A simple, eighteen-inch stick of wood, the grip taped, the slender part above wrapped with green-enameled wire, for reinforcement.
He did not see how it could be very useful, but evidently it was part of some plan for escape conceived by Jay Kalam’s deliberate, analytic mind.
Each guard was locked in the great room with them four hours at a time, pacing around the cell block, reporting through a speaking tube at fifteen-minute intervals.
Their habits differed.
The first, good-natured man carried the club safely in his farther hand.
The next walked a precise, cautious beat, well out of reach.
The third was not so careful, swinging the club by a leather thong, sometimes from one wrist, sometimes the other.
He would swing it sometime, John Star thought, within a foot of the bars.
He waited, unobtrusively alert, until the guard was changed again.
And his chance had not yet come.
Again the good-natured man.
And the precise, cautious man.
Then, again, the one who swung the club.
John Star waited an hour, sprawled on the cot with gloom on his face, aimlessly picking the lint from his blanket—and the chance did come.
Every minutest motion of it he had planned, rehearsed in his mind.
He was keyed up, ready; his trained body reacted with lightning quickness.
He sprang, soundlessly, when the club began its swing.
His arm slipped through the bars.
His straining fingers snapped around the wood.
He braced knee and shoulder against the bars. His arm came back.
It was all done before the guard could turn his head.
The leathern thong on his wrist jerked him against the cell; Ms skull struck the bars; he went down silently.
John Star slipped the thong over his limp hand, whispering:
“Jay! I have the club!”
“I hoped you might,” spoke Jay Kalam, quietly, quickly, from the cell to his right.
“If you will please hold it out to Giles———”
“Outside here, lad!”
The fearful, wheezing gasp came from his left.
“Quick, for life’s sake!”
He thrust the club back through the bars, felt Giles Habibula’s fingers grasp it.
“Shall I search him?” he whispered. “For keys?”
“He had none,” said Jay Kalam.
“They knew this might happen.
We must depend on Giles.”
“My father was an inventor of locks,” came the absent nasal whine from the cell on the left.
“I learned a higher calling.
Giles Habibula was not always a crippled old soldier in the Legion.
In his nimbler days…” The voice drifted away.
John Star restrained his curiosity, waiting silently.
There was nothing else to do.
In the next cell, Giles Habibula was busy.
His breath became audible, panting.
John Star could sometimes hear a fearful muttering:
“Mortal minutes!… This wicked wire!… Life’s precious sake!… Ah, poor old Giles…”
“Hurry, Giles!” implored Hal Samdu, from the cell beyond.
“Hurry!”
There were tiny, metallic sounds.
“We’ve another five minutes.”
Jay Kalam’s voice was calm and low.
“Then the guard’s report is due.”