All these cells are brick structures with their doors sunk into the
walls fully three feet from the face of the outer corridor wall. When
the heavily barred door is closed, an armlike bar runs out to the
corridor wall and then angles to the right and slips over a steel catch
which sets a spring that fastens the lock. The latter is only opened by
a key, and there are no less than five tumblers in the lock. One key
opens all the doors in the corridor.
With Houdini there, it was very natural that everybody should express
the ardent desire to have him then and there go into a cell and see if
he could release himself, and Houdini, with his accustomed courtesy,
yielded a ready acquiescence. He insisted, however, that he preferred
to try cell No. 2, for the reason that it is the hardest one there to
get out of alive, as he expressed it, and because of the notorious
murderers who have spent their last moments on earth within its
whitewashed walls.
This was agreed upon, and then he was stripped to the skin and locked
into No. 2 with Hamilton, the negro, who crouched in the far corner
of the cell, presumably laboring under the belief that one of the
arch-fiends was already there to get him for a red-hot furnace. In two
minutes Houdini was out of that cell, free, the lock holding him hardly
longer than it took him to get into the place and get his bearings.
Then, without the knowledge of the waiting officials who had retired
from view, Houdini quickly ran to the cells of Chase, Whitney, Mercer,
Ferguson, Donovan, Gaskins, Backus, and Howlett. To each occupant the
unclad cell-breaker seemed like an apparition from some other world,
and the astonishment he created when he commanded each to come out and
follow him can be better imagined than described.