Other fears suddenly assailed him. Suppose the governor should detect something wrong in the order for the prisoners? Or, worse still—and what more likely?—suppose the governor, desiring instruction upon some detail of the transfer, had called up the real administrator of prisons and had thus laid bare the plot?—and even now was cunningly waiting for him to appear to snap the prison doors behind him like the doors of a trap?
A hundred chances against them? Standing beneath those frowning walls, the odds seemed worse a hundred times than that!
CHAPTER XXVI
THE JAWS OF DEATH
BUT the odds had to be taken.
“Ring the bell, Ivan,” Drexel ordered. Ivan did so, and the gates slowly creaked open upon their frozen hinges. A sentry appeared, looking more a bear than a man in his huge sheepskin coat.
“Who’s there?” he demanded.
“Captain Laroque,” Drexel gruffly returned.
“Come in, captain.”
Drexel drove into the prison yard, more than half expecting the gates to close behind him with a clang. They did not, but that proved nothing. The governor would wait till he had him in the prison itself before he sprang the trap.
In the court the prison van stood ready. But that also proved nothing.