ews will travel. Give it time and it will reach dungeon and
solitary cell. It reached me, at last, that Cecil Winwood, the
poet-forger, the snitcher, the coward, and the stool, was returned for a
fresh forgery. It will be remembered that it was this Cecil Winwood who
concocted the fairy story that I had changed the plant of the
non-existent dynamite and who was responsible for the five years I had
then spent in solitary.

I decided to kill Cecil Winwood. You see, Morrell was gone, and
Oppenheimer, until the outbreak that finished him, had remained in the
silence. Solitary had grown monotonous for me. I had to do something.
So I remembered back to the time when I was Adam Strang and patiently
nursed revenge for forty years. What he had done I could do if once I
locked my hands on Cecil Winwood's throat.

It cannot be expected of me to divulge how I came into possession of the
four needles. They were small cambric needles. Emaciated as my body
was, I had to saw four bars, each in two places, in order to make an
aperture through which I could squirm. I did it. I used up one needle
to each bar. This meant two cuts to a bar, and it took a month to a cut.
Thus I should have been eight months in cutting my way out.
Unfortunately, I broke my last needle on the last bar, and I had to wait
three months before I could get another needle. But I got it, and I got
out.

I regret greatly that I did not get Cecil Winwood. I had calculated well
on everything save one thing. The certain chance to find Winwood would
be in the dining-room at dinner hour. So I waited until Pie-Face Jones,
the sleepy guard, should be on shift at the noon hour. At that time I
was the only inmate of solitary, so that Pie-Face Jones was quickly
snoring. I removed my bars, squeezed out, stole past him along the ward,
opened the door and was free . . . to a portion of the inside of the
prison.

And here was the one thing I had not calculated on--myself. I had been
five years in solitary. I was hideously weak. I weighed eighty-seven
pounds. I was half blind. And I was immediately stricken with
agoraphobia. I was affrighted by spaciousness. Five years in narrow
walls had unfitted me for the enormous declivity of the stairway, for the
vastitude of the prison yard.

The descent of that stairway I consider the most heroic exploit I ever
accomplished. The yard was deserted. The blinding sun blazed down on
it. Thrice I essayed to cross