said his companion. They went out, shutting
and locking the heavy oaken door behind them. Then they took the
track that led to the main road.

The sound of their footsteps had scarcely died away when the sacking
over one of the barrels became convulsed by an internal disturbance
and fell to the floor; and Jim Linton's head popped up in the opening,
like a Jack-in-the box.

"Come on, Desmond--they've gone at last!" he whispered.

Desmond's head came up cautiously from another barrel.

"Take care--it may be only a blind," he warned. "They may come back
at any moment."

Jim's answer was to wriggle himself out of his narrow prison, slowly
and painfully. He reached the floor, and stood stretching himself.

"If they come back, I'll meet them with my hands free," he said.
"Come on, old man; we're like rats in a trap if they catch us in those
beastly tubs. At least, out here, we've our knives and our fists.
Come out, and get the stiffness out of your limbs."

"Well, I suppose we may as well go under fighting if we have to,"
Desmond agreed.

Jim helped him out, and they stood looking at each other. They were a
sorry-looking pair. Their clothes hung in rags about them; they were
barefoot and hatless, and, beyond all belief, dirty. Thin to
emaciation, their gaunt limbs and hollow cheeks spoke of terrible
privations; but their sunken eyes burned fiercely, and there was grim
purpose in their set lips.

"Well--we're out of the small traps, but it seems to me we're caught
pretty securely in a big one," Desmond said presently. "How on earth
are we going to get out of this pepper-pot?"

"We'll explore," Jim said. Suddenly his eye fell on a package lying
on an empty box, and he sprang towards it, tearing it open with
claw-like fingers.

"Oh, by Jove--_food!_" he said.

They fell upon it ravenously; coarse food left by one of the men,
whose beer-drinking of the night before had perhaps been too heavy to
leave him with much appetite next day. But, coarse as it was, it was
life to the two men who devoured it.

It was nearly six weeks since the night when their tunnel had taken
them into the world outside the barbed wire of their prison; six weeks
during which it had seemed, in Desmond's phrase, as though they had
escaped from a small trap to find themselves caught within a big one.
They had been weeks of dodging and hiding; travelling by night,
trusting to map and compass and the stars; lying by day in woods, in