All this Long Bill told me in the dungeons afterward.  Cecil Winwood demurred against the immediacy of the demonstration.  He claimed that he must have time in which to steal the dope from the dispensary.  They gave him the time, and a week later he announced that he was ready.  Forty hard-bitten lifers waited for the guard Barnum to go to sleep on his shift.  And Barnum did.  He was found asleep, and he was discharged for sleeping on duty.

Of course, that convinced the lifers.  But there was the Captain of the Yard to convince.  To him, daily, Cecil Winwood was reporting the progress of the break—all fancied and fabricated in his own imagination.  The Captain of the Yard demanded to be shown.  Winwood showed him, and the full details of the showing I did not learn until a year afterward, so slowly do the secrets of prison intrigue leak out.

Winwood said that the forty men in the break, in whose confidence he was, had already such power in the Prison that they were about to begin smuggling in automatic pistols by means of the guards they had bought up.

“Show me,” the Captain of the Yard must have demanded.

And the forger-poet showed him.  In the Bakery, night work was a regular thing.  One of the convicts, a baker, was on the first night-shift.  He was a stool of the Captain of the Yard, and Winwood knew it.

“To-night,” he told the Captain, “Summerface will bring in a dozen ’44 automatics.  On his next time off he’ll bring in the ammunition.  But to-night he’ll turn the automatics over to me in the bakery.  You’ve got a good stool there.  He’ll make you his report to-morrow.”

Now Summerface was a strapping figure of a bucolic guard who hailed from