“It’s nailed fast,” Tom remarked when, by dint of lighting many matches inside his hat, he had examined the shutter. “But I can reach it by standing on two chairs, and if I can get it open, I can crawl out and drop to the ground. But how am I going to pull out those big nails?”
Indeed it did seem impossible, but Tom was ingenious. His fingers, when he had thrust his hands into his pockets, had touched his keen-bladed knife, the one that had gotten him into trouble about the wire and which had been returned to him by the proctor.
“I can cut away the wood around the nails,” he thought, and at once he put his plan into operation. He managed to get two chairs, one on top of the other, and mounting upon this perch, he attacked the shutter. Fortunately the wood was soft, and working in the darkness by means of feeling with his fingers around the nails, Tom soon had one spike cut free of the shutter. Then he began on the others, and in half an hour he could raise the solid piece of wood. A breath of the fresh night air came to him.
“No glass in it,” he exclaimed softly. “That’s good. Now to get away and show up at the dinner. I hope they didn’t get any other fellows. They haven’t brought any more here, that’s sure.”
He listened at the door a moment.
“I wish some of our fellows would come back,” he heard one of the guards saying.
“Yes, it’s lonesome here. I wonder if Parsons is still there?”
“Sure he is. How could he get away?”
“That’s so. He couldn’t.”
“Wait a bit,” whispered Tom.