For many months Malcolm Hulsey had been watching closely the movements of the night guards. During his stay in the hospital, while recovering from the gunshot wound in his shoulder, he had "doped out" a possible means of escape, and he was on the point of making the attempt when the doctor pronounced him sufficiently recovered to be returned to the cell-house.
The "lifer's" plan of escape was simply this: At midnight, while Captain Dunlap and his crew were on duty, the yard guard made his round, counted the patients in the hospital and left the yard through the guards' gate to eat his lunch in the guards' dinning-room outside the walls. When the yard guard returned to the inside lookout he carried with him a hot lunch for Captain Dunlap.
In counting the men in the hospital, the yard guard did not as a rule enter the building. He merely turned on the lights in one large ward and looked through the window. The convict hospital nurse on night duty stood ready, and when the lights were turned on, proceeded from bed to bed and partly uncovered each patient so that the yard guard outside could see and count them.
There were several factors in Hulsey's favor now, one being that a new substitute guard was on duty over the guards' entrance gate during the absence of the regular guard who was away on vacation. There was only one patient in the hospital besides Hulsey. The yard guard must be lured into the hospital, overpowered, his uniform stripped from him, then Hulsey, garbed in the uniform, would attempt to deceive the guard at the gate and be given the keys.
At fifteen minutes to midnight on Hulsey's first day in the hospital, the "lifer" quietly rose form his bed while the white-clad convict nurse's back was turned. Three minutes later the unsuspecting nurse had been neatly laid out from a well-directed blow behind the ear, bound with sheets, gagged, stripped of his white suit and tenderly tucked in the bed recently occupied by Mr. Malcolm Hulsey.
The other patient, a feeble old con-
