Ned did not know it, but a deep red flush had come into each pale cheek.  He removed most of his clothes, and put his head forward between the iron bar and the window sill.  The head went through and the shoulders followed.  He drew back, breathing a deep and mighty breath of triumph.  Yet he had known that it would be so.  When he first tried the space he had been only a shade too large for it.  Now his head and shoulders would go between, but with nothing to spare.  A sheet of paper could not have been slipped in on either side.  Yet it was enough.  The triumph of self-denial was complete.

He had thought several times of telling Mr. Austin, but he finally decided not to do so.  He might seek to interfere.  He would put a thousand difficulties in the way, some real and some imaginary.  It would save the feelings of both for him to go quietly, and, when Mr. Austin missed him, he would know why and how he had gone.

Ned stood at the window a little while longer, listening.  He heard far away the faint rattle of a saber, probably some officer of Santa Anna who was going to a place outside a lattice, the sharp cry of a Mexican upbraiding his lazy mule, and the distant note of a woman singing an old Spanish song.  It was as dark as ever, with the clouds rolling over the great valley of Tenochtitlan, which had seen so much of human passion and woe.  Ned, brave and resolute as he was, shivered.  He was oppressed by the night and the place.  It seemed to him, for the moment, that the ghosts of stern Cortez, and of the Aztecs themselves were walking out there.

Then he did a characteristic thing.  Folding his arms in front of him he grasped his own elbows and shook himself fiercely.  The effort of will and body banished the shapes and illusions, and he went to work with firm hands.

He tore the coverings from his bed into strips, and knotted them together stoutly, trying each knot by tying the strip to the bar, and pulling on it with all his strength.  He made his rope at least thirty feet long and then gave it a final test, knot by knot.  He judged that it was now near midnight and the skies were still very dark.  Inside of a half hour he would be gone—­to what?  He was seized with an intense yearning to wake up Mr. Austin and tell him good-by.  The Texan leader had been so good to him, he would worry so much about him that it was almost heartless to slip away in this manner.  But he checked the impulse again, and went swiftly ahead with his work.

He kept on nothing but his underclothing and trousers.  The rest he made up into a small package which he tied upon his back.  He was sorry that he did not have any weapon.  He had been deprived of even his pocket-knife, but he did have a few dollars of Spanish coinage, which he stowed carefully in his trousers pocket.  All the while his energy endured despite his wasted form.  Hope made a bridge for his weakness.