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
Humboldt County. He was a simple-minded, good-natured dolt and not above
earning an honest dollar by smuggling in tobacco for the convicts. On
that night, returning from a trip to San Francisco, he brought in with
him fifteen pounds of prime cigarette tobacco. He had done this before,
and delivered the stuff to Cecil Winwood. So, on that particular night,
he, all unwitting, turned the stuff over to Winwood in the bakery. It
was a big, solid, paper-wrapped bundle of innocent tobacco. The stool
baker, from concealment, saw the package delivered to Winwood and so
reported to the Captain of the Yard next morning.

But in the meantime the poet-forger's too-lively imagination ran away
with him. He was guilty of a slip that gave me five years of solitary
confinement and that placed me in this condemned cell in which I now
write. And all the time I knew nothing about it. I did not even know of
the break he had inveigled the forty lifers into planning. I knew
nothing, absolutely nothing. And the rest knew little. The lifers did
not know he was giving them the cross. The Captain of the Yard did not
know that the cross know was being worked on him. Summerface was the
most innocent of all. At the worst, his conscience could have accused
him only of smuggling in some harmless tobacco.

And now to the stupid, silly, melodramatic slip of Cecil Winwood. Next
morning, when he encountered the Captain of the Yard, he was triumphant.
His imagination took the bit in its teeth.

"Well, the stuff came in all right as you said," the captain of the Yard
remarked.

"And enough of it to blow half the prison sky-high," Winwood
corroborated.

"Enough of what?" the Captain demanded.

"Dynamite and detonators," the fool rattled on. "Thirty-five pounds of
it. Your stool saw Summerface pass it over to me."

And right there the Captain of the Yard must have nearly died. I can
actually sympathize with him--thirty-five pounds of dynamite loose in the
prison.

They say that Captain Jamie--that