they be building, then?"

"It's a shed, I think. I can see four sockets in the ground, and they
are fixing four uprights into them."

"Well, we can't get away as long as there are four men just under our
window."

"Impossible."

"But we may as well finish our work, for all that." The gentle
scrapings of his iron were drowned amid the noise which swelled ever
louder from without. The bar loosened at the end, and he drew it slowly
towards him. At that instant, however, just as he was disengaging it, a
round head appeared between him and the moonlight, a head with a great
shock of tangled hair and a woollen cap upon the top of it.
So astonished was Amos Green at the sudden apparition that he let go his
grip upon the bar, which, falling outwards, toppled over the edge of the
window-sill.

"You great fool!" shrieked a voice from below, "are your fingers ever to
be thumbs, then, that you should fumble your tools so? A thousand
thunders of heaven! You have broken my shoulder."

"What is it, then?" cried the other. "My faith, Pierre, if your fingers
went as fast as your tongue, you would be the first joiner in France."

"What is it, you ape! You have dropped your tool upon me."

"I! I have dropped nothing."

"Idiot! Would you have me believe that iron falls from the sky? I say
that you have struck me, you foolish, clumsy-fingered lout."

"I have not struck you yet," cried the other, "but, by the Virgin, if I
have more of this I will come down the ladder to you!"

"Silence, you good-for-naughts!" said a third voice sternly. "If the
work be not done by daybreak, there will be a heavy reckoning for
somebody."

And again the steady hammering and sawing went forward. The head still
passed and repassed, its owner walking apparently upon some platform
which they had constructed beneath their window, but never giving a
glance or a thought to the black square opening beside him. It was
early morning, and the first cold light was beginning to steal over the
courtyard, before the work was at last finished and the workmen had
left. Then at last the prisoners dared to climb up and to see what it
was which had been constructed during the night. It gave them a catch
of the breath as they looked at it. It was a scaffold.

There it lay, the ill-omened platform of dark greasy boards newly
fastened together, but evidently used often before for the same purpose.
It was buttressed up against their wall, and extended