stool had lied an infraction of the rules on me in order to curry favour
with the guards.

Meanwhile Captain Jamie fretted his head off and prepared for the night,
while Winwood passed the word along to the forty lifers to be ready for
the break. And two hours after midnight every guard in the prison was
under orders. This included the day-shift which should have been asleep.
When two o'clock came, they rushed the cells occupied by the forty. The
rush was simultaneous. The cells were opened at the same moment, and
without exception the men named by Winwood were found out of their bunks,
fully dressed, and crouching just inside their doors. Of course, this
was verification absolute of all the fabric of lies that the poet-forger
had spun for Captain Jamie. The forty lifers were caught in red-handed
readiness for the break. What if they did unite, afterward, in averring
that the break had been planned by Winwood? The Prison Board of
Directors believed, to a man, that the forty lied in an effort to save
themselves. The Board of Pardons likewise believed, for, ere three
months were up, Cecil Winwood, forger and poet, most despicable of men,
was pardoned out.

Oh, well, the stir, or the pen, as they call it in convict argot, is a
training school for philosophy. No inmate can survive years of it
without having had burst for him his fondest illusions and fairest
metaphysical bubbles. Truth lives, we are taught; murder will out. Well,
this is a demonstration that murder does not always come out. The
Captain of the Yard, the late Warden Atherton, the Prison Board of
Directors to a man--all believe, right now, in the existence of that
dynamite that never existed save in the slippery-geared and all
too-accelerated brain of the degenerate forger and poet, Cecil Winwood.
And Cecil Winwood still lives, while I, of all men concerned, the