can't pass the word out from the dungeon. The men are ready to make the
break. We can catch them red-handed. It is up to me to set the time.
I'll tell them two o'clock to-night and tell them that, with the guards
doped, I'll unlock their cells and give them their automatics. If, at
two o'clock to-night, you don't catch the forty I shall name with their
clothes on and wide awake, then, Captain, you can give me solitary for
the rest of my sentence. And with Standing and the forty tight in the
dungeons, we'll have all the time in the world to locate the dynamite."

"If we have to tear the prison down stone by stone," Captain Jamie added
valiantly.

That was six years ago. In all the intervening time they have never
found that non-existent explosive, and they have turned the prison upside-
down a thousand times in searching for it. Nevertheless, to his last day
in office Warden Atherton believed in the existence of that dynamite.
Captain Jamie, who is still Captain of the Yard, believes to this day
that the dynamite is somewhere in the prison. Only yesterday, he came
all the way up from San Quentin to Folsom to make one more effort to get
me to reveal the hiding-place. I know he will never breathe easy until
they swing me off.




CHAPTER III


All that day I lay in the dungeon cudgelling my brains for the reason of
this new and inexplicable punishment. All I could conclude was that some