“That’s it!” exclaimed Jim. “I can see, now. When I pushed so hard, I bent the grating, for those light steel bars are springy. They sprung out so far that they pulled out that tongue beyond the catch and so the door slipped open. I can do it again,—Why,—I can get out into the corridor as often as I want to, but I mustn’t let anybody know how it’s done. Not even the other fellows.—I’ll look at their locks.”
It seemed to him as if his very breathing could be heard by somebody, and so he hardly breathed as he stepped softly along to the next door. The gas-jet near him had been turned low and the light was dim, but he could see that the boy in that cell was sleeping soundly, after his hard work in one of the shops and his long drill-marching.
“He isn’t one of the fellows I want,” thought Jim. “He can’t climb worth a cent and he hollers when he’s hurt.”
That would never do, for Jim was beginning to feel like a captain, hunting up recruits for some difficult and almost desperate enterprise. Nevertheless, he tried the lock of that boy’s door.
“Yes,” he said to himself, “they are all alike. I can get my finger in over the end of the catch-bolt and push it back.—There, I’ve opened that door, but I’ll shut it again. Guess I’ll go back to bed, too, before anybody comes to catch me. I know I can open the doors, but what good’ll that do? I’ve got to think about it.”
The Silent Printing Office.
Silently, with his heart beating hard and his breath coming short, Jim slipped back to his own door, and through it, and pulled it shut behind him. He made no noise in doing so,—only a slight click as the bolt sprang into the hasp,—but he did not feel safe until the bedclothes were over him and he could seem to be asleep. Not many minutes passed before he heard the feet of another watchman, or it may have been the same man,—going along the corridor.
“I’d have been caught,” he thought. “I must look out for that.”
During all those minutes, and long afterward, he lay and thought of locks, locks, locks, on all the doors he knew of in that House of Refuge. He made up his mind to examine them, every chance he could get, and he thought of all sorts of impossible ways of opening them.