Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 6).djvu/148

ONVICT'S escaped!"

"Oh—when?"

"Last night. Didn't you hear the guns?"

I had not heard them. I don't think that Ted had heard them, either. We had not gone to bed with the intention of lying awake to listen to guns.

We sat down to breakfast, Ted and I, thinking rather of the food in front of us than of the unfortunate or fortunate individual who, according to our landlord, had quitted Princetown Prison, in the small hours of the morning, without first going through the form of obtaining his host's permission. But the landlord was full of the subject. He went on talking while we went on eating.

"They'll catch him, safe enough. I've been here a few years, and I've seen a few of 'em escape, I tell you. But I've never known one that wasn't brought back yet. You see, there's five pounds to anyone who gives the screws the office—they call the warders 'screws,' them chaps up here. So pretty near everyone's hand's against them. And then Princetown isn't like Millbank. You can't drop over the wall and find a pal waiting for you round the corner. It's when they're out that their troubles begin. They don't know their way about Dartmoor any more than they know their way about the moon."

Mr. Pethick paused to take in a little breath. So Ted asked a question: "Have you heard who it is has got away?"

Mr. Pethick winked.

"They keep that dark just at first, you know. They like to lay their hands upon him before anybody gets to know who it is has tried to slip his collar. But I was told it was a 'lifer'—a chap who, if he'd got his rights, would have been hung. I shouldn't be surprised if he made a bit of a fight for it before he lets them lay their hands on him."

Ted Lane and I were staying at a certain little inn within two miles of Princetown Prison, which is not unknown to brethren of the rod and the line, and of the palette and the brush. It stands just at the junction of the tiny stream which they call the River Cowsick with the River Dart; in the heart of a country which, at least in summer, is as beautiful as it is wild. We had gone there ostensibly to sketch, but we had done a little fishing, and to tell the truth, I don't think that we had done much of either.

I was a lazy man in those days. I don't know that I am much more hard-working now.

But that particular day we had planned a ten-mile walk over the moor—ten miles out and ten miles home—to Erme Head. And if we felt in the mood, and not too lazy, and that sort of thing, we had vague intentions of pushing on to Red Lake, about a mile farther on.

It was good walking weather, a clear sky