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cling to, dangling forty feet above the paving, he began to move hand by hand in a slow agony round the two walls of the yard. He felt sweat on his shirt-front and then saw it was not sweat but blood running from his hands, back down his arms. The shirt-cloth round his palms had become two blood-sodden rags. But to surrender now would allow the world to chuckle at his bravado, and then hang him just the same.
    The blood-drops falling in the yard might betray him to the first person who noticed them. There was no help for that. Yet to come so far and be caught on the prison roofs was worse than letting go and smashing on the stone paving below. He would smash rather than let them take him again. He tried to hurry and almost lost his grip with one hand.
    But he was at the first corner now. The second wall was the shorter side of the oblong yard. The leads of the death-wards lay only twenty feet along that flank of granite. Twenty feet more of blood that ran slippery on needle-sharp iron. He sobbed with the pain. But then it was ten feet, and five. He came to the end of it. To his right, a dozen feet below the support from which he hung, were the flat leads of the condemned block.
    A rooftop-burglar's dead-fall was the only way. Throwing himself to one side, he let go of the support above him. Twisting and falling, he heard the brief rush of wind at his ears. He missed the roof but felt the stone ledge of it smack into his hands. One hand slipped but the other held. He snatched a second hold. Kicking and flipping like a fish in a net, Jack Rann pulled himself slowly on hands and knees to the flat roof of the condemned block, bleeding, and weeping with relief.
    He was still at the centre of the prison and time was against him. The succession of flat roofs varied little in height, with gaps of eight to ten feet between each and a drop of forty feet to the passageways below. Where some of the roofs ended, a spiked rail marked the boundary of the prison along Newgate Street.
    Blood still dripped as he gathered his strength, sprinted at the first gap, leapt with all his power, saw the drop flash beneath him, and landed sprawling on the next roof. A long chase down it, a narrower leap and a landing with a trip that gashed his ankle.
    How far until he was safe? Even as the question occurred, he knew that he could never be safe. Sooner or later, the nightmare was to come again - unless he could cross an ocean to a new continent; unless the legacy of Pandy Quinn's genius might save him.
    He took another leap and made a landing that was easier. Now a wider gap. Ten feet, he guessed. He drew back, ran with all his might and hurled himself across it. He missed the flat roof, caught the ledge and pulled himself up.
    His strength was gone for another jump like that. Then, a dozen feet ahead of him, he saw a smoke-stack at the edge of the roof he was standing on, its black lettering weathered almost to nothing. Tyler's Manufactory'. He had lost all sense of time and distance on the roofs but now he knew that he must be somewhere beyond the prison, above the first commercial premises of Newgate Street.
    From this moment any man or woman might be his enemy. The first encounter might betray him. He edged forward and saw, several yards from the chimney, a woman in a grey woollen shawl and white apron gathering washing from a line between two posts. Such homeliness after weeks of the condemned cell gave him hope that she would not refuse him. From the shelter of the stack, he watched her carry the washing-basket to an attic well-ahead and go down into the house.
    Rann waited a moment and then moved forward. There was an attic ladder inside the well-head, down which the young woman had gone. Easing himself through the opening, he went softly and barefoot after her.
    It was a Newgate garret, built for extra rent on top of a shabby garment-warehouse. Through a half-open door, he saw the basket of laundry on a table, a grate of dead coals, a child in a