The Star Rover. Jack London
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definite in my brain. The whole organization of this prison is stupid. You are a politician. You can weave the political pull of San Francisco saloon men and ward heelers into a position of graft such as this one you occupy; but you can't weave jute. Your loom rooms are fifty years behind the times. … "
But why continue the tirade? For tirade it was. I showed him what a fool he was, and as a result he decided that I was a hopeless incorrigible.
Give a dog a bad name—you know the saw. Very well. Warden Atherton gave the final sanction to the badness of my name. I was fair game. More than one convict's dereliction was shunted off on me, and was paid for by me in the dungeon on bread and water, or in being triced up by the thumbs on my tiptoes for long hours, each hour of which was longer than the memory of any life I have ever lived.
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 sniveling 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 favor 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 bedbug race—and bedbug 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 Windwood and, when he approached them with his plan of a wholesale prison break, they laughed at him and turned him away with curses for the stool that he was. But he fooled them in the end, forty of the bitterestwise 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 tonight. 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 tonight 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 Windwood 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.
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 nightshift. He was a stool of the Captain of the Yard, and Winwood knew it.
"Tonight," he told the captain, "Summerface will bring in a dozen '44 automatics. On his next time off he'll bring in the ammunition. But tonight he'll turn the automatics over to me in the bakery. You've got a good stool there. He'll make you his report tomorrow."
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 Windwood 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 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 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 nonexistent thirty-five pounds of high