The Great Escape by Paul Brickhill Read Free Book Online Page B

directions, and the penguins in the middle being flung over someone’s shoulder with the sand dripping out of their pants. The yellow stuff was shuffled into the sand, and the gray soil from the gardens sprinkled over any parts that showed. Sometimes Sage had volley-ball games going with a mob standing around cheering, and the sand was shuffled in among them. More sand was poured down the deep privy pits.
    A curly-headed Australian called Willy Williams, who was supply chief, stripped some of the double-decker bunks and smuggled the bedposts over to 123. When Floody had sunk the shaft about five feet he stood four of these posts in the four corners of the shaft, bolted them together with cross braces, and slid bedboards in behind as a solid wall. After he’d packed sand as tightly as he could behind the lining boards, that part of the shaft framing stayed rigidly in position while he dug down another five feet, and put in another section. He framed the whole shaft like that, and as they got deeper he nailed a ladder in one corner.
    When it was about fifteen feet deep Johnny Marshall took over “Tom” with three or four selected diggers, and Floody went to start “Dick’s” shaft with another team. It was strange that these two could work so well down tunnels; they were both so tall. Floody was lean as a beanpole with a large, rather sensitive mouth and eyes sunk back in his head making him look solemn and ill. Johnny Marshall lived a lot on his nerves, very intelligent and good-looking, a little thin on top and with perfect white teeth.
    They dug fast because the sand was crumbly, but they would rather have dug through hard clay. Even in clay you could dig as much as the dispersers could handle and clay was safe. The sand wasn’t. It collapsed if you winked an eye at it; and it had to be solidly shored all the way. Even so, there were a lot of nasty falls, dangerous things thirty feet down a rat hole when a couple of hundred pounds of earth slips away and can smother you.
    Just before sand falls like that, it gives a faint crack and there’s a shaven second to get out of the way. No one ever spoke too much down below. You were too busy listening.
    “Tom’s” shaft was thirty feet deep in a couple of weeks. “Dick” reached the same mark a few days later, and over in “Harry,” Crump was getting down to the twenty-foot level.
    Marshall and his gang started to excavate the working chambers at the base of “Tom.” They dug a little chamber about five feet long where a shaft man could store his gear and assemble the tunnel-shoring frames. On another side they dug a similar chamber to store sand in when it came back from the tunnel until the dispersers could handle it; and on the third side they made a chamber six feet long for the air pump and pumper. The fourth side was the west side, facing the wire — the tunnel side.
    Crump left “Harry” to help Floody dig the workshops at the base of “Dick.” They were down there one day with Canton shoring the pumping chamber when they heard a crack in the shaft and Canton looked up and saw a broken bedboard sticking out of the frame about twenty-five feet up. Sand was pouring through the gap, and, as he shielded his eyes from the cascade, there was a rending sound up there; a frame burst out with the pressure behind it, and as the sand crashed down, the shaft framework began to twist and break up.
    By some miracle the ladder held, and Canton was going up it like a rocket with the other two right behind. Canton and Crump shot out of the top and turned to grab Floody just in time. The sand had reached his waist and he was pinned and couldn’t heave himself any higher while the sand mounted. They were just able to heave him free. When he’d got the sand out of his eyes, Floody swore for five solid minutes. He had an imaginative vocabulary. “Dick’s” shaft was full to just below the top.
    Floody found Roger out on the circuit and told him the news. Roger said one