and very thick. A Yale lock with a new look gave all entrance at the
front an impossible look. The back door was equally impregnable unless
he set to work with his auger and saw and took out a heavy oak panel.

He got down to the ground and began to examine the cellar windows. They
seemed to be fitted with iron bars set into the solid masonry. He went
all around the house and found each one unshakable, until he reached
the last at the back. There he found a bit of stone cracked and
loosened and it gave him an idea. He set to work with his few tools,
and finally succeeded in loosening one rusted bar. He was much hindered
in his work by the necessity of keeping a constant watch out, and by
his attempts to be quiet. There was no telling when Link and Shorty
might come to feed their captive and he must not be discovered.

It was slow work picking away at the stone, filing away at the rusty
iron, but the bars were so close together that three must be removed
before he could hope to crawl through, and even then he might be able
to get no further than the cellar. The guy that fixed this house up for
a prison knew what he was about.

Faintly across the mountains came the echo of bells, or were they in
the boy's own soul? He worked away in the hot sun, the perspiration
rolling down his weary dirty face, and sometimes his soul fainted
within him. Bells, and the sweet quiet church with the pleasant daily
faces about and the hum of Sunday School beginning! How far away that
all seemed to him now as he filed and picked, and sweated, and kept up
a strange something in his soul half yearning, half fierce dread, that
might have been like praying only the burden of its yearning seemed to
be expressed in but a single word, "Mark! Mark!"