The Jacket (Star-Rover) / London, Jack, 1876-1916

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Title: The Jacket (The Star-Rover)


Author: Jack London

Release Date: April 25, 2005  [eBook #1162]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)


***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE JACKET (THE STAR-ROVER)***






Transcribed from the 1915 Mills & Boon edition by David Price, email
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk





THE JACKET (THE STAR-ROVER)


CHAPTER I


All my life I have had an awareness of other times and places.  I have
been aware of other persons in me.--Oh, and trust me, so have you, my
reader that is to be.  Read back into your childhood, and this sense of
awareness I speak of will be remembered as an experience of your
childhood.  You were then not fixed, not crystallized.  You were plastic,
a soul in flux, a consciousness and an identity in the process of
forming--ay, of forming and forgetting.

You have forgotten much, my reader, and yet, as you read these lines, you
remember dimly the hazy vistas of other times and places into which your
child eyes peered.  They seem dreams to you to-day.  Yet, if they were
dreams, dreamed then, whence the substance of them?  Our dreams are
grotesquely compounded of the things we know.  The stuff of our sheerest
dreams is the stuff of our experience.  As a child, a wee child, you
dreamed you fell great heights; you dreamed you flew through the air as
things of the air fly; you were vexed by crawling spiders and many-legged
creatures of the slime; you heard other voices, saw other faces
nightmarishly familiar, and gazed upon sunrises and sunsets other than
you know now, looking back, you ever looked upon.

Very well.  These child glimpses are of other-worldness, of
other-lifeness, of things that you had never seen in this particular
world of your particular life.  Then whence?  Other lives?  Other worlds?
Perhaps, when you have read all that I shall write, you will have
received answers to the perplexities I have propounded to you, and that
you yourself, ere you came to read me, propounded to yourself.

* * * * *

Wordsworth knew.  He was neither seer nor prophet, but just ordinary man
like you or any man.  What he knew, you know, any man knows.  But he most
aptly stated it in his passage that begins "Not in utter nakedness, not
in entire forgetfulness. . ."

Ah, truly, shades of the prison-house close about us, the new-born
things, and all too soon do we forget.  And yet, when we were new-born we
did remember other times and places.  We, helpless infants in arms or
creeping quadruped-like on the floor, dreamed our dreams of air-flight.
Yes; and we endured the torment and torture of nightmare fears of dim and
monstrous things.  We new-born infants, without experience, were born
with fear, with memory of fear; and _memory is experience_.

As for myself, at the beginnings of my vocabulary, at so tender a period
that I still made hunger noises and sleep noises, yet even then did I
know that I had been a star-rover.  Yes, I, whose lips had never lisped
the word "king," remembered that I had once been the son of a king.
More--I remembered that once I had been a slave and a son of a slave, and
worn an iron collar round my neck.

Still more.  When I was three, and four, and five years of age, I was not
yet I.  I was a mere becoming, a flux of spirit not yet cooled solid in
the mould of my particular flesh and time and place.  In that period all
that I had ever been in ten thousand lives before strove in me, and
troubled the flux of me, in the effort to incorporate itself in me and
become me.

Silly, isn't it?  But remember, my reader, whom I hope to have travel far
with me through time and space--remember, please, my reader, that I have
thought much on these matters, that through bloody nights and sweats of
dark that lasted years-long, I have been alone with my many selves to
consult and contemplate my many selves.  I have gone through the hells of
all existences to bring you news which you will share with me in a casual
comfortable hour over my printed page.

So, to return, I say, during the ages of three and four and five, I was
not yet I.  I was merely becoming as I took form in the mould of my body,
and all the mighty, indestructible past wrought in the mixture of me to
determine what the form of that becoming would be.  It was not my voice
that cried out in the night in fear of things known, which I, forsooth,
did not and could not know.  The same with my childish angers, my loves,
and my laughters.  Other voices screamed through my voice, the voices of
men and women aforetime, of all shadowy hosts of progenitors.  And the
snarl of my anger was blended with the snarls of beasts more ancient than
the mountains, and the vocal madness of my child hysteria, with all the
red of its wrath, was chorded with the insensate, stupid cries of beasts
pre-Adamic and progeologic in time.

And there the secret is out.  The red wrath!  It has undone me in this,
my present life.  Because of it, a few short weeks hence, I shall be led
from this cell to a high place with unstable flooring, graced above by a
well-stretched rope; and there they will hang me by the neck until I am
dead.  The red wrath always has undone me in all my lives; for the red
wrath is my disastrous catastrophic heritage from the time of the slimy
things ere the world was prime.

* * * * *

It is time that I introduce myself.  I am neither fool nor lunatic.  I
want you to know that, in order that you will believe the things I shall
tell you.  I am Darrell Standing.  Some few of you who read this will
know me immediately.  But to the majority, who are bound to be strangers,
let me exposit myself.  Eight years ago I was Professor of Agronomics in
the College of Agriculture of the University of California.  Eight years
ago the sleepy little university town of Berkeley was shocked by the
murder of Professor Haskell in one of the laboratories of the Mining
Building.  Darrell Standing was the murderer.

I am Darrell Standing.  I was caught red-handed.  Now the right and the
wrong of this affair with Professor Haskell I shall not discuss.  It was
purely a private matter.  The point is, that in a surge of anger,
obsessed by that catastrophic red wrath that has cursed me down the ages,
I killed my fellow professor.  The court records show that I did; and,
for once, I agree with the court records.

No; I am not to be hanged for his murder.  I received a life-sentence for
my punishment.  I was thirty-six years of age at the time.  I am now
forty-four years old.  I have spent the eight intervening years in the
California State Prison of San Quentin.  Five of these years I spent in
the dark.  Solitary confinement, they call it.  Men who endure it, call
it living death.  But through these five years of death-in-life I managed
to attain freedom such as few men have ever known.  Closest-confined of
prisoners, not only did I range the world, but I ranged time.  They who
immured me for petty years gave to me, all unwittingly, the largess of
centuries.  Truly, thanks to Ed Morrell, I have had five years of star-
roving.  But Ed Morrell is another story.  I shall tell you about him a
little later.  I have so much to tell I scarce know how to begin.

Well, a beginning.  I was born on a quarter-section in Minnesota.  My
mother was the daughter of an immigrant Swede.  Her name was Hilda
Tonnesson.  My father was Chauncey Standing, of old American stock.  He
traced back to Alfred Standing, an indentured servant, or slave if you
please, who was transported from England to the Virginia plantations in
the days that were even old when the youthful Washington went a-surveying
in the Pennsylvania wilderness.

A son of Alfred Standing fought in the War of the Revolution; a grandson,
in the War of 1812.  There have been no wars since in which the Standings
have not been represented.  I, the last of the Standings, dying soon
without issue, fought as a common soldier in the Philippines, in our
latest war, and to do so I resigned, in the full early ripeness of
career, my professorship in the University of Nebraska.  Good heavens,
when I so resigned I was headed for the Deanship of the College of
Agriculture in that university--I, the star-rover, the red-blooded
adventurer, the vagabondish Cain of the centuries, the militant priest of
remotest times, the moon-dreaming poet of ages forgotten and to-day
unrecorded in man's history of man!

And here I am, my hands dyed red in Murderers' Row, in the State Prison
of Folsom, awaiting the day decreed by the machinery of state when the
servants of the state will lead me away into what they fondly believe is
the dark--the dark they fear; the dark that gives them fearsome and
superstitious fancies; the dark that drives them, drivelling and
yammering, to the altars of their fear-created, anthropomorphic gods.

No; I shall never be Dean of any college of agriculture.  And yet I knew
agriculture.  It was my profession.  I was born to it, reared to it,
trained to it; and I was a master of it.  It was my genius.  I can pick
the high-percentage butter-fat cow with my eye and let the Babcock Tester
prove the wisdom of my eye.  I can look, not at land, but at landscape,
and pronounce the virtues and the shortcomings of the soil.  Litmus paper
is not necessary when I determine a soil to be acid or alkali.  I repeat,
farm-husbandry, in its highest scientific terms, was my genius, and is my
genius.  And yet the state, which includes all the citizens of the state,
believes that it can blot out this wisdom of mine in the final dark by
means of a rope about my neck and the abruptive jerk of gravitation--this
wisdom of mine that was incubated through the millenniums, and that was
well-hatched ere the farmed fields of Troy were ever pastured by the
flocks of nomad shepherds!

Corn?  Who else knows corn?  There is my demonstration at Wistar, whereby
I increased the annual corn-yield of every county in Iowa by half a
million dollars.  This is history.  Many a farmer, riding in his motor-
car to-day, knows who made possible that motor-car.  Many a sweet-bosomed
girl and bright-browed boy, poring over high-school text-books, little
dreams that I made that higher education possible by my corn
demonstration at Wistar.

And farm management!  I know the waste of superfluous motion without
studying a moving picture record of it, whether it be farm or farm-hand,
the layout of buildings or the layout of the farm-hands' labour.  There
is my handbook and tables on the subject.  Beyond the shadow of any
doubt, at this present moment, a hundred thousand farmers are knotting
their brows over its spread pages ere they tap out their final pipe and
go to bed.  And yet, so far was I beyond my tables, that all I needed was
a mere look at a man to know his predispositions, his co-ordinations, and
the index fraction of his motion-wastage.

And here I must close this first chapter of my narrative.  It is nine
o'clock, and in Murderers' Row that means lights out.  Even now, I hear
the soft tread of the gum-shoed guard as he comes to censure me for my
coal-oil lamp still burning.  As if the mere living could censure the
doomed to die!




CHAPTER II


I am Darrell Standing.  They are going to take me out and hang me pretty
soon.  In the meantime I say my say, and write in these pages of the
other times and places.

After my sentence, I came to spend the rest of my "natural life" in the
prison of San Quentin.  I proved incorrigible.  An incorrigible is a
terrible human being--at least such is the connotation of "incorrigible"
in prison psychology.  I became an incorrigible because I abhorred waste
motion.  The prison, like all prisons, was a scandal and an affront of
waste motion.  They put me in the jute-mill.  The criminality of
wastefulness irritated me.  Why should it not?  Elimination of waste
motion was my speciality.  Before the invention of steam or steam-driven
looms three thousand years before, I had rotted in prison in old Babylon;
and, trust me, I speak the truth when I say that in that ancient day we
prisoners wove more efficiently on hand-looms than did the prisoners in
the steam-powered loom-rooms of San Quentin.

The crime of waste was abhorrent.  I rebelled.  I tried to show the
guards a score or so of more efficient ways.  I was reported.  I was
given the dungeon and the starvation of light and food.  I emerged and
tried to work in the chaos of inefficiency of the loom-rooms.  I
rebelled.  I was given the dungeon, plus the strait-jacket.  I was spread-
eagled, and thumbed-up, and privily beaten by the stupid guards whose
totality of intelligence was only just sufficient to show them that I was
different from them and not so stupid.

Two years of this witless persecution I endured.  It is terrible for a
man to be tied down and gnawed by rats.  The stupid brutes of guards were
rats, and they gnawed the intelligence of me, gnawed all the fine nerves
of the quick of me and of the consciousness of me.  And I, who in my past
have been a most valiant fighter, in this present life was no fighter at
all.  I was a farmer, an agriculturist, a desk-tied professor, a
laboratory slave, interested only in the soil and the increase of the
productiveness of the soil.

I fought in the Philippines because it was the tradition of the Standings
to fight.  I had no aptitude for fighting.  It was all too ridiculous,
the introducing of disruptive foreign substances into the bodies of
little black men-folk.  It was laughable to behold Science prostituting
all the might of its achievement and the wit of its inventors to the
violent introducing of foreign substances into the bodies of black folk.

As I say, in obedience to the tradition of the Standings I went to war
and found that I had no aptitude for war.  So did my officers find me
out, because they made me a quartermaster's clerk, and as a clerk, at a
desk, I fought through the Spanish-American War.

So it was not because I was a fighter, but because I was a thinker, that
I was enraged by the motion-wastage of the loom-rooms and was persecuted
by the guards into becoming an "incorrigible."  One's brain worked and I
was punished for its working.  As I told Warden Atherton, when my
incorrigibility had become so notorious that he had me in on the carpet
in his private office to plead with me; as I told him then:

"It is so absurd, my dear Warden, to think that your rat-throttlers of
guards can shake out of my brain the things that are clear and definite
in my brain.  The whole organization of this prison is stupid.  You are a
politician.  You can weave the political pull of San Francisco saloon-men
and ward heelers into a position of graft such as this one you occupy;
but you can't weave jute.  Your loom-rooms are fifty years behind the
times. . . ."

But why continue the tirade?--for tirade it was.  I showed him what a
fool he was, and as a result he decided that I was a hopeless
incorrigible.

Give a dog a bad name--you know the saw.  Very well.  Warden Atherton
gave the final sanction to the badness of my name.  I was fair game.  More
than one convict's dereliction was shunted off on me, and was paid for by
me in the dungeon on bread and water, or in being triced up by the thumbs
on my tip-toes for long hours, each hour of which was longer than any
life I have ever lived.

Intelligent men are cruel.  Stupid men are monstrously cruel.  The guards
and the men over me, from the Warden down, were stupid monsters.  Listen,
and you shall learn what they did to me.  There was a poet in the prison,
a convict, a weak-chinned, broad-browed, degenerate poet.  He was a
forger.  He was a coward.  He was a snitcher.  He was a stool--strange
words for a professor of agronomics to use in writing, but a professor of
agronomics may well learn strange words when pent in prison for the term
of his natural life.

