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Bushell, but how are you going to camouflage it when you’ve chipped a hole there?”
    “We have, Sir,” Roger said, and Massey got down, holding his game foot out, and peering hard could just see the outline. He shook his head in wonder.
    “It’s just extraordinary,” he said.
    I wouldn’t have believed it possible myself if I hadn’t been taken in the same way.
    Minskewitz, tugging on his beard, said cautiously, “I seenk it will do.”
    For “Dick,” Minskewitz devised one of the most cunning traps doors in the history of prison camps. In the middle of the concrete floor of 122 block’s washroom was an iron grating about eighteen inches square through which overflow water ran into a concrete well about three feet deep. A foot up from the bottom a pipe led off to carry the water away so there was always a foot of water in the well up to the ege of the pipe.
    Minskewitz took off the iron grating while the stooges watched outside, bailed out the water, and mopped the well dry with old rags. He chipped away one wall of the concrete well laying bare the soft earth behind just ripe for tunneling. He cast a new slab to fit where the broken wall had been, slipped it in, sealed the cracks with soap and sand, put the grating back on top, and sioshed water down till the well was again full to the outlet pipe. The ferrets didn’t have a hope of finding “Dick” unless they had second sight, and they didn’t have that.
    With practice it took only a minute or two to take the grating off bail out the well and lift out the slab. Later on, when the shaft was dug beneath, the diggers would vanish into it, the slab and grating would be replaced, and water poured into the well so they could work happily below for hours without a stooge on top.
     
    Floody, Canton, Crump, and Marshall had already started to sink the shaft under “Tom’s” trap. It was to go straight down for thirty feet so that when the tunnel was burrowed out at the bottom it would be out of range of the sound detectors around the wire.
    Then Crump started “Harry’s” trap. In Room 23 of Block 104, he heaved the stove off the square of tiles on which it stood, took up the tiles one by one, and recemented them on a wooden frame that Travis’ carpenters had made. He hinged this on as a trap door in place of the former solid tile foundation.
    Under it he found solid brick and concrete to get through to reach the earth. Someone had souvenired an old pick head which the Russian workmen had used, and Crump fitted a baseball bat in it for a handle and bashed into the brick and concrete. It kicked up a hell of a ringing noise, exactly like a pick biting into brick and concrete, and it was obvious Glemnitz and Rubberneck and every ferret within half a mile would be galloping up inquisitively at any moment.
    Half a dozen diversionists gathered outside the window hammering at bits of tin and wood making innocent things like baking dishes as noisily as they could for a couple of days while Crump sweated with the pick until he had cleared a way to the earth. Crump was a good man with a pick, a wiry stocky character with a square red face and red hair.
    Half a dozen of the tiles on the trap had been cracked, and it wasn’t good enough for him.
    “It looks to suspicious,” he said at a meeting of the committee, and they searched the camp till they found some spare tiles in the kitchen block and replaced the cracked ones. To muffle some of the hollow sound if the ferrets should tap on the trap, he fitted a removable grill that covered the top of the shaft just underneath and piled blankets in the little space. Minskewitz put the same sort of grill under “Tom’s” trap and, as “Tom’s” concrete slab sounded more hollow than “Harry,” he made little bags of sand to stow on the grill.
    It was a good moment when Floody reported to Roger that the last of the traps was finished. It had been the riskiest part of the scheme because if he’d seen chunks of