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."

And there, in that dark hole of man's inhumanity, from dungeon cell to
dungeon cell, their mouths against the gratings, the two-score lifers
solemnly pledged themselves before God to tell the truth.

Little good did their truth-telling do them. At nine o'clock the guards,
paid bravoes of the smug citizens who constitute the state, full of meat
and sleep, wer