This poet-forger's name was Cecil Winwood.  He had had prior convictions,
and yet, because he was a snivelling cur of a yellow dog, his last
sentence had been only for seven years.  Good credits would materially
reduce this time.  My time was life.  Yet this miserable degenerate, in
order to gain several short years of liberty for himself, succeeded in
adding a fair portion of eternity to my own lifetime term.

I shall tell what happened the other way around, for it was only after a
weary period that I learned.  This Cecil Winwood, in order to curry
favour with the Captain of the Yard, and thence the Warden, the Prison
Directors, the Board of Pardons, and the Governor of California, framed
up a prison-break.  Now note three things: (a) Cecil Winwood was so
detested by his fellow-convicts that they would not have permitted him to
bet an ounce of Bull Durham on a bed-bug race--and bed-bug racing was a
great sport with the convicts; (b) I was the dog that had been given a
bad name: (c) for his frame-up, Cecil Winwood needed the dogs with bad
names, the lifetimers, the desperate ones, the incorrigibles.

But the lifers detested Cecil Winwood, and, when he approached them with
his plan of a wholesale prison-break, they laughed at him and turned away
with curses for the stool that he was.  But he fooled them in the end,
forty of the bitterest-wise ones in the pen.  He approached them again
and again.  He told of his power in the prison by virtue of his being
trusty in the Warden's office, and because of the fact that he had the
run of the dispensary.

"Show me," said Long Bill Hodge, a mountaineer doing life for train
robbery, and whose whole soul for years had been bent on escaping in
order to kill the companion in robbery who had turned state's evidence on
him.

Cecil Winwood accepted the test.  He claimed that he could dope the
guards the night of the break.

"Talk is cheap," said Long Bill Hodge.  "What we want is the goods.  Dope
one of the guards to-night.  There's Barnum.  He's no good.  He beat up
that crazy Chink yesterday in Bughouse Alley--when he was off duty, too.
He's on the night watch.  Dope him to-night an' make him lose his job.
Show me, and we'll talk business with you."

All this Long Bill told me in the dungeons afterward.  Cecil Winwood
demurred against the immediacy of the demonstration.  He claimed that he
must have time in which to steal the dope from the dispensary.  They gave
him the time, and a week later he announced that he was ready.  Forty
hard-bitten lifers waited for the guard Barnum to go to sleep on his
shift.  And Barnum did.  He was found asleep, and he was discharged for
sleeping on duty.

Of course, that convinced the lifers.  But there was the Captain of the
Yard to convince.  To him, daily, Cecil Winwood was reporting the
progress of the break--all fancied and fabricated in his own imagination.
The Captain of the Yard demanded to be shown.  Winwood showed him, and
the full details of the showing I did not learn until a year afterward,
so slowly do the secrets of prison intrigue leak out.

Winwood said that the forty men in the break, in whose confidence he was,
had already such power in the Prison that they were about to begin
smuggling in automatic pistols by means of the guards they had bought up.

"Show me," the Captain of the Yard must have demanded.

And the forger-poet showed him.  In the Bakery, night work was a regular
thing.  One of the convicts, a baker, was on the first night-shift.  He
was a stool of the Captain of the Yard, and Winwood knew it.

"To-night," he told the Captain, "Summerface will bring in a dozen '44
automatics.  On his next time off he'll bring in the ammunition.  But to-
night he'll turn the automatics over to me in the bakery.  You've got a
good stool there.  He'll make you his report to-morrow."

Now Summerface was a strapping figure of a bucolic guard who hailed from
Humboldt County.  He was a simple-minded, good-natured dolt and not above
earning an honest dollar by smuggling in tobacco for the convicts.  On
that night, returning from a trip to San Francisco, he brought in with
him fifteen pounds of prime cigarette tobacco.  He had done this before,
and delivered the stuff to Cecil Winwood.  So, on that particular night,
he, all unwitting, turned the stuff over to Winwood in the bakery.  It
was a big, solid, paper-wrapped bundle of innocent tobacco.  The stool
baker, from concealment, saw the package delivered to Winwood and so
reported to the Captain of the Yard next morning.

But in the meantime the poet-forger's too-lively imagination ran away
with him.  He was guilty of a slip that gave me five years of solitary
confinement and that placed me in this condemned cell in which I now
write.  And all the time I knew nothing about it.  I did not even know of
the break he had inveigled the forty lifers into planning.  I knew
nothing, absolutely nothing.  And the rest knew little.  The lifers did
not know he was giving them the cross.  The Captain of the Yard did not
know that the cross know was being worked on him.  Summerface was the
most innocent of all.  At the worst, his conscience could have accused
him only of smuggling in some harmless tobacco.

And now to the stupid, silly, melodramatic slip of Cecil Winwood.  Next
morning, when he encountered the Captain of the Yard, he was triumphant.
His imagination took the bit in its teeth.

"Well, the stuff came in all right as you said," the captain of the Yard
remarked.

"And enough of it to blow half the prison sky-high," Winwood
corroborated.

"Enough of what?" the Captain demanded.

"Dynamite and detonators," the fool rattled on.  "Thirty-five pounds of
it.  Your stool saw Summerface pass it over to me."

And right there the Captain of the Yard must have nearly died.  I can
actually sympathize with him--thirty-five pounds of dynamite loose in the
prison.

They say that Captain Jamie--that was his nickname--sat down and held his
head in his hands.

"Where is it now?" he cried.  "I want it.  Take me to it at once."

And right there Cecil Winwood saw his mistake.

"I planted it," he lied--for he was compelled to lie because, being
merely tobacco in small packages, it was long since distributed among the
convicts along the customary channels.

"Very well," said Captain Jamie, getting himself in hand.  "Lead me to it
at once."

But there was no plant of high explosives to lead him to.  The thing did
not exist, had never existed save in the imagination of the wretched
Winwood.

In a large prison like San Quentin there are always hiding-places for
things.  And as Cecil Winwood led Captain Jamie he must have done some
rapid thinking.

As Captain Jamie testified before the Board of Directors, and as Winwood
also so testified, on the way to the hiding-place Winwood said that he
and I had planted the powder together.

And I, just released from five days in the dungeons and eighty hours in
the jacket; I, whom even the stupid guards could see was too weak to work
in the loom-room; I, who had been given the day off to recuperate--from
too terrible punishment--I was named as the one who had helped hide the
non-existent thirty-five pounds of high explosive!

Winwood led Captain Jamie to the alleged hiding-place.  Of course they
found no dynamite in it.

"My God!" Winwood lied.  "Standing has given me the cross.  He's lifted
the plant and stowed it somewhere else."

The Captain of the Yard said more emphatic things than "My God!"  Also,
on the spur of the moment but cold-bloodedly, he took Winwood into his
own private office, looked the doors, and beat him up frightfully--all of
which came out before the Board of Directors.  But that was afterward.  In
the meantime, even while he took his beating, Winwood swore by the truth
of what he had told.

What was Captain Jamie to do?  He was convinced that thirty-five pounds
of dynamite were loose in the prison and that forty desperate lifers were
ready for a break.  Oh, he had Summerface in on the carpet, and, although
Summerface insisted the package contained tobacco, Winwood swore it was
dynamite and was believed.

At this stage I enter or, rather, I depart, for they took me away out of
the sunshine and the light of day to the dungeons, and in the dungeons
and in the solitary cells, out of the sunshine and the light of day, I
rotted for five years.

I was puzzled.  I had only just been released from the dungeons, and was
lying pain-racked in my customary cell, when they took me back to the
dungeon.

"Now," said Winwood to Captain Jamie, "though we don't know where it is,
the dynamite is safe.  Standing is the only man who does know, and he
can't pass the word out from the dungeon.  The men are ready to make the
break.  We can catch them red-handed.  It is up to me to set the time.
I'll tell them two o'clock to-night and tell them that, with the guards
doped, I'll unlock their cells and give them their automatics.  If, at
two o'clock to-night, you don't catch the forty I shall name with their
clothes on and wide awake, then, Captain, you can give me solitary for
the rest of my sentence.  And with Standing and the forty tight in the
dungeons, we'll have all the time in the world to locate the dynamite."

"If we have to tear the prison down stone by stone," Captain Jamie added
valiantly.

That was six years ago.  In all the intervening time they have never
found that non-existent explosive, and they have turned the prison upside-
down a thousand times in searching for it.  Nevertheless, to his last day
in office Warden Atherton believed in the existence of that dynamite.
Captain Jamie, who is still Captain of the Yard, believes to this day
that the dynamite is somewhere in the prison.  Only yesterday, he came
all the way up from San Quentin to Folsom to make one more effort to get
me to reveal the hiding-place.  I know he will never breathe easy until
they swing me off.




CHAPTER III


All that day I lay in the dungeon cudgelling my brains for the reason of
this new and inexplicable punishment.  All I could conclude was that some
stool had lied an infraction of the rules on me in order to curry favour
with the guards.

Meanwhile Captain Jamie fretted his head off and prepared for the night,
while Winwood passed the word along to the forty lifers to be ready for
the break.  And two hours after midnight every guard in the prison was
under orders.  This included the day-shift which should have been asleep.
When two o'clock came, they rushed the cells occupied by the forty.  The
rush was simultaneous.  The cells were opened at the same moment, and
without exception the men named by Winwood were found out of their bunks,
fully dressed, and crouching just inside their doors.  Of course, this
was verification absolute of all the fabric of lies that the poet-forger
had spun for Captain Jamie.  The forty lifers were caught in red-handed
readiness for the break.  What if they did unite, afterward, in averring
that the break had been planned by Winwood?  The Prison Board of
Directors believed, to a man, that the forty lied in an effort to save
themselves.  The Board of Pardons likewise believed, for, ere three
months were up, Cecil Winwood, forger and poet, most despicable of men,
was pardoned out.

Oh, well, the stir, or the pen, as they call it in convict argot, is a
training school for philosophy.  No inmate can survive years of it
without having had burst for him his fondest illusions and fairest
metaphysical bubbles.  Truth lives, we are taught; murder will out.  Well,
this is a demonstration that murder does not always come out.  The
Captain of the Yard, the late Warden Atherton, the Prison Board of
Directors to a man--all believe, right now, in the existence of that
dynamite that never existed save in the slippery-geared and all
too-accelerated brain of the degenerate forger and poet, Cecil Winwood.
And Cecil Winwood still lives, while I, of all men concerned, the
utterest, absolutist, innocentest, go to the scaffold in a few short
weeks.

* * * * *

And now I must tell how entered the forty lifers upon my dungeon
stillness.  I was asleep when the outer door to the corridor of dungeons
clanged open and aroused me.  "Some poor devil," was my thought; and my
next thought was that he was surely getting his, as I listened to the
scuffling of feet, the dull impact of blows on flesh, the sudden cries of
pain, the filth of curses, and the sounds of dragging bodies.  For, you
see, every man was man-handled all the length of the way.

Dungeon-door after dungeon-door clanged open, and body after body was
thrust in, flung in, or dragged in.  And continually more groups of
guards arrived with more beaten convicts who still were being beaten, and
more dungeon-doors were opened to receive the bleeding frames of men who
were guilty of yearning after freedom.

Yes, as I look back upon it, a man must be greatly a philosopher to
survive the continual impact of such brutish experiences through the
years and years.  I am such a philosopher.  I have endured eight years of
their torment, and now, in the end, failing to get rid of me in all other
ways, they have invoked the machinery of state to put a rope around my
neck and shut off my breath by the weight of my body.  Oh, I know how the
experts give expert judgment that the fall through the trap breaks the
victim's neck.  And the victims, like Shakespeare's traveller, never
return to testify to the contrary.  But we who have lived in the stir
know of the cases that are hushed in the prison crypts, where the
victim's necks are not broken.

It is a funny thing, this hanging of a man.  I have never seen a hanging,
but I have been told by eye-witnesses the details of a dozen hangings so
that I know what will happen to me.  Standing on the trap, leg-manacled
and arm-manacled, the knot against the neck, the black cap drawn, they
will drop me down until the momentum of my descending weight is fetched
up abruptly short by the tautening of the rope.  Then the doctors will
group around me, and one will relieve another in successive turns in
standing on a stool, his arms passed around me to keep me from swinging
like a pendulum, his ear pressed close to my chest, while he counts my
fading heart-beats.  Sometimes twenty minutes elapse after the trap is
sprung ere the heart stops beating.  Oh, trust me, they make most
scientifically sure that a man is dead once they get him on a rope.

I still wander aside from my narrative to ask a question or two of
society.  I have a right so to wander and so to question, for in a little
while they are going to take me out and do this thing to me.  If the neck
of the victim be broken by the alleged shrewd arrangement of knot and
noose, and by the alleged shrewd calculation of the weight of the victim
and the length of slack, then why do they manacle the arms of the victim?
Society, as a whole, is unable to answer this question.  But I know why;
so does any amateur who ever engaged in a lynching bee and saw the victim
throw up his hands, clutch the rope, and ease the throttle of the noose
about his neck so that he might breathe.

Another question I will ask of the smug, cotton-wooled member of society,
whose soul has never strayed to the red hells.  Why do they put the black
cap over the head and the face of the victim ere they drop him through
the trap?  Please remember that in a short while they will put that black
cap over my head.  So I have a right to ask.  Do they, your hang-dogs, O
smug citizen, do these your hang-dogs fear to gaze upon the facial horror
of the horror they perpetrate for you and ours and at your behest?

