ored big enough to have admitted
the points of their little fingers. Hundreds of holes would be needed;
and how were they to be made? With the blades of their small knives it
would have been possible to scoop out a cavity--that is, with much
trouble and waste of time; but vast time and trouble would it take to
scoop out four hundred; and at least that number would be needed. It
would be a tedious task and almost interminable, even supposing that it
could be accomplished; but this was doubtful enough. The blades of the
knives might be worn or broken, long before the necessary number of
holes could be made.

Of course, had they been possessed of a sufficient number of nails, they
might have done without holes. The steps of the ladders could have been
nailed upon the sides, instead of being mortised into them. But nails
were a commodity quite as scarce with them as tools. With the exception
of those in the soles of their shoes, or the stocks of their guns, there
was not a nail in the valley.

It is not to be denied that they were in a dilemma. But Karl had
foreseen this difficulty, and provided against it before a stick of
timber had been cut. Indeed, close following on the first conception of
the scaling ladders, this matter had passed through his mind, and had
been settled to his satisfaction. Only theoretically, it is true; but
his theory was afterwards reduced to practice; and, unlike many other
theories, the practice proved in correspondence with it.

Karl's theory was to make the holes by fire--in other words, to bore
them with a red-hot iron.

Where was this iron to be obtained? That appeared to offer a
difficulty, as great as the absence of an auger or a mortise-chisel.
But by Karl's ingenuity it was also got over. He chanced to have a
small pocket pistol: it was single-barrelled, the barrel being about six
inches in length, without any thimbles, beading, or ramrod attached to
it. What Karl intended to do, then, was to heat this barrel red-hot,
and make a boring-iron of it. And this was exactly what he _did_ do;
and after heating it some hundreds of times, and applying it as often to
the sides of the different ladders, he at last succeeded in burning out
as many holes as there were rounds to go into them, multiplied exactly
by two.

It is needless to say that this wonderful boring operation was not
accomplished at a single "spell," nor yet in a single day. On the
contrary, it took Karl many an