“And once I get over into Indian Territory or Arkansas, you’ll never see me in Texas again,” I muttered.

“How’ll we conceal where we’ve been sawing?” Bud asked.

“By plugging up the grooves with corn bread blackened with soot that we can make by holding the wick of this smoky lamp against the cage-ceiling.”

“And how’ll we keep folks from hearing the sawing?”

“By dancing and singing while Baykins here” (alluding to a “pore white” fiddler who had almost killed a man at a dance) “while Baykins here plays ‘whip the devil.’”

The very next day we began dancing and singing and taking turns at the chuckhole bar.

“Whip the Devil” is an interminable tune like the one about the “old woman chasing her son round the room with a broom."...

The mistake was, that in our eagerness we “whipped the devil” too long at a time.  Naturally, the jailer grew suspicious of such sudden and prolonged hilarity.  But even at that it took almost a week for them to catch on.  We knew it was all up when, one morning at breakfast, the sheriff came in with the jailer.

“Boys, all back into your cells!” he growled.

The long bar was thrown over our closed doors.

The sheriff stooped down and inspected the chuck-hole.

“Why, Jesus Christ, they’d of been through in two more nights.  It’s good we caught them in time or they’d of been a hell of a big jail-delivery ... do you mean to tell me,” turning to the jailer, “you never noticed this before?” and with one finger he raked out the blackened corn bread.

“You see, I’m a little near-sighted, Mistah Jenkins.”

“Too damned near-sighted, an’ too damned stupid, too.”

The big iron door of the cage was locked again, the long bar thrown off our cell doors.

“Now, you sons of b——­ can come out into the cage again; but, mind you, if any of you try such a thing again, I’ll take you out one by one and give you all a rawhiding.”

We received the abuse in sullen silence.  For three days our rations lacked cornpone, for punishment.

We decided among ourselves that the negro preacher, to stand in well with the authorities, had given us away....

And if he had not, panic-stricken, pleaded with the sheriff to be taken out and put in a separate cell, I believe we would have killed him.

* * * * *

There was one more way.  It was so simple a way that we had not thought of it before.  The mulatto girl, who slept by the big stove, on a cot, just outside the cage ... a trusty and the jailer’s unwilling concubine ... this slim, yellow creature was much in love with the lusty young farmer who had stolen the bales of cotton and sold them for a drunk.  And it was he who suggested that, through her, we get possession of the keys.  For, every day, she informed us, she passed them by where they hung on a nail, downstairs, as she swept and cleaned house for the jailer.