Please remember that I am not asking this question in the
twelve-hundredth year after Christ, nor in the time of Christ, nor in the
twelve-hundredth year before Christ.  I, who am to be hanged this year,
the nineteen-hundred-and-thirteenth after Christ, ask these questions of
you who are assumably Christ's followers, of you whose hang-dogs are
going to take me out and hide my face under a black cloth because they
dare not look upon the horror they do to me while I yet live.

And now back to the situation in the dungeons.  When the last guard
departed and the outer door clanged shut, all the forty beaten,
disappointed men began to talk and ask questions.  But, almost
immediately, roaring like a bull in order to be heard, Skysail Jack, a
giant sailor of a lifer, ordered silence while a census could be taken.
The dungeons were full, and dungeon by dungeon, in order of dungeons,
shouted out its quota to the roll-call.  Thus, every dungeon was
accounted for as occupied by trusted convicts, so that there was no
opportunity for a stool to be hidden away and listening.

Of me, only, were the convicts dubious, for I was the one man who had not
been in the plot.  They put me through a searching examination.  I could
but tell them how I had just emerged from dungeon and jacket in the
morning, and without rhyme or reason, so far as I could discover, had
been put back in the dungeon after being out only several hours.  My
record as an incorrigible was in my favour, and soon they began to talk.

As I lay there and listened, for the first time I learned of the break
that had been a-hatching.  "Who had squealed?" was their one quest, and
throughout the night the quest was pursued.  The quest for Cecil Winwood
was vain, and the suspicion against him was general.

"There's only one thing, lads," Skysail Jack finally said.  "It'll soon
be morning, and then they'll take us out and give us bloody hell.  We
were caught dead to rights with our clothes on.  Winwood crossed us and
squealed.  They're going to get us out one by one and mess us up.  There's
forty of us.  Any lyin's bound to be found out.  So each lad, when they
sweat him, just tells the truth, the whole truth, so help him God."

And there, in that dark hole of man's inhumanity, from dungeon cell to
dungeon cell, their mouths against the gratings, the two-score lifers
solemnly pledged themselves before God to tell the truth.

Little good did their truth-telling do them.  At nine o'clock the guards,
paid bravoes of the smug citizens who constitute the state, full of meat
and sleep, were upon us.  Not only had we had no breakfast, but we had
had no water.  And beaten men are prone to feverishness.  I wonder, my
reader, if you can glimpse or guess the faintest connotation of a man
beaten--"beat up," we prisoners call it.  But no, I shall not tell you.
Let it suffice to know that these beaten, feverish men lay seven hours
without water.

At nine the guards arrived.  There were not many of them.  There was no
need for many, because they unlocked only one dungeon at a time.  They
were equipped with pick-handles--a handy tool for the "disciplining" of a
helpless man.  One dungeon at a time, and dungeon by dungeon, they messed
and pulped the lifers.  They were impartial.  I received the same pulping
as the rest.  And this was merely the beginning, the preliminary to the
examination each man was to undergo alone in the presence of the paid
brutes of the state.  It was the forecast to each man of what each man
might expect in inquisition hall.

I have been through most of the red hells of prison life, but, worst of
all, far worse than what they intend to do with me in a short while, was
the particular hell of the dungeons in the days that followed.

Long Bill Hodge, the hard-bitten mountaineer, was the first man
interrogated.  He came back two hours later--or, rather, they conveyed
him back, and threw him on the stone of his dungeon floor.  They then
took away Luigi Polazzo, a San Francisco hoodlum, the first native
generation of Italian parentage, who jeered and sneered at them and
challenged them to wreak their worst upon him.

It was some time before Long Bill Hodge mastered his pain sufficiently to
be coherent.

"What about this dynamite?" he demanded.  "Who knows anything about
dynamite?"

And of course nobody knew, although it had been the burden of the
interrogation put to him.

Luigi Polazzo came back in a little less than two hours, and he came back
a wreck that babbled in delirium and could give no answer to the
questions showered upon him along the echoing corridor of dungeons by the
men who were yet to get what he had got, and who desired greatly to know
what things had been done to him and what interrogations had been put to
him.

Twice again in the next forty-eight hours Luigi was taken out and
interrogated.  After that, a gibbering imbecile, he went to live in
Bughouse Alley.  He has a strong constitution.  His shoulders are broad,
his nostrils wide, his chest is deep, his blood is pure; he will continue
to gibber in Bughouse Alley long after I have swung off and escaped the
torment of the penitentiaries of California.

Man after man was taken away, one at a time, and the wrecks of men were
brought back, one by one, to rave and howl in the darkness.  And as I lay
there and listened to the moaning and the groaning, and all the idle
chattering of pain-addled wits, somehow, vaguely reminiscent, it seemed
to me that somewhere, some time, I had sat in a high place, callous and
proud, and listened to a similar chorus of moaning and groaning.
Afterwards, as you shall learn, I identified this reminiscence and knew
that the moaning and the groaning was of the sweep-slaves manacled to
their benches, which I heard from above, on the poop, a soldier passenger
on a galley of old Rome.  That was when I sailed for Alexandria, a
captain of men, on my way to Jerusalem . . . but that is a story I shall
tell you later.  In the meanwhile . . . .




CHAPTER IV


In the meanwhile obtained the horror of the dungeons, after the discovery
of the plot to break prison.  And never, during those eternal hours of
waiting, was it absent from my consciousness that I should follow these
other convicts out, endure the hells of inquisition they endured, and be
brought back a wreck and flung on the stone floor of my stone-walled,
iron-doored dungeon.

They came for me.  Ungraciously and ungently, with blow and curse, they
haled me forth, and I faced Captain Jamie and Warden Atherton, themselves
arrayed with the strength of half a dozen state-bought, tax-paid brutes
of guards who lingered in the room to do any bidding.  But they were not
needed.

"Sit down," said Warden Atherton, indicating a stout arm-chair.

I, beaten and sore, without water for a night long and a day long, faint
with hunger, weak from a beating that had been added to five days in the
dungeon and eighty hours in the jacket, oppressed by the calamity of
human fate, apprehensive of what was to happen to me from what I had seen
happen to the others--I, a wavering waif of a human man and an erstwhile
professor of agronomy in a quiet college town, I hesitated to accept the
invitation to sit down.

Warden Atherton was a large man and a very powerful man.  His hands
flashed out to a grip on my shoulders.  I was a straw in his strength.  He
lifted me clear of the floor and crashed me down in the chair.

"Now," he said, while I gasped and swallowed my pain, "tell me all about
it, Standing.  Spit it out--all of it, if you know what's healthy for
you."

"I don't know anything about what has happened . . .", I began.

That was as far as I got.  With a growl and a leap he was upon me.  Again
he lifted me in the air and crashed me down into the chair.

"No nonsense, Standing," he warned.  "Make a clean breast of it.  Where
is the dynamite?"

"I don't know anything of any dynamite," I protested.

Once again I was lifted and smashed back into the chair.

I have endured tortures of various sorts, but when I reflect upon them in
the quietness of these my last days, I am confident that no other torture
was quite the equal of that chair torture.  By my body that stout chair
was battered out of any semblance of a chair.  Another chair was brought,
and in time that chair was demolished.  But more chairs were brought, and
the eternal questioning about the dynamite went on.

When Warden Atherton grew tired, Captain Jamie relieved him; and then the
guard Monohan took Captain Jamie's place in smashing me down into the
chair.  And always it was dynamite, dynamite, "Where is the dynamite?"
and there was no dynamite.  Why, toward the last I would have given a
large portion of my immortal soul for a few pounds of dynamite to which I
could confess.

I do not know how many chairs were broken by my body.  I fainted times
without number, and toward the last the whole thing became nightmarish.  I
was half-carried, half-shoved and dragged back to the dark.  There, when
I became conscious, I found a stool in my dungeon.  He was a
pallid-faced, little dope-fiend of a short-timer who would do anything to
obtain the drug.  As soon as I recognized him I crawled to the grating
and shouted out along the corridor:

"There is a stool in with me, fellows!  He's Ignatius Irvine!  Watch out
what you say!"

The outburst of imprecations that went up would have shaken the fortitude
of a braver man than Ignatius Irvine.  He was pitiful in his terror,
while all about him, roaring like beasts, the pain-racked lifers told him
what awful things they would do to him in the years that were to come.

Had there been secrets, the presence of a stool in the dungeons would
have kept the men quiet, As it was, having all sworn to tell the truth,
they talked openly before Ignatius Irvine.  The one great puzzle was the
dynamite, of which they were as much in the dark as was I.  They appealed
to me.  If I knew anything about the dynamite they begged me to confess
it and save them all from further misery.  And I could tell them only the
truth, that I knew of no dynamite.

One thing the stool told me, before the guards removed him, showed how
serious was this matter of the dynamite.  Of course, I passed the word
along, which was that not a wheel had turned in the prison all day.  The
thousands of convict-workers had remained locked in their cells, and the
outlook was that not one of the various prison-factories would be
operated again until after the discovery of some dynamite that somebody
had hidden somewhere in the prison.

And ever the examination went on.  Ever, one at a time, convicts were
dragged away and dragged or carried back again.  They reported that
Warden Atherton and Captain Jamie, exhausted by their efforts, relieved
each other every two hours.  While one slept, the other examined.  And
they slept in their clothes in the very room in which strong man after
strong man was being broken.

And hour by hour, in the dark dungeons, our madness of torment grew.  Oh,
trust me as one who knows, hanging is an easy thing compared with the way
live men may be hurt in all the life of them and still live.  I, too,
suffered equally with them from pain and thirst; but added to my
suffering was the fact that I remained conscious to the sufferings of the
others.  I had been an incorrigible for two years, and my nerves and
brain were hardened to suffering.  It is a frightful thing to see a
strong man broken.  About me, at the one time, were forty strong men
being broken.  Ever the cry for water went up, and the place became
lunatic with the crying, sobbing, babbling and raving of men in delirium.

Don't you see?  Our truth, the very truth we told, was our damnation.
When forty men told the same things with such unanimity, Warden Atherton
and Captain Jamie could only conclude that the testimony was a memorized
lie which each of the forty rattled off parrot-like.

From the standpoint of the authorities, their situation was as desperate
as ours.  As I learned afterward, the Board of Prison Directors had been
summoned by telegraph, and two companies of state militia were being
rushed to the prison.

It was winter weather, and the frost is sometimes shrewd even in a
California winter.  We had no blankets in the dungeons.  Please know that
it is very cold to stretch bruised human flesh on frosty stone.  In the
end they did give us water.  Jeering and cursing us, the guards ran in
the fire-hoses and played the fierce streams on us, dungeon by dungeon,
hour after hour, until our bruised flesh was battered all anew by the
violence with which the water smote us, until we stood knee-deep in the
water which we had raved for and for which now we raved to cease.

I shall skip the rest of what happened in the dungeons.  In passing I
shall merely state that no one of those forty lifers was ever the same
again.  Luigi Polazzo never recovered his reason.  Long Bill Hodge slowly
lost his sanity, so that a year later, he, too, went to live in Bughouse
Alley.  Oh, and others followed Hodge and Polazzo; and others, whose
physical stamina had been impaired, fell victims to prison-tuberculosis.
Fully 25 per cent. of the forty have died in the succeeding six years.

After my five years in solitary, when they took me away from San Quentin
for my trial, I saw Skysail Jack.  I could see little, for I was blinking
in the sunshine like a bat, after five years of darkness; yet I saw
enough of Skysail Jack to pain my heart.  It was in crossing the Prison
Yard that I saw him.  His hair had turned white.  He was prematurely old.
His chest had caved in.  His cheeks were sunken.  His hands shook as with
palsy.  He tottered as he walked.  And his eyes blurred with tears as he
recognized me, for I, too, was a sad wreck of what had once been a man.  I
weighed eighty-seven pounds.  My hair, streaked with gray, was a five-
years' growth, as were my beard and moustache.  And I, too, tottered as I
walked, so that the guards helped to lead me across that sun-blinding
patch of yard.  And Skysail Jack and I peered and knew each other under
the wreckage.

Men such as he are privileged, even in a prison, so that he dared an
infraction of the rules by speaking to me in a cracked and quavering
voice.

"You're a good one, Standing," he cackled.  "You never squealed."

"But I never knew, Jack," I whispered back--I was compelled to whisper,
for five years of disuse had well-nigh lost me my voice.  "I don't think
there ever was any dynamite."

"That's right," he cackled, nodding his head childishly.  "Stick with it.
Don't ever let'm know.  You're a good one.  I take my hat off to you,
Standing.  You never squealed."

And the guards led me on, and that was the last I saw of Skysail Jack.  It
was plain that even he had become a believer in the dynamite myth.

* * * * *

Twice they had me before the full Board of Directors.  I was alternately
bullied and cajoled.  Their attitude resolved itself into two
propositions.  If I delivered up the dynamite, they would give me a
nominal punishment of thirty days in the dungeon and then make me a
trusty in the prison library.  If I persisted in my stubbornness and did
not yield up the dynamite, then they would put me in solitary for the
rest of my sentence.  In my case, being a life prisoner, this was
tantamount to condemning me to solitary confinement for life.

Oh, no; California is civilized.  There is no such law on the statute
books.  It is a cruel and unusual punishment, and no modern state would
be guilty of such a law.  Nevertheless, in the history of California I am
the third man who has been condemned for life to solitary confinement.
The other two were Jake Oppenheimer and Ed Morrell.  I shall tell you
about them soon, for I rotted with them for years in the cells of
silence.

