Part 14 (1/2)

”Yes”.

Hogarth whispered: ”It was _I_ who got him off”.

Bates whitened to the lips. ”I--I thought as much”.

”There is yet another chance, which _you_, if you like, may take”.

Bates saw heaven opening; but with this vague hope was left two days.

On the third, Hogarth explained what he a.s.sumed to be the new plan of Loveday.

”I take it”, he said, ”that he will pa.s.s over the moor in a balloon trailing a rope, which will have a loop to be slipped under the arms. I tell you, there are dangers in this scheme: you may be shot. Are you for trying it?”

”Trying it, aye”, said Bates, with fifty times the boldness of O'Hara.

And now began for these two a painfulness of waiting days, the sleep of both, meanwhile, being one nightmare of confused affrights, balloons and deliriums.

Ten times they re-discussed every possibility of the scheme, Hogarth giving messages for Loveday, heaping counsels upon Bates. Nothing remained to be said, and still the days pa.s.sed over the time-worn hearts, till a month went by.

At last something was observed in the sky--afar to the N.W.--in the afternoon turn, about two o'clock, a mist on the moor, but the sky almost cloudless.

Whereupon Hogarth, who first saw the object, stepped, as if looking for something, close to Bates, hissing: ”_Goodbye!_ Keep cool--choose well--”

Bates shovelled on steadily, as though this was a day like others; but twice his knees gave and bent beneath him; and there was a twitching of the livid under-lip, piteous to see.

It drew nearer, that silent needle, while Bates worked, delving, barrowing, making little trips; plenty of time; and no one noted his lip which pulled and twitched.

Without visible motion it came, wafted on the breaths of high heaven: half an hour--and still it was remote, fifteen hundred feet up. Bates and Hogarth peered to see a rope, but could none.

After fifty minutes it was actually over the moor, all now conscious of it; but the rope was indistinguishable from the air.

Yet it was there, walking the ground, at its end a horizontal staff....Hogarth, with wiser forethought than Loveday's, had predicted, not a staff, but a loop.

It pa.s.sed twenty yards from the quarry, Loveday no doubt imagining that Hogarth still worked there; but the quarry was some hundred and fifty yards from the trench.

Its course, nevertheless was toward the trench: and on walked deliberately the fluctuating rope, the staff now travelling the gorsey ground, now bounding like a kangaroo yards high, to come down once more yonder.

A moment came when Hogarth, with intense hiss, was whispering to himself: ”If I were he, I should dash _now_”.

But Fred Bates did not move.

Hogarth suffered agonies not less excruciating than the rack.

”Oh, whyever does he wait?” he groaned.

But now--all suddenly--it was known, it was felt, deep in five hundred ecstatic hearts, that a convict was gone--a man overboard--a soul in the agony--battling between life and death.

Like tempests the whistles split the air.