This conversation had been conducted face to face in the dark through the aperture formed by the removal of four bricks on each side of the partition. Dobbs had already outlined a general plan to Robert by which they were to escape. He was only waiting, he said, for his "chummy" to "drop the sweet hinnocence game and hown up ee wasn't a lamb."
"So you expect me to climb through that hole, Dobbs?"
"If you won't gnaw your hown bars, you must."
"It's too small."
"Then we'll stretch her till she fits, as the 'aberdasher said when 'is royal 'ighness' trousers didn't meet round 'is royal 'ighness' waistband."
"I doubt if even six will be wide enough. The bricks are only eight by four apiece, and I think I'm more than sixteen by twelve."
"Can a cat jump through a keyhole? No-sirree. But a corpuscle can wiggle through a capillary."
About 11 o'clock the next morning the entire prison force was summoned to the rotunda to hear the farewell address of the warden. The rotunda was a great round hall at one end of the bastile, or prison proper, communicating through two double doors with the warden's office, from which it was only a step to the street. Looking around at the desperate gallery of 600 faces, all shaven, but ill-shaven, and most of them brutal from the indulgence of hateful passions, Robert thought how small a chance the forty keepers stood if that sullen herd should ever stampede.
But the walls of the rotunda were undressed bowlders of granite and the windows all around were double-barred with iron rods that looked strong enough to hold up a mountain. Only the rear doors were vulnerable at all, and these simply led through the kitchen to the cells, or right and left into the yard, at the end of which, and all along one side, abutting the rotunda, were the workshops, while the other side was impregnable with its twenty-foot wall.
Flanked by Gradger and Longlegs, the Pelican rose to address his mutineers. At his approach there was such a tremendous joggling in the crowd, that for a time it looked as if the volcano would burst then and there. But three spokesmen who had wriggled their way to the front stepped forward with their hands clasped over their heads as a token of peaceful intentions and requested the privilege of a word to the warden. They were all marked men, undergoing long sentences and recognized as dangerous criminals. The difference of type between them was conspicuous as they stood in front of the surging crowd—Dickon Harvey, the Right Spur and Minister Slick.