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4 ESCAPE I figured I had to do something now before the guard sounded an alarm, so I shot up quickly and told him not to move a muscle. It turned out to be a guard named John Harris. A terrified look came over his face, and he began hollering, so I knocked him off his feet with a flying tackle I had long practiced on the football field. I told Dillon to cover Harris’s mouth while I found something to tie him up with. He tried to cover Harris’s mouth with his hand, but Harris managed to bite down hard on his thumb. Now both Dillon and Harris were screaming. The only thing I could think was somehow to force Harris to let go of Dillon’s thumb. I hit him in the stomach with my fist, but he still wouldn’t release his bite. Both men continued hollering. I spotted a long wooden paddle, resembling an oar for a rowboat, used to place the bread into the ovens. I grabbed the paddle by the handle and thrust it forward in the direction of Harris’s jaw, hoping to jar his mouth open when it struck him. I missed his jaw, and the paddle glanced off his forehead. He let go of Dillon and fell over. While all of this was going on, another guard patrolling outside the building heard the commotion and looked up to the second floor.With the lights on behind us, we were clearly visible through the bakery window , and he spotted us struggling with Harris. He recognized me, and I heard him shout ‘‘Let him go, Ernie, leave him alone!’’ ‘‘Fuck you!’’ I shouted down. He tied the police dog he had with him to a steel handrail and ran as fast as he could to phone for help. He had no idea that we were trying to escape; he just assumed that there was some kind of trouble in the bakery. I felt I had no choice now but to get out. Meanwhile, Harris was pretending to have some kind of fit. I knew I hadn’t hit him hard enough to knock him unconscious, but he shook his body and began flopping around like a fish out of water. Dillon bent over Harris and pulled a long sliver out of his forehead where the paddle had struck him. Harris must havewanted us to think hewas nearlydone for so that wewouldn’t hit him again. At any rate, he didn’t realize how close he was to the edge of the oven bank, and after flopping around some more, he fell off the edge and landed with a thud about eight feet below. He immediately picked himself up and ran out of the bakery, through the kitchen, and into the main dining hall, which by now was completely locked up. We didn’t bother to chase him, since we had to move quickly now that the other guard was already calling for help. I yanked out the bars we had had cut, climbed through the window, and dropped onto a small roof that sheltered the doorway on the first floor from rain. From there I jumped to the ground, and Dillon followed right behind. The guard dog tied to the rail cocked its head and, instead of barking, looked at us with curiosity. We ran to the cyclone fence topped with barbed wire and clambered over it to get out of the prison grounds. Another guard, also with a dog, was patrolling the fence perimeter, but he couldn’t get the dog to look in our direction, so we were able to run to the wooded area of the island without the dog chasing us. It was very dark, and it had started to rain rather hard, which slowed our progress through the trees and heavy underbrush. We heard the bloodhounds off in the distance, and that prevented us from stopping to catch our breath. Finally we came to the edge of a cliff overlooking Puget Sound. The beach was about fifty feet directly below us. I started climbing down the cliff ahead of Dillon, but the rain was causing me to slip, and I was afraid that I might fall. I climbed back up, angling toward another direction and hoping to find a part of the cliff that sloped down at a more gradual angle. Dillon was following me, and I could hear him wheezing and gasping for breath...

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