Oh, another thing.  They are going to take me out and hang me in a little
while--no, not for killing Professor Haskell.  I got life-imprisonment
for that.  They are going to take me out and hang me because I was found
guilty of assault and battery.  And this is not prison discipline.  It is
law, and as law it will be found in the criminal statutes.

I believe I made a man's nose bleed.  I never saw it bleed, but that was
the evidence.  Thurston, his name was.  He was a guard at San Quentin.  He
weighed one hundred and seventy pounds and was in good health.  I weighed
under ninety pounds, was blind as a bat from the long darkness, and had
been so long pent in narrow walls that I was made dizzy by large open
spaces.  Really, mime was a well-defined case of incipient agoraphobia,
as I quickly learned that day I escaped from solitary and punched the
guard Thurston on the nose.

I struck him on the nose and made it bleed when he got in my way and
tried to catch hold of me.  And so they are going to hang me.  It is the
written law of the State of California that a lifetimer like me is guilty
of a capital crime when he strikes a prison guard like Thurston.  Surely,
he could not have been inconvenienced more than half an hour by that
bleeding nose; and yet they are going to hang me for it.

And, see!  This law, in my case, is _ex post facto_.  It was not a law at
the time I killed Professor Haskell.  It was not passed until after I
received my life-sentence.  And this is the very point: my life-sentence
gave me my status under this law which had not yet been written on the
books.  And it is because of my status of lifetimer that I am to be
hanged for battery committed on the guard Thurston.  It is clearly _ex
post facto_, and, therefore, unconstitutional.

But what bearing has the Constitution on constitutional lawyers when they
want to put the notorious Professor Darrell Standing out of the way?  Nor
do I even establish the precedent with my execution.  A year ago, as
everybody who reads the newspapers knows, they hanged Jake Oppenheimer,
right here in Folsom, for a precisely similar offence . . . only, in his
case of battery, he was not guilty of making a guard's nose bleed.  He
cut a convict unintentionally with a bread-knife.

It is strange--life and men's ways and laws and tangled paths.  I am
writing these lines in the very cell in Murderers' Row that Jake
Oppenheimer occupied ere they took him out and did to him what they are
going to do to me.

I warned you I had many things to write about.  I shall now return to my
narrative.  The Board of Prison Directors gave me my choice: a prison
trustyship and surcease from the jute-looms if I gave up the non-existent
dynamite; life imprisonment in solitary if I refused to give up the non-
existent dynamite.

They gave me twenty-four hours in the jacket to think it over.  Then I
was brought before the Board a second time.  What could I do?  I could
not lead them to the dynamite that was not.  I told them so, and they
told me I was a liar.  They told me I was a hard case, a dangerous man, a
moral degenerate, the criminal of the century.  They told me many other
things, and then they carried me away to the solitary cells.  I was put
into Number One cell.  In Number Five lay Ed Morrell.  In Number Twelve
lay Jake Oppenheimer.  And he had been there for ten years.  Ed Morrell
had been in his cell only one year.  He was serving a fifty-years'
sentence.  Jake Oppenheimer was a lifer.  And so was I a lifer.  Wherefore
the outlook was that the three of us would remain there for a long time.
And yet, six years only are past, and not one of us is in solitary.  Jake
Oppenheimer was swung off.  Ed Morrell was made head trusty of San
Quentin and then pardoned out only the other day.  And here I am in
Folsom waiting the day duly set by Judge Morgan, which will be my last
day.

The fools!  As if they could throttle my immortality with their clumsy
device of rope and scaffold!  I shall walk, and walk again, oh, countless
times, this fair earth.  And I shall walk in the flesh, be prince and
peasant, savant and fool, sit in the high place and groan under the
wheel.




CHAPTER V


It was very lonely, at first, in solitary, and the hours were long.  Time
was marked by the regular changing of the guards, and by the alternation
of day and night.  Day was only a little light, but it was better than
the all-dark of the night.  In solitary the day was an ooze, a slimy
seepage of light from the bright outer world.

Never was the light strong enough to read by.  Besides, there was nothing
to read.  One could only lie and think and think.  And I was a lifer, and
it seemed certain, if I did not do a miracle, make thirty-five pounds of
dynamite out of nothing, that all the years of my life would be spent in
the silent dark.

My bed was a thin and rotten tick of straw spread on the cell floor.  One
thin and filthy blanket constituted the covering.  There was no chair, no
table--nothing but the tick of straw and the thin, aged blanket.  I was
ever a short sleeper and ever a busy-brained man.  In solitary one grows
sick of oneself in his thoughts, and the only way to escape oneself is to
sleep.  For years I had averaged five hours' sleep a night.  I now
cultivated sleep.  I made a science of it.  I became able to sleep ten
hours, then twelve hours, and, at last, as high as fourteen and fifteen
hours out of the twenty-four.  But beyond that I could not go, and,
perforce, was compelled to lie awake and think and think.  And that way,
for an active-brained man, lay madness.

I sought devices to enable me mechanically to abide my waking hours.  I
squared and cubed long series of numbers, and by concentration and will
carried on most astonishing geometric progressions.  I even dallied with
the squaring of the circle . . . until I found myself beginning to
believe that that possibility could be accomplished.  Whereupon,
realizing that there, too, lay madness, I forwent the squaring of the
circle, although I assure you it required a considerable sacrifice on my
part, for the mental exercise involved was a splendid time-killer.

By sheer visualization under my eyelids I constructed chess-boards and
played both sides of long games through to checkmate.  But when I had
become expert at this visualized game of memory the exercise palled on
me.  Exercise it was, for there could be no real contest when the same
player played both sides.  I tried, and tried vainly, to split my
personality into two personalities and to pit one against the other.  But
ever I remained the one player, with no planned ruse or strategy on one
side that the other side did not immediately apprehend.

And time was very heavy and very long.  I played games with flies, with
ordinary house-flies that oozed into solitary as did the dim gray light;
and learned that they possessed a sense of play.  For instance, lying on
the cell floor, I established an arbitrary and imaginary line along the
wall some three feet above the floor.  When they rested on the wall above
this line they were left in peace.  The instant they lighted on the wall
below the line I tried to catch them.  I was careful never to hurt them,
and, in time, they knew as precisely as did I where ran the imaginary
line.  When they desired to play, they lighted below the line, and often
for an hour at a time a single fly would engage in the sport.  When it
grew tired, it would come to rest on the safe territory above.

Of the dozen or more flies that lived with me, there was only one who did
not care for the game.  He refused steadfastly to play, and, having
learned the penalty of alighting below the line, very carefully avoided
the unsafe territory.  That fly was a sullen, disgruntled creature.  As
the convicts would say, it had a "grouch" against the world.  He never
played with the other flies either.  He was strong and healthy, too; for
I studied him long to find out.  His indisposition for play was
temperamental, not physical.

Believe me, I knew all my flies.  It was surprising to me the multitude
of differences I distinguished between them.  Oh, each was distinctly an
individual--not merely in size and markings, strength, and speed of
flight, and in the manner and fancy of flight and play, of dodge and
dart, of wheel and swiftly repeat or wheel and reverse, of touch and go
on the danger wall, or of feint the touch and alight elsewhere within the
zone.  They were likewise sharply differentiated in the minutest shades
of mentality and temperament.

I knew the nervous ones, the phlegmatic ones.  There was a little
undersized one that would fly into real rages, sometimes with me,
sometimes with its fellows.  Have you ever seen a colt or a calf throw up
its heels and dash madly about the pasture from sheer excess of vitality
and spirits?  Well, there was one fly--the keenest player of them all, by
the way--who, when it had alighted three or four times in rapid
succession on my taboo wall and succeeded each time in eluding the velvet-
careful swoop of my hand, would grow so excited and jubilant that it
would dart around and around my head at top speed, wheeling, veering,
reversing, and always keeping within the limits of the narrow circle in
which it celebrated its triumph over me.

Why, I could tell well in advance when any particular fly was making up
its mind to begin to play.  There are a thousand details in this one
matter alone that I shall not bore you with, although these details did
serve to keep me from being bored too utterly during that first period in
solitary.  But one thing I must tell you.  To me it is most memorable--the
time when the one with a grouch, who never played, alighted in a moment
of absent-mindedness within the taboo precinct and was immediately
captured in my hand.  Do you know, he sulked for an hour afterward.

And the hours were very long in solitary; nor could I sleep them all
away; nor could I while them away with house-flies, no matter how
intelligent.  For house-flies are house-flies, and I was a man, with a
man's brain; and my brain was trained and active, stuffed with culture
and science, and always geared to a high tension of eagerness to do.  And
there was nothing to do, and my thoughts ran abominably on in vain
speculations.  There was my pentose and methyl-pentose determination in
grapes and wines to which I had devoted my last summer vacation at the
Asti Vineyards.  I had all but completed the series of experiments.  Was
anybody else going on with it, I wondered; and if so, with what success?

You see, the world was dead to me.  No news of it filtered in.  The
history of science was making fast, and I was interested in a thousand
subjects.  Why, there was my theory of the hydrolysis of casein by
trypsin, which Professor Walters had been carrying out in his laboratory.
Also, Professor Schleimer had similarly been collaborating with me in the
detection of phytosterol in mixtures of animal and vegetable fats.  The
work surely was going on, but with what results?  The very thought of all
this activity just beyond the prison walls and in which I could take no
part, of which I was never even to hear, was maddening.  And in the
meantime I lay there on my cell floor and played games with house-flies.

And yet all was not silence in solitary.  Early in my confinement I used
to hear, at irregular intervals, faint, low tappings.  From farther away
I also heard fainter and lower tappings.  Continually these tappings were
interrupted by the snarling of the guard.  On occasion, when the tapping
went on too persistently, extra guards were summoned, and I knew by the
sounds that men were being strait-jacketed.

The matter was easy of explanation.  I had known, as every prisoner in
San Quentin knew, that the two men in solitary were Ed Morrell and Jake
Oppenheimer.  And I knew that these were the two men who tapped knuckle-
talk to each other and were punished for so doing.

That the code they used was simple I had not the slightest doubt, yet I
devoted many hours to a vain effort to work it out.  Heaven knows--it had
to be simple, yet I could not make head nor tail of it.  And simple it
proved to be, when I learned it; and simplest of all proved the trick
they employed which had so baffled me.  Not only each day did they change
the point in the alphabet where the code initialled, but they changed it
every conversation, and, often, in the midst of a conversation.

Thus, there came a day when I caught the code at the right initial,
listened to two clear sentences of conversation, and, the next time they
talked, failed to understand a word.  But that first time!

"Say--Ed--what--would--
you--give--right--now--for--brown--papers--and--a--sack--of--Bull--Durham!"
asked the one who tapped from farther away.

I nearly cried out in my joy.  Here was communication!  Here was
companionship!  I listened eagerly, and the nearer tapping, which I
guessed must be Ed Morrell's, replied:

"I--would--do--twenty--hours--strait--in--the--jacket--for--a--five--cent--sack--"

Then came the snarling interruption of the guard: "Cut that out,
Morrell!"

It may be thought by the layman that the worst has been done to men
sentenced to solitary for life, and therefore that a mere guard has no
way of compelling obedience to his order to cease tapping.

But the jacket remains.  Starvation remains.  Thirst remains.
Man-handling remains.  Truly, a man pent in a narrow cell is very
helpless.

So the tapping ceased, and that night, when it was next resumed, I was
all at sea again.  By pre-arrangement they had changed the initial letter
of the code.  But I had caught the clue, and, in the matter of several
days, occurred again the same initialment I had understood.  I did not
wait on courtesy.

"Hello," I tapped

"Hello, stranger," Morrell tapped back; and, from Oppenheimer, "Welcome
to our city."

They were curious to know who I was, how long I was condemned to
solitary, and why I had been so condemned.  But all this I put to the
side in order first to learn their system of changing the code initial.
After I had this clear, we talked.  It was a great day, for the two
lifers had become three, although they accepted me only on probation.  As
they told me long after, they feared I might be a stool placed there to
work a frame-up on them.  It had been done before, to Oppenheimer, and he
had paid dearly for the confidence he reposed in Warden Atherton's tool.

To my surprise--yes, to my elation be it said--both my fellow-prisoners
knew me through my record as an incorrigible.  Even into the living grave
Oppenheimer had occupied for ten years had my fame, or notoriety, rather,
penetrated.

I had much to tell them of prison happenings and of the outside world.
The conspiracy to escape of the forty lifers, the search for the alleged
dynamite, and all the treacherous frame-up of Cecil Winwood was news to
them.  As they told me, news did occasionally dribble into solitary by
way of the guards, but they had had nothing for a couple of months.  The
present guards on duty in solitary were a particularly bad and vindictive
set.

Again and again that day we were cursed for our knuckle talking by
whatever guard was on.  But we could not refrain.  The two of the living
dead had become three, and we had so much to say, while the manner of
saying it was exasperatingly slow and I was not so proficient as they at
the knuckle game.

"Wait till Pie-Face comes on to-night," Morrell rapped to me.  "He sleeps
most of his watch, and we can talk a streak."

How we did talk that night!  Sleep was farthest from our eyes.  Pie-Face
Jones was a mean and bitter man, despite his fatness; but we blessed that
fatness because it persuaded to stolen snatches of slumber.  Nevertheless
our incessant tapping bothered his sleep and irritated him so that he
reprimanded us repeatedly.  And by the other night guards we were roundly
cursed.  In the morning all reported much tapping during the night, and
we paid for our little holiday; for, at nine, came Captain Jamie with
several guards to lace us into the torment of the jacket.  Until nine the
following morning, for twenty-four straight hours, laced and helpless on
the floor, without food or water, we paid the price for speech.

