“You ought to be glad.  I’m going to get out of this place, and I don’t believe you could break gaol, unassisted, in twenty years.  Here is where science confronts brutality.  I say, Drummond, bring your table over to the corner, and mount it, then we can talk without shouting.  Not much chance of any one outside hearing us, even if we do clamor, but this is a damp situation, and loud talk is bad for the throat.  Cut a slice of that brown bread and lunch with me.  You’ll find it not half bad, as you say in England, especially when you are hungry.  Now,” continued Jack, as his friend stood opposite him, and they found by experiment that their combined reach was not long enough to enable them to shake hands through the bars, “now, while you are luxuriating in the menu of the Trogzmondoff, I’ll give you a sketch of my plan for escape.”

“Do,” said Drummond.

“I happen to have with me a pair of bottles containing a substance which, if dissolved in water, and sprinkled on this rock, will disintegrate it.  It proves rather slow work, I must admit, but I intend to float in to you one of the bottles, and the apparatus, so that you may help me on your side, which plan has the advantage of giving you useful occupation, and allowing us to complete our task in half the time, like the engineers on each side of the Simplon Tunnel.”

“If there are bars in the lower watercourse,” objected Drummond, “won’t you run a risk of breaking your bottle against them?”

“Not the slightest.  I have just sent that much thinner electric lamp through, but in this case I’ll just tie up the bottle and squirt gun in my stocking, attach that to the wire, and the current will do the rest.  You can unload, and I’ll pull my stocking back again.  If I dared wrench off a table leg, I could perhaps shove bottle and syringe through to you from here, but the material would come to a dead center in the middle of this tunnel, unless I had a stick to push it within your reach.

“Very well; we’ll work away until our excavation connects, and we have made it of sufficient diameter for you to squeeze through.  You are then in my cell.  We put out our lights, and you conceal yourself behind the door.  Gaoler and man with the lantern come in.  You must be very careful not to close the door, because if you once shove it shut we can’t open it from this side, even though it is unlocked and the bolts drawn.  It fits like wax, and almost hermetically seals the room.  You spring forward, and deal the gaoler with your fist one of your justly celebrated English knock-down blows, immediately after felling the man with the lantern.  Knowing something of the weight of your blow, I take it that neither of the two men will recover consciousness until we have taken off their outer garments, secured revolvers and keys.  Then we lock them in, you and I on the outside.”

“My dear Jack, we don’t need any tunnel to accomplish that.  The first time these two men come into my room, I can knock them down as easily here as there.”