piece of wire yet?"

"Surre I have," said Archer, hauling from his pocket about five inches
of barbed wire--the treasured memento of his escape from the Hun prison
camp. "You laughed at me for always gettin' sooveneerrs; now you see----
What you want it for?"

"Sh-h. How many barbs has it?" asked Tom in a cautious whisper.

"Three."

"Let's have it; give me a couple o' matches, too."

Holding a lighted match under the place where he thought the iron
padlock band must be, he scrutinized the under side of the door for any
sign of it.

"I thought maybe the ends of the screws would show through," he said.

"What's the idea?" Archer asked. "Gee, but my head's poundin'."

"If that hasp just fell over the padlock eye," Tom whispered, "and
didn't fit in like it ought to, maybe if I could bore a hole right under
it I could push it up. Don't get scared," he added impassively. "There's
another way, too; but it's a lot of work and it would make a noise. We'd
just have to settle down and take turns and dig through with the wire
barbs. I wish we had more matches. Don't get rattled, now. I know we're
in a dickens of a hole----"

"You said something," observed Archer.

"I didn't mean it for a joke," said Tom soberly.

"This has got the trenches beat a mile," Archer said, somewhat
encouraged by Tom's calmness and resourcefulness.

Striking another match, Tom examined more carefully the area of planking
just in the middle of the side where he knew the hasp must be. He
determined the exact center as nearly as he could. While doing this he
dug his fingernails under a large splinter in the old planking and
pulled it loose. Archer could not see what he was doing, and something
deterred him from bothering his companion with questions.

For a while Tom breathed heavily on the splintered fragment. Then he
tore one end of it until it was in shreds.

"Let's have another match."

Igniting the shredded end, he blew it deftly until the solid wood was
aflame, and by the light of it he could see that Archer was ghastly pale
and almost on the point of collapse. Their dank, unwholesome refuge
seemed the more dreadful for the light.

"You got to just think about our getting out," Tom said, in his usual
dull manner. "We won't suffocate near so soon if we don't think about
it, and don't get rattled. We _got_ to get out and so we _will_ get out.
Let's have that wire."

All Archer's buoyancy was gone, but he tried to take heart from his