“Unless he jumps after me, I’ve got him buffaloed,” whispered Potter to himself, with a dry chuckle. “I wouldn’t do it again for a million. What would be the use of fifty millions, even, to a dead man? Now, how am I to get out of this?”
Keeping under cover of the parapet, he crawled around to the rear of the roof. There was no parapet here—only an iron gutter. The gutter ran along to the end of the roof and emptied into an iron pipe which went straight down to the ground. At least, Potter supposed it did. He could not see in the darkness.
“I’ve got to take another chance,” he muttered. “And it looks worse than the other, when I jumped. I don’t like it, but what can I do? I don’t intend to be caught. I believe even a week in a prison would kill me, unless it drove me insane.”
Lying flat upon the roof, he gripped the pipe firmly. Then, gingerly, he lowered himself over the edge of the roof and pinched the pipe between his knees.
With a double hold on it, hands and knees, he began to inch downward!
“If this pipe should fetch loose, I’m a goner! I hope it will hold. But it seems awfully shaky.”
The pipe creaked from time to time, and more than once he heard the rusty spikes which held it to the wall in the rotting mortar grating, as if they were about to pull out.
But the thing held somehow, and in about ten minutes he was safely on the ground, uttering a prayer of thankfulness for his luck—for he was not what could be called a pious man.
He had made up his mind which way he would go if he reached the ground, and that was over the back fence. Blessed with uncommon agility, as well as hardened muscles, he swarmed over the high fence without much difficulty. Then, after sitting astride for a moment or two, he dropped on the other side.
It was fortunate for him that all the police had withdrawn. They had concluded, when the raid was over, that there would not be any men trying to get away in the rear. If they thought anything about T. Burton Potter, they had decided that he was clear away.