Intelligent men are cruel.  Stupid men are monstrously cruel.  The guards and the men over me, from the Warden down, were stupid monsters.  Listen, 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 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.