Читать книгу Странник по звездам / The Star-Rover - Джек Лондон, William Hootkins - Страница 4

The lifers[15] detested Cecil Winwood, and, when he approached them with his plan of a prison-break[16], they laughed at him. But he fooled them in the end. He approached them again and again. Cecil Winwood claimed that he could dope the guards the night of the break.

“Talk is cheap,” said Bill Hodge[17]. “What we want is the goods. Dope one of the guards tonight. There’s Barnum[18]. He’s no good. He’s on the night watch. Dope him tonight and make him lose his job. Show me, and we’ll talk business with you.”

All this Long Bill told me afterward. Cecil Winwood demurred against 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 lifers waited for the guard Barnum to go to sleep. 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[19] to convince. To him, daily, Cecil Winwood was reporting the progress of the break—all fancied and fabricated in his own imagination. Winwood said that the forty men, in whose confidence he was, had already invented the prison-break and they had had dynamite which I had hidden somewhere.

All that day I lay in the dungeon. Meanwhile Captain prepared for the night, while Winwood was telling the forty lifers to be ready for the break. When two o’clock came, the guards rushed the cells occupied by the forty. The rush was simultaneous. The cells were opened at the same moment, the men named by Winwood were found fully dressed, and standing just behind their doors. The forty lifers were caught in readiness for the break. What if they did unite, afterward, in averring that the break had been planned by Winwood? Captain believed that the forty lied in an effort to save themselves. Cecil Winwood, forger and poet, most despicable of men, was pardoned out[20].

Oh, well, the prison is a training school for philosophy. Cecil Winwood still lives, while I, the utterest, the innocentest, go to the scaffold in a few weeks.