He paused at the window and gasped. The clearing was full of men—he couldn’t seem to count them. Men in uniform, men without uniform, and in the group he saw one that he recognized instantly because of a certain jauntiness of bearing and a cigar that was being chewed with a peculiar fierceness from one side to the other in the man’s generous mouth.
“Mr. Conne—Mr. Conne!” Skippy cried, wild with delight. “It’s me—up here. Me and Nickie—Nickie Fallon!”
Carlton Conne pushed his derby hat almost off his head and as he looked up his cigar went to the side of his mouth and remained there at a right angle.
“Kid!” he shouted. “You there, eh? You all right?”
“Yeah!” Skippy was gasping. “But we can’t....” He took hold of the bars one at a time and shook them ferociously, with Nickie’s help, of course, to prove what he was saying, “We can’t get out through these ... these....”
Nickie shrieked! Something had happened. “The bars, kid! Look, they’re loose!”
Skippy looked in amazement. Miracles didn’t happen of course. He remembered that they had had to leave their task quite hurriedly the last time they had been up there—it might have happened that they had worked the bars loose enough to wrench away, but in their haste had not discovered it.
Nickie was straining himself to the very utmost until he had worked them away sufficiently for them to get their bodies through the window. Skippy was feverishly engaged in swinging his lariat over to the evergreen tree to the accompaniment of joyous shouts.
And then they were free of the house, sliding hand over hand along the taut rope until they reached the sturdy tree. Fallon got safely to the ground first, and as Skippy followed he noticed great curls of thick smoke pouring out from the shutters on the lower floor.
Somebody shouted, “We’ll get in at him the same way the kids came out, hey, Conne—through the attic?”