In the early hours of Sept. 11, 1923, Toronto Daily Star reporter Ernest Hemingway was dispatched to cover a sensational jailbreak by five inmates at the Kingston Penitentiary. Here is an edited version of the story:

KINGSTON, SEPT. 11.—With four of the five convicts who made a sensational escape from the penitentiary yesterday still at large this morning arrangements are being made to secure bloodhounds to assist in the search. Word was also received this morning from W. S. Hughson, inspector of penitentiaries, that a reward of $50 will be paid for the capture of each of the escaped convicts.

The four men still at large, and who are believed to be hiding in the bush and swamp between the Perth road and the Cataraqui river towards Kingston Mills, are:

Gordon Simpson, Toronto, serving ten years for robbery.

Arthur Brown, Toronto, serving ten years for highway robbery.

Patrick Ryan, alias Norman Slade, Hamilton, sentenced to 25 years and lashes for bank robbery.

Thomas Bryans, Montreal, serving ten years for manslaughter.

Edward McMullen, serving fourteen years for robbing a bank at Wyoming, Ontario, also escaped, but was recaptured three miles from the prison, weak with the loss of blood from a gunshot wound in the hand, received from a guard who fired on the party as they escaped.

Guards Out All Night

This morning the guards had been out all night. They were cold and hungry. Farmers were driving in to the town or working in the fields. There were no posses. Everyone in the countryside seemed content to leave the job of man-hunting to the professional man-hunters. The guards completely surrounded the entire woods and were especially thick along the east side to prevent the criminals from breaking across the main road and getting into the woods along the Rideau river. From there they might make their way north and be able to get food at the lumber camps. Everyone was cold and hungry, but there was news.

Last night about eleven o’clock on the narrow muddy road overgrown with underbrush that divides the seven hundred acres of bush into a north and south half, four guards and a scout on horseback were stationed. It was so dark the scout could not see his horse’s head. But he heard the fence wires on the south side of the road creek. He shouted to the guards who were further down the road and then there was silence. The four men had their rifles ready.

Then in the dark there was a rush across the road. The guards fired into the dark at the sound and rushed forward. In the dark a man’s voice said: “Are you hurt, shorty?” The guards shot again where the voice came from and one of them fired point blank as a man dashed by him toward the north side of the road. The men had crossed from the south tract of the woods to the northern half of the seven hundred acres. About fifteen rifle shots were fired in the dark. There is no blood and there are no bodies.

When the sun came up this morning the guards found a hammer and a heavy wrench that the men had dropped when they were fired on while crossing the road. These were taken from Thompson’s car and had been taken as weapons when they fled into the woods. A few yards further up the road was a prisoner’s cap, one of those gray-blue Sherlock Holmes shaped caps that all the prisoners wear.

Trace of Man Seen

About nine o’clock word was brought to the warden by one of the guards patroling the northern frontier of the woods that traces of one man had been found where he had climbed over a fence along the road that bounds the woods on the north. There was also an unconfirmed report that a farmer had seen one or two men crossing the road early this morning. If the men escape out of the north end of the woods it will be a long chase. There are several cheese factories a mile or so north of the present isolated territory, where it is believed the men will try and get food if they break through. They have had nothing since early yesterday morning.

It became known to-day that a long-term convict, who was stationed on duty in the stable which was set on fire by the five desperadoes to screen their bid for liberty, endeavored to foil the attempt of the five men to escape. When he tried to stop them in their desperate work, this convict was roughly handled, and when he persisted in his attempt to frustrate their plans, he was tied up with a rope inside the building, and had it not been for the quick work of another convict, who found him and released him, he would have been burned to death. It is understood that the action of this convict will be brought to the attention of the department of justice.

Plans Went Awry

When back in the penitentiary McMullen stated that the plans for their escape had not worked out as they expected. He said that they figured that after they got over the prison walls they would be able to secure a high powered car from in front of the home of Mrs. H. W. Richardson, who lives close by the prison, and that they would be able to make a quick get-away. McMullen said that he understood that Mrs. Richardson was a millionaire and that he was sure that the car would be close at hand for their use. When they could not get a high powered car they were glad to take a Chevrolet car that was near but in this they were unable to make the speed they desired.

The capture of McMullen was due to the fact that he was weak from loss of blood from a shot he had received in the left hand from a revolver in the hands of Guard Allan, who chased the fleeing convicts in an automobile. When the convicts ran their car into a gateway, near Kemp’s farm, about three miles from this city, and made for the woods close by, McMullen had to drop out of the flight and was found lying on the ground alongside a fence near the road about one hundred feet from the car. He was unarmed and as a result of his weakened condition he was not able to put up any fight. He declared to the guards who surrounded him that if he had not been shot they would never have taken him alive.

McMullen is now confined to the hospital at the penitentiary but it is stated that his condition is not regarded as at all serious. The shot from the revolver went through his index finger.

It was at ten o’clock yesterday morning that a great cloud of thick, yellow-white smoke began to pour from the barn just inside the east wall of the penitentiary. It was the thick dense smoke of a burning straw stack and as it rose it cut off the view of the guard standing with his rifle in the watchtower overlooking the burning barn.

Five men, in the grey prison clothes, ran out of the barn toward the twenty-foot, steep wall. One of them carried a long two-by-four in which spikes had been driven at intervals. The fat man carrying the long scantling leaned it against the wall and a slim kid, his prison cap pulled down over his eyes, swarmed up it to the top of the wall. He carried a length of rope, which he fastened to the end of the scantling. He made the rope fast and then slid down the other side of the wall.

