However, nothing troubled Bob long or deeply, and when he had passed the branch and taken in Zeke Tucker, and got out of the woods to the smooth prairie road beyond, he forgot his scruples and tried to find out just how much speed Butts's bay colt might have in him. Nor did he slacken pace even when he got into the village streets; but remembering how near it was to Jake's time, he held the horse swiftly on till he reached an alley-way behind some village stores. Telling Tucker to tie the horse, he got over the fence and laid hold of a rusty crowbar that he had long kept his mind fixed on. Putting this on his shoulder, he was soon at the jail. "Tom!" he called, in a smothered voice, at the grated window on the east side. But all within was as silent as it was dark. For a moment Bob stood perplexed. Then he went to the grating at the back of the jail--the window that opened into the passage-way at the end opposite to the front door. "Tom, where air you?" he called, putting his hands up on each side of his mouth, that his words might not be heard in the street. "In the dungeon." Tom's voice sounded remote. Bob spent no time in deliberating, but thrust the crowbar between the cross-bars of the iron grating. His first difficulty was similar to that of Archimedes, he could not get a fulcrum; or, as he expressed it less elegantly to Zeke, "he couldn't git no purchase onto the daudblasted ole thing." But by persistently ramming the point of the crowbar against the stone-work at the side of the window he succeeded at length in picking out a little mortar and bracing the tip of the crowbar against a projecting stone. He had great confidence in his own physical strength, but the grating at first was too much for him; the wrought-iron cross-bar of the window bent under the strain he put upon it, but it would not loosen its hold on the masonry. At this rate it would take more time than he could hope to have to push the bars apart enough to admit even Zeke's thin frame, and he could not hope to bend them far enough to let his own great body through. He therefore changed his mode of attack. Withdrawing his crowbar from the grating, he felt for a seam in the stones at the base of the window and then drove the point of the bar into this over and over again, aiming as well as he could in the dark and taking the risk of attracting the attention of some wakeful villager by the sound of his ringing blows. At length, by drilling and prying, he had loosened the large stone which was in some sort the key to the difficulty. This accomplished, he made haste to insert the bar again into the grating, bracing its point as before in the seam he had already opened in the stone-work at the side of the window. Then, with his feet against the wall of the jail, he crouched his great frame and put forth the whole of his forces, thrusting his mighty strength against the crowbar, as blind Samson in his agony tugged at the pillars of the Philistine temple.