That was all very well, but what next?  Bob was suddenly called to a decision which had up to that moment seemed inconceivably remote.  Heretofore, an apparent impossibility had separated him from it.  Now that impossibility was achieved.

A moment’s thought convinced him of the senseless hazard of attempting to slip out through any of the doors or windows.  The moon was bright, and Saleratus Bill would have taken his precautions.  Bob attacked the floor.  Several boards proved to be loose.  He pried them up cautiously, and so was enabled to drop through into the open space beneath the house.  Thence it was easy to crawl away.  Saleratus Bill’s precautions were most likely taken, Bob argued to himself, with a view toward a man bound at the elbows, not to a man with two hands.  In this he was evidently correct, for after a painful effort, he found himself among the high grasses of the meadow.

There were now, as he recognized, two courses open to him:  he could either try to discover Saleratus Bill’s sleeping place and by surprise overpower that worthy as he slept; or he could make the best of the interim before his absence was discovered to get as far away as possible.  Both courses had obvious disadvantages.  The most immediate to the first alternative was the difficulty, failing some clue, of finding Saleratus Bill’s sleeping place without too positive a risk of discovery; the most immediate to the second was the difficulty of getting to the other side of the river.  As Saleratus Bill might be at any one of a thousand places, in or out of doors; whereas the river could be crossed only by the bridge.  Bob, without hesitation, chose the latter.

Therefore he made his way cautiously to that structure.  It proved to be lying in broad moonlight.  As it constituted the only link with the outside world to the south, Bob could not doubt that his captor had arranged to keep it in sight.

The bridge was, as has been said, suspended across a strait between two rocks by means of heavy wire cables.  Slipping beneath these rocks and into the shadow, Bob was rejoiced to find that between the stringers and the shore, smaller cables had been bent to act as guy lines.  If he could walk “hand over hand,” the distance comprised by the width of the stream he could pass the river below the level of the bridge floor.  He measured the distance with his eye.  It did not look farther than the length of the gymnasium at college.  He seized the cable and swung himself out over the waters.

Immediately the swift and boiling current, though twenty feet below, seemed to suck at his feet.  The swirling and flashing of the water dizzied his brain with the impression of falling upstream.  He had to fix his eyes on the black flooring above his head.  The steel cable, too, was old and rusted and harsh.  Bob’s hands had not for many years grasped a rope strongly, and in that respect he found them soft.  His muscles, cramped more