THE IMMORTAL SIX HUNDRED
out by Prewitt getting on my shoulders and pulling himself out by the floor; then he pulled me out. Prewitt had two pair of pants, and part of an old blanket. He put on the pants and loaned me the blanket to keep me from freezing while my pants dried. I do positively believe I had to tell my comrades six million lies about how I fell down in one of the cisterns that some one left open. We gave Captain Chambers full details of our exploration below, but his advice was to stop our foolishness before we took cold and died. While talking to Chambers, he said: "If you had a good hard saw to cut out the cement, and a bar to pry out the bricks you might, in months of hard work, cut from one air chamber to the other until you cut outside of the guard line,—but this was doubtful." Well, this settled it, and we determined to cut that wall. We got hold of an eighteen-inch stove poker; Prewitt had an old dinner knife of which we made a saw; Billy Funk agreed to watch for the coming of
173
