“Talk about Baron Trenck and Monte Cristo!” he said.

In a second more he had put one hand through the bars of his cell, put the key into the lock and let himself out.

“What’s the matter with this,—­hey, what?  Another chapter in Celebrated Escapes!”

Then he tip-toed back into his cell, and shut the door again.

“It won’t do to go upstairs too soon.  I’ll give ’em time to get home.  Then I’ll get the keys to your cells,—­never shall it be said of Despard D’Auvigny that he deserted his friends in misfortune!  A regular jail-delivery,—­what?  The destruction of the Bastille was nothing to this!  And we’ll carry Eb’s head on a pike.”

“What!” exclaimed Mr. Daddles, “I never thought of that!  Do you suppose the keys to our cells are upstairs?  I thought you were the only one to get anything by this,—­I was resolving always to carry a banjo with me.”

“Why, I guess they’ll be upstairs,—­I can’t for the life of me see why this was left down here.  But I don’t care,—­I’ve no fault to find with the arrangement.  Now, we’ll have to wait awhile.”

We all sat down and waited for about ten minutes.  Then the banjo-man, saying “the hour has came!” opened his door again, and stole softly upstairs.  Half way up he turned and came back for a match.  Mr. Daddles gave him one, and he vanished with it.  He was gone a long while, and we began to be in despair, thinking that he couldn’t find the keys, or perhaps that he had gone away without troubling himself any more about us.

At last however, we heard him once more on the stairs.  He came down, on tip-toe, holding up two keys.  He was smiling gleefully.

“They were in Eb’s desk and all tagged and numbered.”

In a moment or two we were all out in the corridor.  Our new friend locked all the cell doors, and hung up his key on its hook.

“It shall be an unsolved mystery to them all.  They shall puzzle themselves bald-headed over it,” he whispered.

Upstairs we stopped long enough to return the keys to Eb’s desk.  Our friend still had his precious banjo under his arm.  We had to go cautiously in the dark, as we dared to light only one match, and that we kept covered as well as we could.  There was a window at the rear of the building, and unlike the window in the corridor below, it was not barred.

Mr. Daddles and I looked out.  There were no lights to be seen, and no people about.  We raised the window very cautiously, an inch at a time.

“Country police have their disadvantages,” whispered Mr. Daddles, “but they have this virtue:  they go home at night, and let the jail take care of itself.  In the city, we should have had to pick our way through the slumbering forms of innumerable cops.”

We listened at the window.  Bailey’s Harbor, after its great excitement over the captured burglars, had gone home, and gone to sleep.  Everything was quiet as a graveyard.  We could hear the slapping of the water against the timbers of the wharf, and somewhere, a rooster, disturbed by the moonlight, crowed once.  It was a dim and sleepy sound, and it was not repeated.  The fog had nearly gone; the moon shone clear.