Oh, our guards were brutes!  And under their treatment we had to harden
to brutes in order to live.  Hard work makes calloused hands.  Hard
guards make hard prisoners.  We continued to talk, and, on occasion, to
be jacketed for punishment.  Night was the best time, and, when
substitute guards chanced to be on, we often talked through a whole
shift.

Night and day were one with us who lived in the dark.  We could sleep any
time, we could knuckle-talk only on occasion.  We told one another much
of the history of our lives, and for long hours Morrell and I have lain
silently, while steadily, with faint, far taps, Oppenheimer slowly
spelled out his life-story, from the early years in a San Francisco slum,
through his gang-training, through his initiation into all that was
vicious, when as a lad of fourteen he served as night messenger in the
red light district, through his first detected infraction of the laws,
and on and on through thefts and robberies to the treachery of a comrade
and to red slayings inside prison walls.

They called Jake Oppenheimer the "Human Tiger."  Some cub reporter coined
the phrase that will long outlive the man to whom it was applied.  And
yet I ever found in Jake Oppenheimer all the cardinal traits of right
humanness.  He was faithful and loyal.  I know of the times he has taken
punishment in preference to informing on a comrade.  He was brave.  He
was patient.  He was capable of self-sacrifice--I could tell a story of
this, but shall not take the time.  And justice, with him, was a passion.
The prison-killings done by him were due entirely to this extreme sense
of justice.  And he had a splendid mind.  A lifetime in prison, ten years
of it in solitary, had not dimmed his brain.

Morrell, ever a true comrade, too had a splendid brain.  In fact, and I
who am about to die have the right to say it without incurring the charge
of immodesty, the three best minds in San Quentin from the Warden down
were the three that rotted there together in solitary.  And here at the
end of my days, reviewing all that I have known of life, I am compelled
to the conclusion that strong minds are never docile.  The stupid men,
the fearful men, the men ungifted with passionate rightness and fearless
championship--these are the men who make model prisoners.  I thank all
gods that Jake Oppenheimer, Ed Morrell, and I were not model prisoners.




CHAPTER VI


There is more than the germ of truth in things erroneous in the child's
definition of memory as the thing one forgets with.  To be able to forget
means sanity.  Incessantly to remember, means obsession, lunacy.  So the
problem I faced in solitary, where incessant remembering strove for
possession of me, was the problem of forgetting.  When I gamed with
flies, or played chess with myself, or talked with my knuckles, I
partially forgot.  What I desired was entirely to forget.

There were the boyhood memories of other times and places--the "trailing
clouds of glory" of Wordsworth.  If a boy had had these memories, were
they irretrievably lost when he had grown to manhood?  Could this
particular content of his boy brain be utterly eliminated?  Or were these
memories of other times and places still residual, asleep, immured in
solitary in brain cells similarly to the way I was immured in a cell in
San Quentin?

Solitary life-prisoners have been known to resurrect and look upon the
sun again.  Then why could not these other-world memories of the boy
resurrect?

But how?  In my judgment, by attainment of complete forgetfulness of
present and of manhood past.

And again, how?  Hypnotism should do it.  If by hypnotism the conscious
mind were put to sleep, and the subconscious mind awakened, then was the
thing accomplished, then would all the dungeon doors of the brain be
thrown wide, then would the prisoners emerge into the sunshine.

So I reasoned--with what result you shall learn.  But first I must tell
how, as a boy, I had had these other-world memories.  I had glowed in the
clouds of glory I trailed from lives aforetime.  Like any boy, I had been
haunted by the other beings I had been at other times.  This had been
during my process of becoming, ere the flux of all that I had ever been
had hardened in the mould of the one personality that was to be known by
men for a few years as Darrell Standing.

Let me narrate just one incident.  It was up in Minnesota on the old
farm.  I was nearly six years old.  A missionary to China, returned to
the United States and sent out by the Board of Missions to raise funds
from the farmers, spent the night in our house.  It was in the kitchen
just after supper, as my mother was helping me undress for bed, and the
missionary was showing photographs of the Holy Land.

And what I am about to tell you I should long since have forgotten had I
not heard my father recite it to wondering listeners so many times during
my childhood.

I cried out at sight of one of the photographs and looked at it, first
with eagerness, and then with disappointment.  It had seemed of a sudden
most familiar, in much the same way that my father's barn would have been
in a photograph.  Then it had seemed altogether strange.  But as I
continued to look the haunting sense of familiarity came back.

"The Tower of David," the missionary said to my mother.

"No!" I cried with great positiveness.

"You mean that isn't its name?" the missionary asked.

I nodded.

"Then what is its name, my boy?"

"It's name is . . ." I began, then concluded lamely, "I, forget."

"It don't look the same now," I went on after a pause.  "They've ben
fixin' it up awful."

Here the missionary handed to my mother another photograph he had sought
out.

"I was there myself six months ago, Mrs. Standing."  He pointed with his
finger.  "That is the Jaffa Gate where I walked in and right up to the
Tower of David in the back of the picture where my finger is now.  The
authorities are pretty well agreed on such matters.  El Kul'ah, as it was
known by--"

But here I broke in again, pointing to rubbish piles of ruined masonry on
the left edge of the photograph.

"Over there somewhere," I said.  "That name you just spoke was what the
Jews called it.  But we called it something else.  We called it . . . I
forget."

"Listen to the youngster," my father chuckled.  "You'd think he'd ben
there."

I nodded my head, for in that moment I knew I had been there, though all
seemed strangely different.  My father laughed the harder, but the
missionary thought I was making game of him.  He handed me another
photograph.  It was just a bleak waste of a landscape, barren of trees
and vegetation, a shallow canyon with easy-sloping walls of rubble.  In
the middle distance was a cluster of wretched, flat-roofed hovels.

"Now, my boy, where is that?" the missionary quizzed.

And the name came to me!

"Samaria," I said instantly.

My father clapped his hands with glee, my mother was perplexed at my
antic conduct, while the missionary evinced irritation.

"The boy is right," he said.  "It is a village in Samaria.  I passed
through it.  That is why I bought it.  And it goes to show that the boy
has seen similar photographs before."

This my father and mother denied.

"But it's different in the picture," I volunteered, while all the time my
memory was busy reconstructing the photograph.  The general trend of the
landscape and the line of the distant hills were the same.  The
differences I noted aloud and pointed out with my finger.

"The houses was about right here, and there was more trees, lots of
trees, and lots of grass, and lots of goats.  I can see 'em now, an' two
boys drivin' 'em.  An' right here is a lot of men walkin' behind one man.
An' over there"--I pointed to where I had placed my village--"is a lot of
tramps.  They ain't got nothin' on exceptin' rags.  An' they're sick.
Their faces, an' hands, an' legs is all sores."

"He's heard the story in church or somewhere--you remember, the healing
of the lepers in Luke," the missionary said with a smile of satisfaction.
"How many sick tramps are there, my boy?"

I had learned to count to a hundred when I was five years old, so I went
over the group carefully and announced:

"Ten of 'em.  They're all wavin' their arms an' yellin' at the other
men."

"But they don't come near them?" was the query.

I shook my head.  "They just stand right there an' keep a-yellin' like
they was in trouble."

"Go on," urged the missionary.  "What next?  What's the man doing in the
front of the other crowd you said was walking along?"

"They've all stopped, an' he's sayin' something to the sick men.  An' the
boys with the goats 's stopped to look.  Everybody's lookin'."

"And then?"

"That's all.  The sick men are headin' for the houses.  They ain't
yellin' any more, an' they don't look sick any more.  An' I just keep
settin' on my horse a-lookin' on."

At this all three of my listeners broke into laughter.

"An' I'm a big man!" I cried out angrily.  "An' I got a big sword!"

"The ten lepers Christ healed before he passed through Jericho on his way
to Jerusalem," the missionary explained to my parents.  "The boy has seen
slides of famous paintings in some magic lantern exhibition."

But neither father nor mother could remember that I had ever seen a magic
lantern.

"Try him with another picture," father suggested.

"It's all different," I complained as I studied the photograph the
missionary handed me.  "Ain't nothin' here except that hill and them
other hills.  This ought to be a country road along here.  An' over there
ought to be gardens, an' trees, an' houses behind big stone walls.  An'
over there, on the other side, in holes in the rocks ought to be where
they buried dead folks.  You see this place?--they used to throw stones
at people there until they killed 'm.  I never seen 'm do it.  They just
told me about it."

"And the hill?" the missionary asked, pointing to the central part of the
print, for which the photograph seemed to have been taken.  "Can you tell
us the name of the hill?"

I shook my head.

"Never had no name.  They killed folks there.  I've seem 'm more 'n
once."

"This time he agrees with the majority of the authorities," announced the
missionary with huge satisfaction.  "The hill is Golgotha, the Place of
Skulls, or, as you please, so named because it resembles a skull.  Notice
the resemblance.  That is where they crucified--"  He broke off and
turned to me.  "Whom did they crucify there, young scholar?  Tell us what
else you see."

Oh, I saw--my father reported that my eyes were bulging; but I shook my
head stubbornly and said:

"I ain't a-goin' to tell you because you're laughin' at me.  I seen lots
an' lots of men killed there.  They nailed 'em up, an' it took a long
time.  I seen--but I ain't a-goin' to tell.  I don't tell lies.  You ask
dad an' ma if I tell lies.  He'd whale the stuffin' out of me if I did.
Ask 'm."

And thereat not another word could the missionary get from me, even
though he baited me with more photographs that sent my head whirling with
a rush of memory-pictures and that urged and tickled my tongue with
spates of speech which I sullenly resisted and overcame.

"He will certainly make a good Bible scholar," the missionary told father
and mother after I had kissed them good-night and departed for bed.  "Or
else, with that imagination, he'll become a successful fiction-writer."

Which shows how prophecy can go agley.  I sit here in Murderers' Row,
writing these lines in my last days, or, rather, in Darrell Standing's
last days ere they take him out and try to thrust him into the dark at
the end of a rope, and I smile to myself.  I became neither Bible scholar
nor novelist.  On the contrary, until they buried me in the cells of
silence for half a decade, I was everything that the missionary
forecasted not--an agricultural expert, a professor of agronomy, a
specialist in the science of the elimination of waste motion, a master of
farm efficiency, a precise laboratory scientist where precision and
adherence to microscopic fact are absolute requirements.

And I sit here in the warm afternoon, in Murderers' Row, and cease from
the writing of my memoirs to listen to the soothing buzz of flies in the
drowsy air, and catch phrases of a low-voiced conversation between
Josephus Jackson, the negro murderer on my right, and Bambeccio, the
Italian murderer on my left, who are discussing, through grated door to
grated door, back and forth past my grated door, the antiseptic virtues
and excellences of chewing tobacco for flesh wounds.

And in my suspended hand I hold my fountain pen, and as I remember that
other hands of me, in long gone ages, wielded ink-brush, and quill, and
stylus, I also find thought-space in time to wonder if that missionary,
when he was a little lad, ever trailed clouds of glory and glimpsed the
brightness of old star-roving days.

Well, back to solitary, after I had learned the code of knuckle-talk and
still found the hours of consciousness too long to endure.  By
self-hypnosis, which I began successfully to practise, I became able to
put my conscious mind to sleep and to awaken and loose my subconscious
mind.  But the latter was an undisciplined and lawless thing.  It
wandered through all nightmarish madness, without coherence, without
continuity of scene, event, or person.

My method of mechanical hypnosis was the soul of simplicity.  Sitting
with folded legs on my straw-mattress, I gazed fixedly at a fragment of
bright straw which I had attached to the wall of my cell near the door
where the most light was.  I gazed at the bright point, with my eyes
close to it, and tilted upward till they strained to see.  At the same
time I relaxed all the will of me and gave myself to the swaying
dizziness that always eventually came to me.  And when I felt myself sway
out of balance backward, I closed my eyes and permitted myself to fall
supine and unconscious on the mattress.

And then, for half-an-hour, ten minutes, or as long as an hour or so, I
would wander erratically and foolishly through the stored memories of my
eternal recurrence on earth.  But times and places shifted too swiftly.  I
knew afterward, when I awoke, that I, Darrell Standing, was the linking
personality that connected all bizarreness and grotesqueness.  But that
was all.  I could never live out completely one full experience, one
point of consciousness in time and space.  My dreams, if dreams they may
be called, were rhymeless and reasonless.

Thus, as a sample of my rovings: in a single interval of fifteen minutes
of subconsciousness I have crawled and bellowed in the slime of the
primeval world and sat beside Haas--further and cleaved the twentieth
century air in a gas-driven monoplane.  Awake, I remembered that I,
Darrell Standing, in the flesh, during the year preceding my
incarceration in San Quentin, had flown with Haas further over the
Pacific at Santa Monica.  Awake, I did not remember the crawling and the
bellowing in the ancient slime.  Nevertheless, awake, I reasoned that
somehow I had remembered that early adventure in the slime, and that it
was a verity of long-previous experience, when I was not yet Darrell
Standing but somebody else, or something else that crawled and bellowed.
One experience was merely more remote than the other.  Both experiences
were equally real--or else how did I remember them?

Oh, what a fluttering of luminous images and actions!  In a few short
minutes of loosed subconsciousness I have sat in the halls of kings,
above the salt and below the salt, been fool and jester, man-at-arms,
clerk and monk; and I have been ruler above all at the head of the
table--temporal power in my own sword arm, in the thickness of my castle
walls, and the numbers of my fighting men; spiritual power likewise mine
by token of the fact that cowled priests and fat abbots sat beneath me
and swigged my wine and swined my meat.

