Then he let me in on one of the cleverest beats I ever knew; if I could have succeeded in being put on that gallery I should not have finished my first term in State's prison. At that time work was slack and the men were locked in their cells most of the time. Leahy started in to dig out the bricks from the ceiling of his cell. Each day, when taking his turn for an hour in the yard, he would give the cement, which he had done up in small packages, to friends, who would dump it in their buckets, the contents of which they would then throw into the large cesspool. While exercising in the yard, the cons would throw the bricks Leahy had removed on an old brick pile under the archway. After he had removed sufficient stuff to make a hole big enough to crawl through, all he had left to do was to saw a few boards, and remove a few tiles, and then he was on the roof. It is the habit of the guard, when he goes the rounds, to rap the ceiling of every cell with his stick, to see if there is an excavation. Leahy had guarded against this by filling a small box with sand and placing it in the opening. Then he pasted a piece of linen over the box and whitewashed it. Even when the screw came around to glance in his cell Leahy would continue to work, for he had rigged up a dummy of himself in bed. When he reached the roof, he dropped to a lower building, reached the wall which surrounds the prison, and with a rope lowered himself to the ground. With a brand new suit of clothes which a friend had stolen from the shop, Leahy went forth into the open, and was never caught.