leg differ from the other legs? Was it in the sound? And now that the thief had made some kind of a discovery, what step was he planning to take next?
Intensely interested in what had taken place in the sitting room, I had given no attention to [[162]]my companions, and therefore hadn’t missed Peg at the stovepipe hole.
But in the disappearance of our jailer into the cellar, our big chum had jumped to his feet, extracting from the bureau several folded bed sheets. Tearing the sheets into strips, he had twisted the strips into a rope, one end of which now dangled out of the window.
“Come on, fellows,” the worker panted, calling our attention to the way that he had opened to probable freedom.
We weren’t blind to the risk that we would run in escaping down the bed-sheet rope. If we were detected in our descent by our jailer we probably would get a charge of bird shot in our legs. But in our crazy eagerness to get away from our hated prison we were willing to run any kind of a risk.
Before going through the window Red grabbed his pants and shirt, for, as I have said, we were all more or less undressed. I was slow in finding my pants, so Peg, the next one dressed, went out through the window and down the rope, scooting, with the freckled one, in the direction of the underbrush on the canal bank.
I still hadn’t been able, in my excitement, to find my misplaced pants. So Scoop prepared to make his escape from the room ahead of me. [[163]]