I have worn the iron collar of the serf about my neck in cold climes; and
I have loved princesses of royal houses in the tropic-warmed and
sun-scented night, where black slaves fanned the sultry air with fans of
peacock plumes, while from afar, across the palm and fountains, drifted
the roaring of lions and the cries of jackals.  I have crouched in chill
desert places warming my hands at fires builded of camel's dung; and I
have lain in the meagre shade of sun-parched sage-brush by dry
water-holes and yearned dry-tongued for water, while about me,
dismembered and scattered in the alkali, were the bones of men and beasts
who had yearned and died.

I have been sea-cuny and bravo, scholar and recluse.  I have pored over
hand-written pages of huge and musty tomes in the scholastic quietude and
twilight of cliff-perched monasteries, while beneath on the lesser
slopes, peasants still toiled beyond the end of day among the vines and
olives and drove in from pastures the blatting goats and lowing kine;
yes, and I have led shouting rabbles down the wheel-worn, chariot-rutted
paves of ancient and forgotten cities; and, solemn-voiced and grave as
death, I have enunciated the law, stated the gravity of the infraction,
and imposed the due death on men, who, like Darrell Standing in Folsom
Prison, had broken the law.

Aloft, at giddy mastheads oscillating above the decks of ships, I have
gazed on sun-flashed water where coral-growths iridesced from profounds
of turquoise deeps, and conned the ships into the safety of mirrored
lagoons where the anchors rumbled down close to palm-fronded beaches of
sea-pounded coral rock; and I have striven on forgotten battlefields of
the elder days, when the sun went down on slaughter that did not cease
and that continued through the night-hours with the stars shining down
and with a cool night wind blowing from distant peaks of snow that failed
to chill the sweat of battle; and again, I have been little Darrell
Standing, bare-footed in the dew-lush grass of spring on the Minnesota
farm, chilblained when of frosty mornings I fed the cattle in their
breath-steaming stalls, sobered to fear and awe of the splendour and
terror of God when I sat on Sundays under the rant and preachment of the
New Jerusalem and the agonies of hell-fire.

Now, the foregoing were the glimpses and glimmerings that came to me,
when, in Cell One of Solitary in San Quentin, I stared myself unconscious
by means of a particle of bright, light-radiating straw.  How did these
things come to me?  Surely I could not have manufactured them out of
nothing inside my pent walls any more than could I have manufactured out
of nothing the thirty-five pounds of dynamite so ruthlessly demanded of
me by Captain Jamie, Warden Atherton, and the Prison Board of Directors.

I am Darrell Standing, born and raised on a quarter section of land in
Minnesota, erstwhile professor of agronomy, a prisoner incorrigible in
San Quentin, and at present a death-sentenced man in Folsom.  I do not
know, of Darrell Standing's experience, these things of which I write and
which I have dug from out my store-houses of subconsciousness.  I,
Darrell Standing, born in Minnesota and soon to die by the rope in
California, surely never loved daughters of kings in the courts of kings;
nor fought cutlass to cutlass on the swaying decks of ships; nor drowned
in the spirit-rooms of ships, guzzling raw liquor to the wassail-shouting
and death-singing of seamen, while the ship lifted and crashed on the
black-toothed rocks and the water bubbled overhead, beneath, and all
about.

Such things are not of Darrell Standing's experience in the world.  Yet
I, Darrell Standing, found these things within myself in solitary in San
Quentin by means of mechanical self-hypnosis.  No more were these
experiences Darrell Standing's than was the word "Samaria" Darrell
Standing's when it leapt to his child lips at sight of a photograph.

One cannot make anything out of nothing.  In solitary I could not so make
thirty-five pounds of dynamite.  Nor in solitary, out of nothing in
Darrell Standing's experience, could I make these wide, far visions of
time and space.  These things were in the content of my mind, and in my
mind I was just beginning to learn my way about.




CHAPTER VII


So here was my predicament: I knew that within myself was a Golconda of
memories of other lives, yet I was unable to do more than flit like a
madman through those memories.  I had my Golconda but could not mine it.

I remembered the case of Stainton Moses, the clergyman who had been
possessed by the personalities of St. Hippolytus, Plotinus, Athenodorus,
and of that friend of Erasmus named Grocyn.  And when I considered the
experiments of Colonel de Rochas, which I had read in tyro fashion in
other and busier days, I was convinced that Stainton Moses had, in
previous lives, been those personalities that on occasion seemed to
possess him.  In truth, they were he, they were the links of the chain of
recurrence.

But more especially did I dwell upon the experiments of Colonel de
Rochas.  By means of suitable hypnotic subjects he claimed that he had
penetrated backwards through time to the ancestors of his subjects.  Thus,
the case of Josephine which he describes.  She was eighteen years old and
she lived at Voiron, in the department of the Isere.  Under hypnotism
Colonel de Rochas sent her adventuring back through her adolescence, her
girlhood, her childhood, breast-infancy, and the silent dark of her
mother's womb, and, still back, through the silence and the dark of the
time when she, Josephine, was not yet born, to the light and life of a
previous living, when she had been a churlish, suspicious, and embittered
old man, by name Jean-Claude Bourdon, who had served his time in the
Seventh Artillery at Besancon, and who died at the age of seventy, long
bedridden.  _Yes_, and did not Colonel de Rochas in turn hypnotize this
shade of Jean-Claude Bourdon, so that he adventured farther back into
time, through infancy and birth and the dark of the unborn, until he
found again light and life when, as a wicked old woman, he had been
Philomene Carteron?

But try as I would with my bright bit of straw in the oozement of light
into solitary, I failed to achieve any such definiteness of previous
personality.  I became convinced, through the failure of my experiments,
that only through death could I clearly and coherently resurrect the
memories of my previous selves.

But the tides of life ran strong in me.  I, Darrell Standing, was so
strongly disinclined to die that I refused to let Warden Atherton and
Captain Jamie kill me.  I was always so innately urged to live that
sometimes I think that is why I am still here, eating and sleeping,
thinking and dreaming, writing this narrative of my various me's, and
awaiting the incontestable rope that will put an ephemeral period in my
long-linked existence.

And then came death in life.  I learned the trick, Ed Morrell taught it
me, as you shall see.  It began through Warden Atherton and Captain
Jamie.  They must have experienced a recrudescence of panic at thought of
the dynamite they believed hidden.  They came to me in my dark cell, and
they told me plainly that they would jacket me to death if I did not
confess where the dynamite was hidden.  And they assured me that they
would do it officially without any hurt to their own official skins.  My
death would appear on the prison register as due to natural causes.

Oh, dear, cotton-wool citizen, please believe me when I tell you that men
are killed in prisons to-day as they have always been killed since the
first prisons were built by men.

I well knew the terror, the agony, and the danger of the jacket.  Oh, the
men spirit-broken by the jacket!  I have seen them.  And I have seen men
crippled for life by the jacket.  I have seen men, strong men, men so
strong that their physical stamina resisted all attacks of prison
tuberculosis, after a prolonged bout with the jacket, their resistance
broken down, fade away, and die of tuberculosis within six months.  There
was Slant-Eyed Wilson, with an unguessed weak heart of fear, who died in
the jacket within the first hour while the unconvinced inefficient of a
prison doctor looked on and smiled.  And I have seen a man confess, after
half an hour in the jacket, truths and fictions that cost him years of
credits.

I had had my own experiences.  At the present moment half a thousand
scars mark my body.  They go to the scaffold with me.  Did I live a
hundred years to come those same scars in the end would go to the grave
with me.

Perhaps, dear citizen who permits and pays his hang-dogs to lace the
jacket for you--perhaps you are unacquainted with the jacket.  Let me
describe, it, so that you will understand the method by which I achieved
death in life, became a temporary master of time and space, and vaulted
the prison walls to rove among the stars.

Have you ever seen canvas tarpaulins or rubber blankets with brass
eyelets set in along the edges?  Then imagine a piece of stout canvas,
some four and one-half feet in length, with large and heavy brass eyelets
running down both edges.  The width of this canvas is never the full
girth of the human body it is to surround.  The width is also
irregular--broadest at the shoulders, next broadest at the hips, and
narrowest at the waist.

The jacket is spread on the floor.  The man who is to be punished, or who
is to be tortured for confession, is told to lie face-downward on the
flat canvas.  If he refuses, he is man-handled.  After that he lays
himself down with a will, which is the will of the hang-dogs, which is
your will, dear citizen, who feeds and fees the hang-dogs for doing this
thing for you.

The man lies face-downward.  The edges of the jacket are brought as
nearly together as possible along the centre of the man's back.  Then a
rope, on the principle of a shoe-lace, is run through the eyelets, and on
the principle of a shoe-lacing the man is laced in the canvas.  Only he
is laced more severely than any person ever laces his shoe.  They call it
"cinching" in prison lingo.  On occasion, when the guards are cruel and
vindictive, or when the command has come down from above, in order to
insure the severity of the lacing the guards press with their feet into
the man's back as they draw the lacing tight.

Have you ever laced your shoe too tightly, and, after half an hour,
experienced that excruciating pain across the instep of the obstructed
circulation?  And do you remember that after a few minutes of such pain
you simply could not walk another step and had to untie the shoe-lace and
ease the pressure?  Very well.  Then try to imagine your whole body so
laced, only much more tightly, and that the squeeze, instead of being
merely on the instep of one foot, is on your entire trunk, compressing to
the seeming of death your heart, your lungs, and all the rest of your
vital and essential organs.

I remember the first time they gave me the jacket down in the dungeons.
It was at the beginning of my incorrigibility, shortly after my entrance
to prison, when I was weaving my loom-task of a hundred yards a day in
the jute-mill and finishing two hours ahead of the average day.  Yes, and
my jute-sacking was far above the average demanded.  I was sent to the
jacket that first time, according to the prison books, because of "skips"
and "breaks" in the cloth, in short, because my work was defective.  Of
course this was ridiculous.  In truth, I was sent to the jacket because
I, a new convict, a master of efficiency, a trained expert in the
elimination of waste motion, had elected to tell the stupid head weaver a
few things he did not know about his business.  And the head weaver, with
Captain Jamie present, had me called to the table where atrocious
weaving, such as could never have gone through my loom, was exhibited
against me.  Three times was I thus called to the table.  The third
calling meant punishment according to the loom-room rules.  My punishment
was twenty-four hours in the jacket.

They took me down into the dungeons.  I was ordered to lie face-downward
on the canvas spread flat upon the floor.  I refused.  One of the guards,
Morrison, gulletted me with his thumbs.  Mobins, the dungeon trusty, a
convict himself, struck me repeatedly with his fists.  In the end I lay
down as directed.  And, because of the struggle I had vexed them with,
they laced me extra tight.  Then they rolled me over like a log upon my
back.

It did not seem so bad at first.  When they closed my door, with clang
and clash of levered boltage, and left me in the utter dark, it was
eleven o'clock in the morning.  For a few minutes I was aware merely of
an uncomfortable constriction which I fondly believed would ease as I
grew accustomed to it.  On the contrary, my heart began to thump and my
lungs seemed unable to draw sufficient air for my blood.  This sense of
suffocation was terrorizing, and every thump of the heart threatened to
burst my already bursting lungs.

After what seemed hours, and after what, out of my countless succeeding
experiences in the jacket I can now fairly conclude to have been not more
than half-an-hour, I began to cry out, to yell, to scream, to howl, in a
very madness of dying.  The trouble was the pain that had arisen in my
heart.  It was a sharp, definite pain, similar to that of pleurisy,
except that it stabbed hotly through the heart itself.

To die is not a difficult thing, but to die in such slow and horrible
fashion was maddening.  Like a trapped beast of the wild, I experienced
ecstasies of fear, and yelled and howled until I realized that such vocal
exercise merely stabbed my heart more hotly and at the same time consumed
much of the little air in my lungs.

I gave over and lay quiet for a long time--an eternity it seemed then,
though now I am confident that it could have been no longer than a
quarter of an hour.  I grew dizzy with semi-asphyxiation, and my heart
thumped until it seemed surely it would burst the canvas that bound me.
Again I lost control of myself and set up a mad howling for help.

In the midst of this I heard a voice from the next dungeon.

"Shut up," it shouted, though only faintly it percolated to me.  "Shut
up.  You make me tired."

"I'm dying," I cried out.

"Pound your ear and forget it," was the reply.

"But I _am_ dying," I insisted.

"Then why worry?" came the voice.  "You'll be dead pretty quick an' out
of it.  Go ahead and croak, but don't make so much noise about it.  You're
interruptin' my beauty sleep."

So angered was I by this callous indifference that I recovered
self-control and was guilty of no more than smothered groans.  This
endured an endless time--possibly ten minutes; and then a tingling
numbness set up in all my body.  It was like pins and needles, and for as
long as it hurt like pins and needles I kept my head.  But when the
prickling of the multitudinous darts ceased to hurt and only the numbness
remained and continued verging into greater numbness I once more grew
frightened.

"How am I goin' to get a wink of sleep?" my neighbour, complained.  "I
ain't any more happy than you.  My jacket's just as tight as yourn, an' I
want to sleep an' forget it."

"How long have you been in?" I asked, thinking him a new-comer compared
to the centuries I had already suffered.

"Since day before yesterday," was his answer.

"I mean in the jacket," I amended.

"Since day before yesterday, brother."

"My God!" I screamed.

