Argosy All-Story Weekly — page 20: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

646 led him. He passed from the guard room into a corridor, through an iron door with a small square hole in it at about face height. One end of the corridor ended in the blank wall of the depot bath house; the other opened into an exercise yard. There were smaller doors along the corridor, of wood, each with a small, square hole at face height. At one of these the batman caught a glimpse of a face resting on a pair of big forearms. Beyond the fact that he was so tall that he had to stoop to look out of the aperture in his door, the batman saw little of his fellow prisoner, but it came to him that this must be the big American of whom Kate had spoken. - When the door was closed and locked and the corporal had gone back to toasting his bread, the batman looked about him. There was one chance out of four that this had been Pearsley’s cell, for he had seen that there were just four doors in the narrow corridor. It was a small room, with a sin- gle barred window, high up. It contained an iron cot, but, as far as he could see, no other possible hiding place. He squeezed the hard mattress, and won- dered whether he could get it open without being discovered. After a time, when he had got on the good side of the corporal of the guard, he might beg a needle and thread on the plea of torn clothing. He could open the “ biscuits” at night, and sew them up before the next morning. The walls were of hard plaster over brick, and they contained a history of that cell, and almost a history of the British army. There were names, initials, dates running far back beyond the Crimean War, and messages blaspheming generals who had long since passed along the parade behind muffled drums. “ Roll on, German navy,” one Tommy had written in the humorous despair of confinement. There was just a chance that Pearsley might have put his own initials somewhere on that record, and the batman knelt on his cot and scrutinized that patch of wall where the writing was thickest. And there he found an initial P., recently cut. At first he passed it over, for it stood as one of several letters enclosed in a sort of lozenge by aline. R. P., T. C., H. V. the ini- ARGOSY-ALLSTORY WEEKLY. tials read, and it was only when he had come across them a half dozen times on the stretch of wall just above the cot that the batman began to study and to wonder. Then it came to him—the first stood for Richard Pearsley, the second stood for Thomas Crill, but what the third name might be he did not know. He hugged his knees and checked the exultation which welled up within him. He heard the corporal of the guard walk- ing in the corridor outside his door, and putting his head out of the aperture hailed him. “I say, corporal, this was Pearsley’s cell, wasn’t it?” The corporal looked at him for a startled moment, and in that moment the batman heard the slow stir of a big body in the cell next his own. ““ Aye,” answered the corporal. do you ask?” “*°F’s written his nyme all over the wall. And under it, ’e’s put a T. C. and under that a H. V.” “ Bli’me! It’s old Pearsley still thinkink about ’is chum, Crill. They was a funny pair. They’d been in the army since Adam was a lance-jack. Crill was drowned swim- mink ’osses, and arter it Pearsley went all to ’ell. ’E got into the clink and never come out alive. Gawd love a duck! It shows wot a Soldier’s life will do to a bloke!” “ Aye, but wot’s the H. V.?” asked the batman. “7 couldn’t tell you. Arsk the Yank ’ere. "E was with Pearsley while ’e was in the clink ’ere, and ’e was with ’im when he died.” “¢ Ah,” said the batman to himself, with a tightening of his pulse. He bent his head and listened, and heard a stir from the cell next his own. After a pause the man next him spoke. “There were three of them originally— three chums. They went into the army as trumpeters together, Pearsley, Crill, and Vine. Vine was wounded in 1914 and dis- charged.” “Oh,” said the batman. ‘“‘ Thanks, old un. ’Struth, he must have been a rummy cove to write things all over the wall this way. Gomichooks “ Why com