The remainder of our interview was stormy and fruitless. It resulted in my being taken to Chihuahua penitentiary, the strongest prison in Mexico, and thrown into a cell. It was two months and a half before I came out again. There is small use going in detail into the major and minor degradations of life in a Mexican prison. I pass over _cimex lectularius_ and the warfare which ended with my release. There are more edifying things to tell. For instance, how I came into possession of half a blanket and a pair of friends. I was confined—incommunicado, a sentry with fixed bayonet standing before my door—in an upper tier in the officers’ wing. Confinement in the officers’ wing carried one special privilege in which I, the desperado, did not share. During the day the cell doors were left open and the prisoners had the run of the corridor and galleries. My sentry’s bayonet barred them from me, but could not keep them from talking of the new prisoner who claimed to be a German and was suffering because he was suspected of attachment to the Constitutionalist cause. On my third or fourth night there I was attracted to my cell door by a sibilant “_Oiga! Aleman!_” and something soft was thrust between the bars. “German,” whispered a voice in Spanish out of the blackness, “it is cold to-night. We have brought you up a blanket.” So began my friendship with Pablo Almendaris and Rafael Castro, two young Constitutionalist officers. Almendaris, in particular, later became a chum of mine. He was a long, lank, solemn individual, the very image of Don Quixote of La Mancha. I remember him with love because he was the man who gave to me in prison, out of kindness of heart, a full half of his single blanket. This is how it happened. He and Rafael Castro, who were cellmates, had contrived a way to pick their lock and roam the cell block at night, stark naked, their brown skins blending perfectly with the dingy walls. They had already heard the story of my plight. That night Almendaris had cut his blanket in two, and the pair, with the bit of wool and a bottle of tequila they had bought that day when the prison market was open, sneaked up to the gallery and my cell. They gave the liquor to the sentry, who, being an Indian, promptly drank the whole of it down and became blissfully unconscious. The blanket was the first of many gifts, and many were the chats we had together, all with a practical purpose. “If you ever escape or are released,” Almendaris kept telling me, “go to Trinidad Rodriguez. He is my colonel. And if you ever get out of Mexico, go to El Paso and hunt up Labansat. He is there.” So they contrived to alleviate the minor evils of my predicament, and I shall never forget them. The major difficulty was beyond their reach. The trap had closed completely round me. The charge of spying and Mercado’s general truculence were only cloaks for a more subtle hostility from another quarter. The reason for my imprisonment was soon revealed openly.