Of course, that convinced the lifers.  But there was the Captain of the Yard to convince.  To him, daily, Cecil Winwood was reporting the progress of the break—­all fancied and fabricated in his own imagination.  The Captain of the Yard demanded to be shown.  Winwood showed him, and the full details of the showing I did not learn until a year afterward, so slowly do the secrets of prison intrigue leak out.

Winwood said that the forty men in the break, in whose confidence he was, had already such power in the Prison that they were about to begin smuggling in automatic pistols by means of the guards they had bought up.

“Show me,” the Captain of the Yard must have demanded.

And the forger-poet showed him.  In the Bakery, night work was a regular thing.  One of the convicts, a baker, was on the first night-shift.  He was a stool of the Captain of the Yard, and Winwood knew it.

“To-night,” he told the Captain, “Summerface will bring in a dozen ’44 automatics.  On his next time off he’ll bring in the ammunition.  But to-night he’ll turn the automatics over to me in the bakery.  You’ve got a good stool there.  He’ll make you his report to-morrow.”

Now Summerface was a strapping figure of a bucolic guard who hailed from Humboldt County.  He was a simple-minded, good-natured dolt and not above earning an honest dollar by smuggling in tobacco for the convicts.  On that night, returning from a trip to San Francisco, he brought in with him fifteen pounds of prime cigarette tobacco.  He had done this before, and delivered the stuff to Cecil Winwood.  So, on that particular night, he, all unwitting, turned the stuff over to Winwood in the bakery.  It was a big, solid, paper-wrapped bundle of innocent tobacco.  The stool baker, from concealment, saw the package delivered to Winwood and so reported to the Captain of the Yard next morning.

But in the meantime the poet-forger’s too-lively imagination ran away with him.  He was guilty of a slip that gave me five years of solitary confinement and that placed me in this condemned cell in which I now write.  And all the time I knew nothing about it.  I did not even know of the break he had inveigled the forty lifers into planning.  I knew nothing, absolutely nothing.  And the rest knew little.  The lifers did not know he was giving them the cross.  The Captain of the Yard did not know that the cross know was being worked on him.  Summerface was the most innocent of all.  At the worst, his conscience could have accused him only of smuggling in some harmless tobacco.

And now to the stupid, silly, melodramatic slip of Cecil Winwood.  Next morning, when he encountered the Captain of the Yard, he was triumphant.  His imagination took the bit in its teeth.

“Well, the stuff came in all right as you said,” the captain of the Yard remarked.

“And enough of it to blow half the prison sky-high,” Winwood corroborated.