"Yes, brother, fifty straight hours, an' you don't hear me raisin' a roar
about it.  They cinched me with their feet in my back.  I am some tight,
believe _me_.  You ain't the only one that's got troubles.  You ain't ben
in an hour yet."

"I've been in hours and hours," I protested.

"Brother, you may think so, but it don't make it so.  I'm just tellin'
you you ain't ben in an hour.  I heard 'm lacin' you."

The thing was incredible.  Already, in less than an hour, I had died a
thousand deaths.  And yet this neighbour, balanced and equable,
calm-voiced and almost beneficent despite the harshness of his first
remarks, had been in the jacket fifty hours!

"How much longer are they going to keep you in?" I asked.

"The Lord only knows.  Captain Jamie is real peeved with me, an' he won't
let me out until I'm about croakin'.  Now, brother, I'm going to give you
the tip.  The only way is shut your face an' forget it.  Yellin' an'
hollerin' don't win you no money in this joint.  An' the way to forget is
to forget.  Just get to rememberin' every girl you ever knew.  That'll
cat up hours for you.  Mebbe you'll feel yourself gettin' woozy.  Well,
get woozy.  You can't beat that for killin' time.  An' when the girls
won't hold you, get to thinkin' of the fellows you got it in for, an'
what you'd do to 'em if you got a chance, an' what you're goin' to do to
'em when you get that same chance."

That man was Philadelphia Red.  Because of prior conviction he was
serving fifty years for highway robbery committed on the streets of
Alameda.  He had already served a dozen of his years at the time he
talked to me in the jacket, and that was seven years ago.  He was one of
the forty lifers who were double-crossed by Cecil Winwood.  For that
offence Philadelphia Red lost his credits.  He is middle-aged now, and he
is still in San Quentin.  If he survives he will be an old man when they
let him out.

I lived through my twenty-four hours, and I have never been the same man
since.  Oh, I don't mean physically, although next morning, when they
unlaced me, I was semi-paralyzed and in such a state of collapse that the
guards had to kick me in the ribs to make me crawl to my feet.  But I was
a changed man mentally, morally.  The brute physical torture of it was
humiliation and affront to my spirit and to my sense of justice.  Such
discipline does not sweeten a man.  I emerged from that first jacketing
filled with a bitterness and a passionate hatred that has only increased
through the years.  My God--when I think of the things men have done to
me!  Twenty-four hours in the jacket!  Little I thought that morning when
they kicked me to my feet that the time would come when twenty-four hours
in the jacket meant nothing; when a hundred hours in the jacket found me
smiling when they released me; when two hundred and forty hours in the
jacket found the same smile on my lips.

Yes, two hundred and forty hours.  Dear cotton-woolly citizen, do you
know what that means?  It means ten days and ten nights in the jacket.  Of
course, such things are not done anywhere in the Christian world nineteen
hundred years after Christ.  I don't ask you to believe me.  I don't
believe it myself.  I merely know that it was done to me in San Quentin,
and that I lived to laugh at them and to compel them to get rid of me by
swinging me off because I bloodied a guard's nose.

I write these lines to-day in the Year of Our Lord 1913, and to-day, in
the Year of Our Lord 1913, men are lying in the jacket in the dungeons of
San Quentin.

I shall never forget, as long as further living and further lives be
vouchsafed me, my parting from Philadelphia Red that morning.  He had
then been seventy-four hours in the jacket.

"Well, brother, you're still alive an' kickin'," he called to me, as I
was totteringly dragged from my cell into the corridor of dungeons.

"Shut up, you, Red," the sergeant snarled at him.

"Forget it," was the retort.

"I'll get you yet, Red," the sergeant threatened.

"Think so?" Philadelphia Red queried sweetly, ere his tones turned to
savageness.  "Why, you old stiff, you couldn't get nothin'.  You couldn't
get a free lunch, much less the job you've got now, if it wasn't for your
brother's pull.  An' I guess we all ain't mistaken on the stink of the
place where your brother's pull comes from."

It was admirable--the spirit of man rising above its extremity, fearless
of the hurt any brute of the system could inflict.

"Well, so long, brother," Philadelphia Red next called to me.  "So long.
Be good, an' love the Warden.  An' if you see 'em, just tell 'em that you
saw me but that you didn't see me saw."

The sergeant was red with rage, and, by the receipt of various kicks and
blows, I paid for Red's pleasantry.




CHAPTER VIII


In solitary, in Cell One, Warden Atherton and Captain Jamie proceeded to
put me to the inquisition.  As Warden Atherton said to me:

"Standing, you're going to come across with that dynamite, or I'll kill
you in the jacket.  Harder cases than you have come across before I got
done with them.  You've got your choice--dynamite or curtains."

"Then I guess it is curtains," I answered, "because I don't know of any
dynamite."

This irritated the Warden to immediate action.  "Lie down," he commanded.

I obeyed, for I had learned the folly of fighting three or four strong
men.  They laced me tightly, and gave me a hundred hours.  Once each
twenty-four hours I was permitted a drink of water.  I had no desire for
food, nor was food offered me.  Toward the end of the hundred hours
Jackson, the prison doctor, examined my physical condition several times.

But I had grown too used to the jacket during my incorrigible days to let
a single jacketing injure me.  Naturally, it weakened me, took the life
out of me; but I had learned muscular tricks for stealing a little space
while they were lacing me.  At the end of the first hundred hours' bout I
was worn and tired, but that was all.  Another bout of this duration they
gave me, after a day and a night to recuperate.  And then they gave one
hundred and fifty hours.  Much of this time I was physically numb and
mentally delirious.  Also, by an effort of will, I managed to sleep away
long hours.

Next, Warden Atherton tried a variation.  I was given irregular intervals
of jacket and recuperation.  I never knew when I was to go into the
jacket.  Thus I would have ten hours' recuperation, and do twenty in the
jacket; or I would receive only four hours' rest.  At the most unexpected
hours of the night my door would clang open and the changing guards would
lace me.  Sometimes rhythms were instituted.  Thus, for three days and
nights I alternated eight hours in the jacket and eight hours out.  And
then, just as I was growing accustomed to this rhythm, it was suddenly
altered and I was given two days and nights straight.

And ever the eternal question was propounded to me: Where was the
dynamite?  Sometimes Warden Atherton was furious with me.  On occasion,
when I had endured an extra severe jacketing, he almost pleaded with me
to confess.  Once he even promised me three months in the hospital of
absolute rest and good food, and then the trusty job in the library.

Dr. Jackson, a weak stick of a creature with a smattering of medicine,
grew sceptical.  He insisted that jacketing, no matter how prolonged,
could never kill me; and his insistence was a challenge to the Warden to
continue the attempt.

"These lean college guys 'd fool the devil," he grumbled.  "They're
tougher 'n raw-hide.  Just the same we'll wear him down.  Standing, you
hear me.  What you've got ain't a caution to what you're going to get.
You might as well come across now and save trouble.  I'm a man of my
word.  You've heard me say dynamite or curtains.  Well, that stands.  Take
your choice."

"Surely you don't think I'm holding out because I enjoy it?" I managed to
gasp, for at the moment Pie-Face Jones was forcing his foot into my back
in order to cinch me tighter, while I was trying with my muscle to steal
slack.  "There is nothing to confess.  Why, I'd cut off my right hand
right now to be able to lead you to any dynamite."

"Oh, I've seen your educated kind before," he sneered.  "You get wheels
in your head, some of you, that make you stick to any old idea.  You get
baulky, like horses.  Tighter, Jones; that ain't half a cinch.  Standing,
if you don't come across it's curtains.  I stick by that."

One compensation I learned.  As one grows weaker one is less susceptible
to suffering.  There is less hurt because there is less to hurt.  And the
man already well weakened grows weaker more slowly.  It is of common
knowledge that unusually strong men suffer more severely from ordinary
sicknesses than do women or invalids.  As the reserves of strength are
consumed there is less strength to lose.  After all superfluous flesh is
gone what is left is stringy and resistant.  In fact, that was what I
became--a sort of string-like organism that persisted in living.

Morrell and Oppenheimer were sorry for me, and rapped me sympathy and
advice.  Oppenheimer told me he had gone through it, and worse, and still
lived.

"Don't let them beat you out," he spelled with his knuckles.  "Don't let
them kill you, for that would suit them.  And don't squeal on the plant."

"But there isn't any plant," I rapped back with the edge of the sole of
my shoe against the grating--I was in the jacket at the time and so could
talk only with my feet.  "I don't know anything about the damned
dynamite."

"That's right," Oppenheimer praised.  "He's the stuff, ain't he, Ed?"

Which goes to show what chance I had of convincing Warden Atherton of my
ignorance of the dynamite.  His very persistence in the quest convinced a
man like Jake Oppenheimer, who could only admire me for the fortitude
with which I kept a close mouth.

During this first period of the jacket-inquisition I managed to sleep a
great deal.  My dreams were remarkable.  Of course they were vivid and
real, as most dreams are.  What made them remarkable was their coherence
and continuity.  Often I addressed bodies of scientists on abstruse
subjects, reading aloud to them carefully prepared papers on my own
researches or on my own deductions from the researches and experiments of
others.  When I awakened my voice would seem still ringing in my ears,
while my eyes still could see typed on the white paper whole sentences
and paragraphs that I could read again and marvel at ere the vision
faded.  In passing, I call attention to the fact that at the time I noted
that the process of reasoning employed in these dream speeches was
invariably deductive.

Then there was a great farming section, extending north and south for
hundreds of miles in some part of the temperate regions, with a climate
and flora and fauna largely resembling those of California.  Not once,
nor twice, but thousands of different times I journeyed through this
dream-region.  The point I desire to call attention to was that it was
always the same region.  No essential feature of it ever differed in the
different dreams.  Thus it was always an eight-hour drive behind mountain
horses from the alfalfa meadows (where I kept many Jersey cows) to the
straggly village beside the big dry creek, where I caught the little
narrow-gauge train.  Every land-mark in that eight-hour drive in the
mountain buckboard, every tree, every mountain, every ford and bridge,
every ridge and eroded hillside was ever the same.

In this coherent, rational farm-region of my strait-jacket dreams the
minor details, according to season and to the labour of men, did change.
Thus on the upland pastures behind my alfalfa meadows I developed a new
farm with the aid of Angora goats.  Here I marked the changes with every
dream-visit, and the changes were in accordance with the time that
elapsed between visits.

Oh, those brush-covered slopes!  How I can see them now just as when the
goats were first introduced.  And how I remembered the consequent
changes--the paths beginning to form as the goats literally ate their way
through the dense thickets; the disappearance of the younger, smaller
bushes that were not too tall for total browsing; the vistas that formed
in all directions through the older, taller bushes, as the goats browsed
as high as they could stand and reach on their hind legs; the driftage of
the pasture grasses that followed in the wake of the clearing by the
goats.  Yes, the continuity of such dreaming was its charm.  Came the day
when the men with axes chopped down all the taller brush so as to give
the goats access to the leaves and buds and bark.  Came the day, in
winter weather, when the dry denuded skeletons of all these bushes were
gathered into heaps and burned.  Came the day when I moved my goats on to
other brush-impregnable hillsides, with following in their wake my
cattle, pasturing knee-deep in the succulent grasses that grew where
before had been only brush.  And came the day when I moved my cattle on,
and my plough-men went back and forth across the slopes'
contour--ploughing the rich sod under to rot to live and crawling humous
in which to bed my seeds of crops to be.

Yes, and in my dreams, often, I got off the little narrow-gauge train
where the straggly village stood beside the big dry creek, and got into
the buckboard behind my mountain horses, and drove hour by hour past all
the old familiar landmarks of my alfalfa meadows, and on to my upland
pastures where my rotated crops of corn and barley and clover were ripe
for harvesting and where I watched my men engaged in the harvest, while
beyond, ever climbing, my goats browsed the higher slopes of brush into
cleared, tilled fields.

But these were dreams, frank dreams, fancied adventures of my deductive
subconscious mind.  Quite unlike them, as you shall see, were my other
adventures when I passed through the gates of the living death and
relived the reality of the other lives that had been mine in other days.

In the long hours of waking in the jacket I found that I dwelt a great
deal on Cecil Winwood, the poet-forger who had wantonly put all this
torment on me, and who was even then at liberty out in the free world
again.  No; I did not hate him.  The word is too weak.  There is no word
in the language strong enough to describe my feelings.  I can say only
that I knew the gnawing of a desire for vengeance on him that was a pain
in itself and that exceeded all the bounds of language.  I shall not tell
you of the hours I devoted to plans of torture on him, nor of the
diabolical means and devices of torture that I invented for him.  Just
one example.  I was enamoured of the ancient trick whereby an iron basin,
containing a rat, is fastened to a man's body.  The only way out for the
rat is through the man himself.  As I say, I was enamoured of this until
I realized that such a death was too quick, whereupon I dwelt long and
favourably on the Moorish trick of--but no, I promised to relate no
further of this matter.  Let it suffice that many of my pain-maddening
waking hours were devoted to dreams of vengeance on Cecil Winwood.




CHAPTER IX


One thing of great value I learned in the long, pain-weary hours of
waking--namely, the mastery of the body by the mind.  I learned to suffer
passively, as, undoubtedly, all men have learned who have passed through
the post-graduate courses of strait-jacketing.  Oh, it is no easy trick
to keep the brain in such serene repose that it is quite oblivious to the
throbbing, exquisite complaint of some tortured nerve.

And it was this very mastery of the flesh by the spirit which I so
acquired that enabled me easily to practise the secret Ed Morrell told to
me.

"Think it is curtains?" Ed Morrell rapped to me one night.

