, Cecil Winwood needed the dogs with bad
names, the lifetimers, the desperate ones, the incorrigibles.

But the lifers detested Cecil Winwood, and, when he approached them with
his plan of a wholesale prison-break, they laughed at him and turned away
with curses for the stool that he was. But he fooled them in the end,
forty of the bitterest-wise ones in the pen. He approached them again
and again. He told of his power in the prison by virtue of his being
trusty in the Warden's office, and because of the fact that he had the
run of the dispensary.

"Show me," said Long Bill Hodge, a mountaineer doing life for train
robbery, and whose whole soul for years had been bent on escaping in
order to kill the companion in robbery who had turned state's evidence on
him.

Cecil Winwood accepted the test. He claimed that he could dope the
guards the night of the break.

"Talk is cheap," said Long Bill Hodge. "What we want is the goods. Dope
one of the guards to-night. There's Barnum. He's no good. He beat up
that crazy Chink yesterday in Bughouse Alley--when he was off duty, too.
He's on the night watch. Dope him to-night an' make him lose his job.
Show me, and we'll talk business with you."

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