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 it.  But my senses reeled and I shrank back to the wall for protection.  Again, summoning all my courage, I attempted it.  But my poor blear eyes, like a bat’s, startled me at my shadow on the flagstones.  I attempted to avoid my own shadow, tripped, fell over it, and like a drowning man struggling for shore crawled back on hands and knees to the wall.

I leaned against the wall and cried.  It was the first time in many years that I had cried.  I remember noting, even in my extremity, the warmth of the tears on my cheeks and the salt taste when they reached my lips.  Then I had a chill, and for a time shook as with an ague.  Abandoning the openness of the yard as too impossible a feat for one in my condition, still shaking with the chill, crouching close to the protecting wall, my hands touching it, I started to skirt the yard.

Then it was, somewhere along, that the guard Thurston espied me.  I saw him, distorted by my bleared eyes, a huge, well-fed monster, rushing upon me with incredible speed out of the remote distance.  Possibly, at that moment, he was twenty feet away.  He weighed one hundred and seventy pounds.  The struggle between us can be easily imagined, but somewhere in that brief struggle it was claimed that I struck him on the nose with my fist to such purpose as to make that organ bleed.