pun for Captain Jamie. The forty lifers were caught in red-handed
readiness for the break. What if they did unite, afterward, in averring
that the break had been planned by Winwood? The Prison Board of
Directors believed, to a man, that the forty lied in an effort to save
themselves. The Board of Pardons likewise believed, for, ere three
months were up, Cecil Winwood, forger and poet, most despicable of men,
was pardoned out.

Oh, well, the stir, or the pen, as they call it in convict argot, is a
training school for philosophy. No inmate can survive years of it
without having had burst for him his fondest illusions and fairest
metaphysical bubbles. Truth lives, we are taught; murder will out. Well,
this is a demonstration that murder does not always come out. The
Captain of the Yard, the late Warden Atherton, the Prison Board of
Directors to a man--all believe, right now, in the existence of that
dynamite that never existed save in the slippery-geared and all
too-accelerated brain of the degenerate forger and poet, Cecil Winwood.
And Cecil Winwood still lives, while I, of all men concerned, the
utterest, absolutist, innocentest, go to the scaffold in a few short
weeks.

* * * * *

And now I must tell how entered the forty lifers upon my dungeon
stillness. I was asleep when the outer door to the corridor of dungeons
clanged open and aroused me. "Some poor devil," was my thought; and my
next thought was that he was surely getting his, as I listened to the
scuffling of feet, the dull impact of blows on flesh, the sudden cries of
pain, the filth of curses, and the sounds of dragging bodies. For, you
see, every man was man-handled all the length of the way.

Dungeon-door after dungeon-door clanged open, and body after body was
thrust in, flung in, or dragged in. And continually more groups of
guards arrived with more beaten convicts who still were being beaten, and
more dungeon-doors were opened to receive the bleeding frames of men who
were guilty of yearning after freedom.

Yes, as I look back upon it, a man must be greatly a philosopher to
survive the continual impact of such brutish experiences through the
years and years. I am such a philosopher. I have endured eight years of
their torment, and now, in the end, failing to get rid of me in all other
ways, they have invoked the machinery of state to put a rope around my
neck and shut off my breath by the weight of my body. Oh, I know how the
experts g