we could get. We were ready but for the method, and now it's
there--there in that hut--quite close to us, and it's dark enough,
and--and--and there's no one about--why not?"

"Come on," said Stuart abruptly, in that resolute way he had. "I'm
with you fellows, if you'll have me."

Without another word the trio turned promptly, and, looking round to
make sure that no one had observed them, they bolted back to the hut
from which those unfortunate prisoners had been dragged, and, closing
the door behind them, leapt into the pit and made their way into the
tunnel. Freedom lay before them--freedom for which they pined--freedom
to be had if only they could break their way into the open.

CHAPTER III

The Road to Freedom

"What's this? An old shovel, by the feel of it--the thing they've dug
the tunnel with," Henri told his comrades as they stood at the entrance
of the tunnel in the dense darkness, and felt all about them. "My
fingers dropped upon it as I bent at the entrance, and, yes--here's a
basket with a rope attached to it, into which, no doubt, one of them
shovelled the earth at the far end of the tunnel, while his comrade
dragged it to the bottom of the pit by means of the rope. Poor chaps!
How hard they must have worked, and what a disappointment it must have
been to have failed just at the last moment."

"That's just what we have got to look to," Stuart told them in a hoarse
whisper. "They've done the work and have failed; let's look to it that
we get out promptly. Come along now. Give me the spade, Henri, for
I'm bigger and stronger than you, and, if there's only a foot of earth
above our heads when we get to the far end of the tunnel, I'll bash a
way through it without difficulty. George! What a narrow space it is!
It hardly lets my shoulders through."

That tunnel, indeed, was hardly better than a rabbit burrow. Perhaps
four to five feet in height, it was scarcely two in breadth, cold and
dark and winding. Let us admit at once that it required no small stock
of courage on the part of Stuart and his friends to force their way
along it, particularly so in the case of the Englishman, whose frame
was such a close fit to the damp earthen sides, that failure to break a
way out at the far end would have left him in a difficult position--one
from which he would undoubtedly have found it hard to extricate
himself. Yet there was liberty beyond, escape from this dreary
Ruhleben with its monotonous