The Jacket | Page 7

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 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