ed to deliver it for me.

"I have nothing to give you, now," I ended, "but, if I ever get free,
I'll send you twenty-five dollars or so from up home, when I reach the
North."

* * * * *

A prisoner's first dream is "escape." Voices outside on the street, the
sight of the tops of green trees through bars, dogs barking far away,
the travels of the sun as shown by moving bands of light on the walls
and in the cells--all remind him of the day when he was, as he now sees
it, happy and free ... he forgets entirely, in the midst of the jail's
black restraints, the lesser evils of outside, daily life. Even the
termagant wife is turned into a domestic angel.

* * * * *

Under the smoky prison lamp made of a whiskey bottle filled with oil,
and a shred of shirt drawn through a cork, we planned to cut out.

"The way to do it is easy," said the little pickpocket, "in the sole of
every good shoe is a steel spring. I'll take the steel from my shoe.
There's already one bar removed from the chuck-hole (No use trying to
reproduce the dialect). If we saw out another bar, that will give us
enough room for going through. Then it will be easy to dig out the
mortar between the bricks, in the jail wall. Once out, we can make for
the river bottoms, and, by wading in the water, even their bloodhounds
can't track us."

"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 ba