Please remember that I am not asking this question in the twelve-hundredth year after Christ, nor in the time of Christ, nor in the twelve-hundredth year before Christ.  I, who am to be hanged this year, the nineteen-hundred-and-thirteenth after Christ, ask these questions of you who are assumably Christ’s followers, of you whose hang-dogs are going to take me out and hide my face under a black cloth because they dare not look upon the horror they do to me while I yet live.

And now back to the situation in the dungeons.  When the last guard departed and the outer door clanged shut, all the forty beaten, disappointed men began to talk and ask questions.  But, almost immediately, roaring like a bull in order to be heard, Skysail Jack, a giant sailor of a lifer, ordered silence while a census could be taken.  The dungeons were full, and dungeon by dungeon, in order of dungeons, shouted out its quota to the roll-call.  Thus, every dungeon was accounted for as occupied by trusted convicts, so that there was no opportunity for a stool to be hidden away and listening.

Of me, only, were the convicts dubious, for I was the one man who had not been in the plot.  They put me through a searching examination.  I could but tell them how I had just emerged from dungeon and jacket in the morning, and without rhyme or reason, so far as I could discover, had been put back in the dungeon after being out only several hours.  My record as an incorrigible was in my favour, and soon they began to talk.

As I lay there and listened, for the first time I learned of the break that had been a-hatching.  “Who had squealed?” was their one quest, and throughout the night the quest was pursued.  The quest for Cecil Winwood was vain, and the suspicion against him was general.

“There’s only one thing, lads,” Skysail Jack finally said.  “It’ll soon be morning, and then they’ll take us out and give us bloody hell.  We were caught dead to rights with our clothes on.  Winwood crossed us and squealed.  They’re going to get us out one by one and mess us up.  There’s forty of us.  Any lyin’s bound to be found out.  So each lad, when they sweat him, just tells the truth, the whole truth, so help him God.”