Not in hope but in despair, in the weighing of different deaths, in a whisper passed with a plate at mess, along a file at exercise, in a package slipped under the table in the visitors' room, a stolen knife, a gun under the grey clothes—so prison breaks begin, nobody knows just how. One morning last week at Auburn. N. Y., an appointed moment came. Father Donald Cleary, the prison's young chaplain, found a strange party in one of the corridors.
It was 11 a. m., the time when 200 segregated prisoners, under special watch for taking part in the attempted break and prison-burning less than five months ago (TIME, Aug. 5), were supposed to be having lunch. They were not eating. Some of them had handcuffed six guards and marched them back to the punishment cells to set free their comrades. They had sent a message to Warden Jennings and he was there now, manacled and trembling, a white-haired man with a lined, anxious face, a hostage. The prisoners waited for their leader, Convict Henry Sullivan, to tell them how the guards and troopers at the main gate, where the siren was screaming, had received their ultimatum, a soiled paper across which was scrawled "For God's sake, give them what they want," followed by Warden Jennings' signature. The priest's advent was an accident, not to be considered, an irrelevant, frantic voice, begging them to think, to undo what they had done. His words fell on the deaf faces like a flurry of wind on stone.
Several other people had stumbled on the party in the corridor. One of them, George A. Durnford, the head keeper, had been shot and killed when he tried to run. A keeper named David Winney had dodged the bullets by falling down and rolling through a doorway. He had sent the alarm to the gate by the only telephone the conspirators had overlooked when they were cutting wires. Now at the gate Captain Stephen McGrath, State trooper, held Sullivan's ultimatum between his fists, wondering how he could take the responsibility of ignoring that scrawled postscript signed with Warden Jennings' name.
"Phone the Commissioner at Albany." Captain McOrath commanded one of his men. "See what he says."
After a bit the trooper came back. "He says, 'Go in and get them. The warden will have to take his chances.'"
From the snowy roadway, darkened in irregular patches by the parked automobiles of townspeople who had turned out to help, McGrath looked toward the wing of the grey stone block next to the warden's office, the wing where the rebels were barricaded. He could charge in all right, get across the yard to the main hall maybe, but no further. They would have the steel doors of the hall closed. He studied it until he thought of a plan, then took Father Cleary aside and talked to him. . . . Automobiles for their escape? The gate open?