I had just been released from one hundred hours, and I was weaker than I
had ever been before.  So weak was I that though my whole body was one
mass of bruise and misery, nevertheless I scarcely was aware that I had a
body.

"It looks like curtains," I rapped back.  "They will get me if they keep
it up much longer."

"Don't let them," he advised.  "There is a way.  I learned it myself,
down in the dungeons, when Massie and I got ours good and plenty.  I
pulled through.  But Massie croaked.  If I hadn't learned the trick, I'd
have croaked along with him.  You've got to be pretty weak first, before
you try it.  If you try it when you are strong, you make a failure of it,
and then that queers you for ever after.  I made the mistake of telling
Jake the trick when he was strong.  Of course, he could not pull it off,
and in the times since when he did need it, it was too late, for his
first failure had queered it.  He won't even believe it now.  He thinks I
am kidding him.  Ain't that right, Jake?"

And from cell thirteen Jake rapped back, "Don't swallow it, Darrell.  It's
a sure fairy story."

"Go on and tell me," I rapped to Morrell.

"That is why I waited for you to get real weak," he continued.  "Now you
need it, and I am going to tell you.  It's up to you.  If you have got
the will you can do it.  I've done it three times, and I know."

"Well, what is it?" I rapped eagerly.

"The trick is to die in the jacket, to will yourself to die.  I know you
don't get me yet, but wait.  You know how you get numb in the jacket--how
your arm or your leg goes to sleep.  Now you can't help that, but you can
take it for the idea and improve on it.  Don't wait for your legs or
anything to go to sleep.  You lie on your back as comfortable as you can
get, and you begin to use your will.

"And this is the idea you must think to yourself, and that you must
believe all the time you're thinking it.  If you don't believe, then
there's nothing to it.  The thing you must think and believe is that your
body is one thing and your spirit is another thing.  You are you, and
your body is something else that don't amount to shucks.  Your body don't
count.  You're the boss.  You don't need any body.  And thinking and
believing all this you proceed to prove it by using your will.  You make
your body die.

"You begin with the toes, one at a time.  You make your toes die.  You
will them to die.  And if you've got the belief and the will your toes
will die.  That is the big job--to start the dying.  Once you've got the
first toe dead, the rest is easy, for you don't have to do any more
believing.  You know.  Then you put all your will into making the rest of
the body die.  I tell you, Darrell, I know.  I've done it three times.

"Once you get the dying started, it goes right along.  And the funny
thing is that you are all there all the time.  Because your toes are dead
don't make you in the least bit dead.  By-and-by your legs are dead to
the knees, and then to the thighs, and you are just the same as you
always were.  It is your body that is dropping out of the game a chunk at
a time.  And you are just you, the same you were before you began."

"And then what happens?" I queried.

"Well, when your body is all dead, and you are all there yet, you just
skin out and leave your body.  And when you leave your body you leave the
cell.  Stone walls and iron doors are to hold bodies in.  They can't hold
the spirit in.  You see, you have proved it.  You are spirit outside of
your body.  You can look at your body from outside of it.  I tell you I
know because I have done it three times--looked at my body lying there
with me outside of it."

"Ha! ha! ha!" Jake Oppenheimer rapped his laughter thirteen cells away.

"You see, that's Jake's trouble," Morrell went on.  "He can't believe.
That one time he tried it he was too strong and failed.  And now he
thinks I am kidding."

"When you die you are dead, and dead men stay dead," Oppenheimer
retorted.

"I tell you I've been dead three times," Morrell argued.

"And lived to tell us about it," Oppenheimer jeered.

"But don't forget one thing, Darrell," Morrell rapped to me.  "The thing
is ticklish.  You have a feeling all the time that you are taking
liberties.  I can't explain it, but I always had a feeling if I was away
when they came and let my body out of the jacket that I couldn't get back
into my body again.  I mean that my body would be dead for keeps.  And I
didn't want it to be dead.  I didn't want to give Captain Jamie and the
rest that satisfaction.  But I tell you, Darrell, if you can turn the
trick you can laugh at the Warden.  Once you make your body die that way
it don't matter whether they keep you in the jacket a month on end.  You
don't suffer none, and your body don't suffer.  You know there are cases
of people who have slept a whole year at a time.  That's the way it will
be with your body.  It just stays there in the jacket, not hurting or
anything, just waiting for you to come back.

"You try it.  I am giving you the straight steer."

"And if he don't come back?" Oppenheimer, asked.

"Then the laugh will be on him, I guess, Jake," Morrell answered.
"Unless, maybe, it will be on us for sticking round this old dump when we
could get away that easy."

And here the conversation ended, for Pie-Face Jones, waking crustily from
stolen slumber, threatened Morrell and Oppenheimer with a report next
morning that would mean the jacket for them.  Me he did not threaten, for
he knew I was doomed for the jacket anyway.

I lay long there in the silence, forgetting the misery of my body while I
considered this proposition Morrell had advanced.  Already, as I have
explained, by mechanical self-hypnosis I had sought to penetrate back
through time to my previous selves.  That I had partly succeeded I knew;
but all that I had experienced was a fluttering of apparitions that
merged erratically and were without continuity.

But Morrell's method was so patently the reverse of my method of self-
hypnosis that I was fascinated.  By my method, my consciousness went
first of all.  By his method, consciousness persisted last of all, and,
when the body was quite gone, passed into stages so sublimated that it
left the body, left the prison of San Quentin, and journeyed afar, and
was still consciousness.

It was worth a trial, anyway, I concluded.  And, despite the sceptical
attitude of the scientist that was mine, I believed.  I had no doubt I
could do what Morrell said he had done three times.  Perhaps this faith
that so easily possessed me was due to my extreme debility.  Perhaps I
was not strong enough to be sceptical.  This was the hypothesis already
suggested by Morrell.  It was a conclusion of pure empiricism, and I,
too, as you shall see, demonstrated it empirically.




CHAPTER X


And above all things, next morning Warden Atherton came into my cell on
murder intent.  With him were Captain Jamie, Doctor Jackson, Pie-Face
Jones, and Al Hutchins.  Al Hutchins was serving a forty-years' sentence,
and was in hopes of being pardoned out.  For four years he had been head
trusty of San Quentin.  That this was a position of great power you will
realize when I tell you that the graft alone of the head trusty was
estimated at three thousand dollars a year.  Wherefore Al Hutchins, in
possession of ten or twelve thousand dollars and of the promise of a
pardon, could be depended upon to do the Warden's bidding blind.

I have just said that Warden Atherton came into my cell intent on murder.
His face showed it.  His actions proved it.

"Examine him," he ordered Doctor Jackson.

That wretched apology of a creature stripped from me my dirt-encrusted
shirt that I had worn since my entrance to solitary, and exposed my poor
wasted body, the skin ridged like brown parchment over the ribs and sore-
infested from the many bouts with the jacket.  The examination was
shamelessly perfunctory.

"Will he stand it?" the Warden demanded.

"Yes," Doctor Jackson answered.

"How's the heart?"

"Splendid."

"You think he'll stand ten days of it, Doc.?"

"Sure."

"I don't believe it," the Warden announced savagely.  "But we'll try it
just the same.--Lie down, Standing."

I obeyed, stretching myself face-downward on the flat-spread jacket.  The
Warden seemed to debate with himself for a moment.

"Roll over," he commanded.

I made several efforts, but was too weak to succeed, and could only
sprawl and squirm in my helplessness.

"Putting it on," was Jackson's comment.

"Well, he won't have to put it on when I'm done with him," said the
Warden.  "Lend him a hand.  I can't waste any more time on him."

So they rolled me over on my back, where I stared up into Warden
Atherton's face.

"Standing," he said slowly, "I've given you all the rope I am going to.  I
am sick and tired of your stubbornness.  My patience is exhausted.  Doctor
Jackson says you are in condition to stand ten days in the jacket.  You
can figure your chances.  But I am going to give you your last chance
now.  Come across with the dynamite.  The moment it is in my hands I'll
take you out of here.  You can bathe and shave and get clean clothes.
I'll let you loaf for six months on hospital grub, and then I'll put you
trusty in the library.  You can't ask me to be fairer with you than that.
Besides, you're not squealing on anybody.  You are the only person in San
Quentin who knows where the dynamite is.  You won't hurt anybody's
feelings by giving in, and you'll be all to the good from the moment you
do give in.  And if you don't--"

He paused and shrugged his shoulders significantly.

"Well, if you don't, you start in the ten days right now."

The prospect was terrifying.  So weak was I that I was as certain as the
Warden was that it meant death in the jacket.  And then I remembered
Morrell's trick.  Now, if ever, was the need of it; and now, if ever, was
the time to practise the faith of it.  I smiled up in the face of Warden
Atherton.  And I put faith in that smile, and faith in the proposition I
made to him.

"Warden," I said, "do you see the way I am smiling?  Well, if, at the end
of the ten days, when you unlace me, I smile up at you in the same way,
will you give a sack of Bull Durham and a package of brown papers to
Morrell and Oppenheimer?"

"Ain't they the crazy ginks, these college guys," Captain Jamie snorted.

Warden Atherton was a choleric man, and he took my request for insulting
braggadocio.

"Just for that you get an extra cinching," he informed me.

"I made you a sporting proposition, Warden," I said quietly.  "You can
cinch me as tight as you please, but if I smile ten days from now will
you give the Bull Durham to Morrell and Oppenheimer?"

"You are mighty sure of yourself," he retorted.

"That's why I made the proposition," I replied.

"Getting religion, eh?" he sneered.

"No," was my answer.  "It merely happens that I possess more life than
you can ever reach the end of.  Make it a hundred days if you want, and
I'll smile at you when it's over."

"I guess ten days will more than do you, Standing."

"That's your opinion," I said.  "Have you got faith in it?  If you have
you won't even lose the price of the two five-cents sacks of tobacco.
Anyway, what have you got to be afraid of?"

"For two cents I'd kick the face off of you right now," he snarled.

"Don't let me stop you."  I was impudently suave.  "Kick as hard as you
please, and I'll still have enough face left with which to smile.  In the
meantime, while you are hesitating, suppose you accept my original
proposition."

A man must be terribly weak and profoundly desperate to be able, under
such circumstances, to beard the Warden in solitary.  Or he may be both,
and, in addition, he may have faith.  I know now that I had the faith and
so acted on it.  I believed what Morrell had told me.  I believed in the
lordship of the mind over the body.  I believed that not even a hundred
days in the jacket could kill me.

Captain Jamie must have sensed this faith that informed me, for he said:

"I remember a Swede that went crazy twenty years ago.  That was before
your time, Warden.  He'd killed a man in a quarrel over twenty-five cents
and got life for it.  He was a cook.  He got religion.  He said that a
golden chariot was coming to take him to heaven, and he sat down on top
the red-hot range and sang hymns and hosannahs while he cooked.  They
dragged him off, but he croaked two days afterward in hospital.  He was
cooked to the bone.  And to the end he swore he'd never felt the heat.
Couldn't get a squeal out of him."

"We'll make Standing squeal," said the Warden.

"Since you are so sure of it, why don't you accept my proposition?" I
challenged.

The Warden was so angry that it would have been ludicrous to me had I not
been in so desperate plight.  His face was convulsed.  He clenched his
hands, and, for a moment, it seemed that he was about to fall upon me and
give me a beating.  Then, with an effort, he controlled himself.

"All right, Standing," he snarled.  "I'll go you.  But you bet your sweet
life you'll have to go some to smile ten days from now.  Roll him over,
boys, and cinch him till you hear his ribs crack.  Hutchins, show him you
know how to do it."

And they rolled me over and laced me as I had never been laced before.
The head trusty certainly demonstrated his ability.  I tried to steal
what little space I could.  Little it was, for I had long since shed my
flesh, while my muscles were attenuated to mere strings.  I had neither
the strength nor bulk to steal more than a little, and the little I stole
I swear I managed by sheer expansion at the joints of the bones of my
frame.  And of this little I was robbed by Hutchins, who, in the old days
before he was made head trusty, had learned all the tricks of the jacket
from the inside of the jacket.

You see, Hutchins was a cur at heart, or a creature who had once been a
man, but who had been broken on the wheel.  He possessed ten or twelve
thousand dollars, and his freedom was in sight if he obeyed orders.
Later, I learned that there was a girl who had remained true to him, and
who was even then waiting for him.  The woman factor explains many things
of men.

If ever a man deliberately committed murder, Al Hutchins did that morning
in solitary at the Warden's bidding.  He robbed me of the little space I
stole.  And, having robbed me of that, my body was defenceless, and, with
his foot in my back while he drew the lacing light, he constricted me as
no man had ever before succeeded in doing.  So severe was this
constriction of my frail frame upon my vital organs that I felt, there
and then, immediately, that death was upon me.  And still the miracle of
faith was mine.  I did not believe that I was going to die.  I knew--I
say I _knew_--that I was not going to die.  My head was swimming, and my
heart was pounding from my toenails to the hair-roots in my scalp.

"That's pretty tight," Captain Jamie urged reluctantly.

"The hell it is," said Doctor Jackson.  "I tell you nothing can hurt him.
He's a wooz.  He ought to have been dead long ago."

Warden Atherton, after a hard struggle, managed to insert his forefinger
between the lacing and my back.  He brought his foot to bear upon me,
with the weight of his body added to his foot, and pulled, but failed to
get any fraction of an inch of slack.

"I take my hat off to you, Hutchins," he said.  "You know your job.  Now
roll him over and let's look at him."

They rolled me over on my back.  I stared up