and you shall learn what they did to me. There was a poet in the prison,
a convict, a weak-chinned, broad-browed, degenerate poet. He was a
forger. He was a coward. He was a snitcher. He was a stool--strange
words for a professor of agronomics to use in writing, but a professor of
agronomics may well learn strange words when pent in prison for the term
of his natural life.

This poet-forger's name was Cecil Winwood. He had had prior convictions,
and yet, because he was a snivelling cur of a yellow dog, his last
sentence had been only for seven years. Good credits would materially
reduce this time. My time was life. Yet this miserable degenerate, in
order to gain several short years of liberty for himself, succeeded in
adding a fair portion of eternity to my own lifetime term.

I shall tell what happened the other way around, for it was only after a
weary period that I learned. This Cecil Winwood, in order to curry
favour with the Captain of the Yard, and thence the Warden, the Prison
Directors, the Board of Pardons, and the Governor of California, framed
up a prison-break. Now note three things: (a) Cecil Winwood was so
detested by his fellow-convicts that they would not have permitted him to
bet an ounce of Bull Durham on a bed-bug race--and bed-bug racing was a
great sport with the convicts; (b) I was the dog that had been given a
bad name: (c) for his frame-up, 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