It was twelve o’clock and after.  He dared wait no longer.  Dick must shift for himself.  Perhaps he had lost his way.  In any event it was safer to set the general prisoners free, as they were only carelessly guarded.  Lamps glimmered fitfully in the guard-room, throwing fantastic banners of light almost to the water’s edge.  He made a final tour about the broken ground, but there was no sound or suspicion of Dick.  He knew every inch of the ground.  Dick and he had surveyed and resurveyed it for days.  The coast was clear.  No one was on guard at the vital point, but still he lingered, his breath coming and going painfully, as a break in the clouds cast a moving shape over the undulating ground.  Should he give the boy another half-hour’s grace?  He makes a circuit in the direction Dick must approach by and waits.  He will count a hundred very slowly, then wait no longer.  He counts up to fifty, hears a coming step, and waits alertly.  No—­it passes on.  He begins again—­counts one hundred, two hundred.  No sign.  “Pah! it is madness to delay for him.  The young poltroon has lost his resolution in his lovesick fever.  Very likely he has been unable to run the risk of Rosa’s anger—­her mother’s indignation—­the possibility of never seeing the girl again.”  Well, he had given him ample grace.  He had endangered his own and other lives to humor a boyish whim.  Now he must act, and swiftly.

The plan was too far gone in execution to be changed.  He must carry out the final measures alone.  Now, one of these details required some one to slip down on the ground and crawl to the point between the windows where the prisoners were working and aid them to remove the thin, shell of brick.  If it fell outward, the guard at the corner would hear the noise, and might come down to see what it was that made it.  The removal of this wall released all confined in the main prison.  These he saw stealing out in groups of ten or more.  They had guides waiting on the bank of the river.  Jack gave them final orders.  The most difficult work was the getting out Jones and Barney, for they had special cells.  Jack was to guard Jones’s exit and Dick Barney’s, but now all the work would devolve upon him.  It was two o’clock, and he dared wait no longer.  Raising himself from the low wall where he had been crouching, he started toward the corner of the prison farthest from the guard-room.  At the wall of the building he dropped flat on his face and began to crawl forward, sheltered by the low ground that formed a sort of dry ditch about the basement of the prison.  He had barely stretched himself at full length when a bright light was flashed on him from a deep doorway just beyond him, and a voice, mocking and triumphant, exclaimed.

“This is a bad place to swim, my friend!  There ain’t enough water to drown you, but if you stir you’ll run against a bullet.”