A big husky with a heavy undershot jaw followed him over. On his heels came a little runt who scrambled up the scantling like a monkey. He was followed by a thick set, ham-faced man who scrambled awkwardly over the wall.

Standing at the foot of the scantling, while they all went up was a thick, freckle-faced man whose prison cap could not hide his flaming head. It was “Red” Ryan. The others who had climbed over were Young Brown, Big Simpson, Runty Bryans and Wyoming McMullen.

As “Red” Ryan started up the ladder, Matt Walsh, chief keeper of Portsmouth penitentiary, came running around the corner to see the burning barn. Walsh saw “Red” on the ladder and ran toward the scantling to try and jerk it down, shouting the alarm as he ran. “Red” saw him coming, realized that he was trapped, and came down the ladder. He had left a pitchfork leaning against the jail wall for just this emergency.

As Walsh reached the ladder “Red” reached for the pitchfork. Walsh tackled him and “Red” swung with all his might on Walsh’s head with the pitchfork. Walsh went down and “Red” dropped the fork and went up the scantling and over the wall.

The men were strung out across the field outside the prison wall running for Mrs. Richardson’s house where a car was standing. The guard in the tower was still cut off by the thick smoke. Allan Forsythe, the only other guard in sight, thought that he could stop them without shooting. He had dropped over the wall and was just behind the running men. He had never shot anyone and something held him back from beginning. He shouted at the men but they kept on going.

The Guard Shoots

As they climbed into the little Chevrolet car belonging to “Shorty” Thompson, who was doing a painting job at Richardson’s. Allan Forsythe commenced shooting. He couldn’t tell what his shots did, but he was sure he had hit someone. The Chevrolet kept on going. Forsythe stopped a car that was passing and stepped out after the car careering wildly ahead up the road.

McMullen was at the wheel of the Chevrolet — that is, he was hunched over what was left of the wheel. One of Forsythe’s shots had cut the wheel clean in two and smashed McMullen’s left hand. He drove on with his right hand, hunched low, his face paling from the amount of blood he was losing. The other two big men were in the back of the car with “Young” Brown, the wild kid. On the front seat with McMullen sat “Runty” Bryans. One of Forsythe’s bullets ripped through the back of the car and out the front above “Runty’s” head. It would have hit a full sized man in the skull.

A Wild Chase

Back of the little car was strung out a wild chase. All sorts of cars had been commandeered in Kingston. As the little motor car went along the road from the penitentiary, through the streets of Kingston and north on the Inverary road, the cars behind kept gaining. Directly behind was the Ford commandeered by Forsythe, who kept on firing. The prisoners’ car was going along a narrow strip of asphalt road with houses and cottages on either side. It looked as though any minute they might be overtaken. There was no cover on either side.

Then the road widened out into country stone road. The houses fell away. They crossed the two railway tracks of the Canadian Pacific and Canadian National, dipped down a long hill, past a quarry on the left, and were in farming and bush country. On the right they were passing a long stretch of thick, hardwood timber, the trees just going yellow and red in the fall. On the top of the hill they could see it stretched out for miles ahead. The men looking out behind could see that they had a lead of about two hundred and fifty yards on the nearest of the pursuing cars.

McMullen turned the car sharply to the left and ran it down the bank into a sunken field. The convicts ripped off the seats, grabbed the tool bags, the tire pump and jack, climbed the banks and cut across the Inverary road into the woods.

There are seven hundred acres in the patch of woods the convicts are hiding in. It is bounded by roads on all sides and is surrounded by prison guards armed with rifles. Across the middle of the patch of woods runs a narrow, muddy road, overhung with trees.

McMullen Captured

Last night at about six-thirty, Warden Ponsford, who is in charge of the pursuit, found McMullen about forty yards from where the men entered the McAdoo’s Woods. The warden, a kindly-looking grey-mustached man in a grey suit, felt hat and worried look in his eyes, was going over the route the men had taken into the woods when he saw a blue shirt lying under a low growing cedar. He thought it meant that one of the men was discarding his prison clothes and bent down to look. It was McMullen, white from loss of blood, lying under the little cedar, his shirt pulled over his head and his legs and shoes covered with grass.

Warden Ponsford pulled McMullen to his feet and called a patrol. Surrounded by twelve guards with rifles, McMullen was white and shaky. “I’m through, “ he aid, “leave me alone.” His hand was still bleeding.

One of the guards said: “Well, are you going to try and run, McMullen?” McMullen looked at the twelve rifle barrels: “What do you think I wanta do? Commit suicide?” They took him in a motor car back to the penitentiary over the same road he had driven in the morning. He was very quiet.

Stewart Patterson, one of Warden Ponsford’s lieutenants in the man hunt, said the search parties must have passed McMullen twenty times as he lay there. The cover in the wood is so dense a man cannot make his way through it in places.

Matt Walsh, the head keeper, who was beaten up with a pitchfork by “Red” Ryan, is not seriously injured, although badly marked. He is commanding a detachment in the hunt. “I am leaving now to return to the woods where the men are believed to be cornered and where the closing in on them is due to start,” he said to-day.

This story is part of The Hemingway Papers, an exclusive collection of more than 70 articles written by Ernest Hemingway for the Toronto Star in the 1920s. The 80-page newsprint collection is available May 1 at Chapters Indigo or now at www.StarStore.ca.