They were soon free, and quickly had their fellows liberated and the gags all removed.  But the liberty of hands and feet and tongues, though it left them free to express their rage, still left them as far as ever from the banquet which, as they soon suspected, was disappearing rapidly under the teeth of the Lakerimmers.  They groped around in the pitch-black darkness, and finally one of the men in the cupola found a little round window through which he could put his head and yell for help.  His cry was soon answered by another that seemed to come faintly from the depths of the earth.

XI

The far-off cry which the six Crows in the cupola heard coming from the depths of the earth was raised by the eleven Crows in the cellar.  By dint of much yelling the two flocks made their misery known to each other.  The trouble with the cellar party was that it could not get up.  The trouble with the cupola crowd was that it could not get down.  And they seemed to be too far apart to be of much help to each other, for the cupola Crows had lost little time in lifting the trap-door of the belfry and finding that the ladder was gone, and none of them was hardy—­or foolhardy—­enough to risk the drop into the uncertain dark.  So there they waited in mid-air.

The cellar Crows, when they had released each other’s bonds, and groped around the jagged walls, and stumbled foolishly over each other and all the other tripping things in their dungeons, had succeeded in forcing apart the wooden doors between their three cells and joining forces—­or joining weaknesses, rather, because, when they finally found the cellar stairs, they also found that, for all the strength they could throw into their backs and shoulders, they could not lift the door, with all the heavy weights put on it by the Dozen.  There were a few matches in the crowd, and they sufficed to reveal the little cellar windows.  These they reached by forming a human ladder, as the Gauls scaled the walls of Rome (only to find that a flock of silly geese had foiled their plans).  But there were no geese to disturb the Crows, and the first of their number managed to worm through to the outer air and help up his fellows in misery.

It seemed for a time, though, as if even this escape were to be cut off; for a very fat Crow got himself stuck in a little window, and the Crows outside could not pull him through, tug as they would.  Then the Crows inside began to pull at his feet and to hang their whole weight on his legs.

But still he stuck.

Then they all grew excited, and both the outsiders and the insiders pulled at once, until the luckless fat boy thought they were trying to make twins of him, and howled for mercy.

He might have been there to this day had he not managed, by some mysterious and painful wriggle, to crawl through unaided.

Before long, then, the whole crowd of cellar Crows was standing out in the cold air and asking the cupola Crows why they didn’t come down.