hese were questions I could not answer; but
you may be sure the knowledge that Vetch was gone acted as a whip
to my determination, and I was more than ever resolved to find some
way of leaving these walls behind.

We had concluded, Punchard and I, that our only course must be to
pierce the castle wall and let ourselves down to the moat by means
of a rope. The latter portion of this scheme being manifestly the
more likely, we decided to secure our rope first. This was easier
said than done. Our coverlets were of such thin and rotten
material, we should need to tear up several of them before, even
carefully knotted, they would serve our purpose, and we could not
risk the detection that would surely follow if any of them were
missed by our guards. When I went next to take my turn at drawing
water from the well I carefully examined the rope by which the
bucket was let down, thinking it might be possible to cut this one
night at an hour when its loss would not be discovered till next
day and the birds had flown. But a close inspection showed that it
was very rotten; evidently it had seen long service; and while it
was still strong enough to stand the strain of a bucketful of
water, I could not flatter myself it would safely bear my weight,
to say nothing of the bosun, who was a deal heavier.

But since a rope we must have, I pleased myself with the fancy that
if I should succeed in procuring that it might be taken as a good
augury for success in the more difficult feat, the piercing of the
wall. Could we make a rope, I wondered? We had a fair quantity of
bast, in the mats that formed the only covering of the floor of our
barracks, but not near enough to form a rope sufficiently stout to
bear the weight of even the lightest of us; besides the tearing up
of the mats could not fail to be discovered.

Racking my brains for some means of overcoming the difficulty, I
suddenly bethought myself of trying a ruse. I said nothing of my
intention to Punchard (to the others I had as yet not breathed a
word of our purpose) but the next time I went to the well I took a
knife with me, and, choosing a portion of the rope where it was
much frayed, I carefully sawed through one or two of the strands
with the blunt edge. The result was that when I was drawing the
full bucket up, the rope snapped, the bucket fell to the bottom
with a clatter, and I (to make the accident more convincing)
toppled over on my back. Up came one of the guard, and