The key turns in the inner lock and we hear the door turn on its hinges. Then the light is lighted, the grated door of my cell is again thrown open, and Grant stands there. This time I rise. “Come in here,” I say, “where we can’t be heard,” and taking him by the arm I lead him back into the darkness of the cell.
“What’s the matter?” asks Grant, with a trace of some anxiety in his tone.
“Nothing’s the matter,” I answer. “Only I’m learning such a lot down here that I ought to stay the night. There are four or five fellows in the other cells and I can’t afford to miss the opportunity. Just explain to the P. K., will you? I’m afraid I was rather rude to him.”
Grant explodes in mirth. “Well, you did jar him a little. He telephoned up to my house while I was at supper and said, ‘Please hurry down here, for I can’t get that fellow out!’”
I can not help laughing myself at the poor P. K.—panic-stricken because a man refused to come out of the jail. “Now let me stay the night here,” I say to Grant, “and send someone for me at six o’clock to-morrow morning. But for Heaven’s sake don’t make it any later than six,” I add.
Grant is a little anxious, feeling his responsibility to the Warden. “Are you sure you’d better do this?” he asks. “How do you feel? How are you standing it?”
“Oh, it’s the most interesting thing I have done yet,” I answer, “and my experience would have been a failure without it. Now, don’t worry. I shall last until six o’clock in the morning at any rate. But remember—not a minute later than six!”
Grant promises to arrange it, and our whispered conference comes to an end. He and the other officer take their departure; again the inner door is shut and locked, the footsteps travel down the corridor, the outer door is shut and locked; and then silence, which is broken once more by the voice of Number Four, an anxious voice this time.
“Has he gone?”
Silence. Then Number Two’s gentle tones, “I think he went with the officer. I don’t hear anything in his cell. Yes, he must have gone.”