That a prisoner should break bounds in the evening, return again the
next morning, and be present each time the roll is called, with fetters
properly rivetted on hands and feet seems, humanly speaking, an
impossible feat to achieve.
But Papis was quite ready to tell how he had managed it. While the
gaoler had been occupied with testing the fetters of each prisoner, he
had crawled noiselessly into the bucket which stood close at hand. In
the half-dark cell no one could have noted his disappearance.
When the examination was over, two prisoners lifted the bucket and
carried it to the well, which was one worked by means of a pulley, the
chains which let the bucket up and down clanked, and the axle creaked so
loudly that under cover of the noise, and unseen in the tub, Papis could
strip off his fetters, for there were no rings too narrow for the pliant
gipsy to draw his hands and feet through. Then the carriers removed the
lid of the receptacle and began to fill it from that of the well-bucket,
taking care the while that the heydukes could not see there was anything
else inside. They had of course to pour the water over the gipsy, and
as it came up to his chin when the bucket was full, he held his missives
tightly between his jaws.
The two prisoners then carried it into the assembly house, where it was
emptied into a water-tub. If a maidservant happened to be lounging in
the kitchen by any chance, the two men would deliberately frighten her
away by their foul talk. The water-tub stood close to the mouth of an
oven; whilst the two others transferred the water from the bucket into
the tub, the gipsy slipped away as nimbly as a squirrel into the oven,
clambered up the chimney, and waited there till the coast was clear.
As soon as he heard the pass-word shouted from the guard in the
courtyard below, he knew that it must be ten o'clock. So he clambered up
out of the top of the chimney on to the roof of the Assembly House, as
far as the gable-end. In the yard of the building stood an ancient
pear-tree, which the governor would not cut down, as it bore an
excellent crop of pears every year, although it was obviously dangerous
in the neighbourhood of prisoners. Papis swung himself dexterously from
the roof on to this tree, whose branches jutted out over the two fathoms
of wall which shut in the court towards the street, that had now to be
scaled.
But the returning was a more difficult matter than the setting out in
this case, for Papis had not only to break out of prison, but the next
morning to break in again, which is a different matter.
And this was how he managed it. The pear-tree had a great hollow in its
trunk, and in this a rope-ladder was hidden; this, the gipsy wound round
an overhanging bough, laid himself flat on the edge of the wall, and
waited till the guard, who patrolled the space below, had turned his
back. Then he let down the ladder, and slid along it into the street
below.
But this would doubtless have been seen by the sentry the next time he
passed by, so to obviate this peril, the cunning Papis fastened a string
to the other end of the ladder. As soon as he reached _terra firma_, he
threw the ladder back. The dun-coloured string which fell down over the
wall no one was likely to notice in the dark.
By the time the sentry had returned, the gipsy was in the neighbouring
street. From there it was easy to reach the Jewry direct, and find the
way to Abraham Rotheisel's.
He returned by the way he had come up the ladder over the wall, over the
pear-tree on to the roof, through the chimney into the kitchen of the
Assembly House, and into the bucket again, and so back into the dungeon.
When the gaoler came for his morning rounds, Papis lay fettered hand and
foot in his accustomed place.