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.
“Enough of what?” the Captain demanded.
“Dynamite and detonators,” the fool rattled on. “Thirty-five pounds of it.
Your stool saw Summerface pass it over to me.”
And right there the Captain of the Yard must have nearly died.
I can actually sympathize with him—thirty-five pounds of dynamite loose in the prison.
They say that Captain Jamie—that was his nickname—sat down and held his head in his hands.
“Where is it now?” he cried. “I want it.
Take me to it at once.”
And right there Cecil Winwood saw his mistake.
“I planted it,” he lied—for he was compelled to lie because, being merely tobacco in small packages, it was long since distributed among the convicts along the customary channels.
“Very well,” said Captain Jamie, getting himself in hand.
“Lead me to it at once.”
But there was no plant of high explosives to lead him to.
The thing did not exist, had never existed save in the imagination of the wretched Winwood.
In a large prison like San Quentin there are always hiding-places for things.
And as Cecil Winwood led Captain Jamie he must have done some rapid thinking.
As Captain Jamie testified before the Board of Directors, and as Winwood also so testified, on the way to the hiding-place Winwood said that he and I had planted the powder together.
And I, just released from five days in the dungeons and eighty hours in the jacket; I, whom even the stupid guards could see was too weak to work in the loom-room; I, who had been given the day off to recuperate—from too terrible punishment—I was named as the one who had helped hide the non-existent thirty-five pounds of high explosive!
Winwood led Captain Jamie to the alleged hiding-place.
Of course they found no dynamite in it.
“My God!” Winwood lied. “Standing has given me the cross.
He’s lifted the plant and stowed it somewhere else.”
The Captain of the Yard said more emphatic things than “My God!”