e lightning or as cover to some larger attempt
at escape we could not tell. Very likely the latter, I have since thought,
for the soldiers were gathering there in numbers, and the bell still rang
and the drum still beat.

Without a word, for all this we had discussed and arranged long since, we
crept to the palisade nearest to us. I took my place solidly against it. Le
Marchant climbed up onto my shoulders, flung the end of his hammock over
the spiked top till it caught with its cordage, and in a moment he was
sitting among the teeth up above. Another moment, and I was alongside him,
peering down into the danger ring below, while the rain thrashed down upon
us so furiously that it was all we could do to see or hear. We could,
indeed, see nothing save what was right under our hands, for the dead
blackness of the night was a thing to be felt.

There was no sound or sign of wardership. It seemed as though what I had
hardly dared to hope had come to pass,--as though, in a word, that urgent
call to the other side of the enclosure, to forestall an escape or assist
at the fire, had bared this side of guards.

We crouched there among the sharp points, listening intently; then, taking
our lives in our hands, we dropped the hammock on the outside of the
palisade and slipped gently down.

My heart was beating a tattoo as loud as that in the soldiers' quarters, as
we sped across the black space which had baffled us so long, and not
another sound did we hear save the splashing of the rain.

My hammock helped us over the outer palisade in the same way as the other,
and we stood for a moment in the rain and darkness, panting and
shaking,--free men.

We made for the void in front, with no thought but of placing the greatest
possible distance between ourselves and the prison in the shortest possible
time. We plunged into bogs and scrambled through to the farther side, eager
bundles of dripping slime, and sped on and on through the rain and
darkness--free men, and where we went we knew not, only that it was from
prison.

For a time the flicker of the burning house showed us where the prison lay,
and directed us from it. But this soon died down, and we were left to make
our own course, with no guide but the drenching rain. We had headed into it
when we loosed from the palisade, and we continued to breast it.

No smaller prize than freedom, no weaker spur than the prison behind would
have carried men through what we underwent that