The Jacket (Star-Rover)
by Jack London
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman

by Jack London

1915 Mills & Boon edition

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 life-time 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 life-timer 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 life-
timer 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 houseflies 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 life-time 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 sagebrush 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 buck-board 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 at them with bulging
eyes. This I know: Had they laced me in such fashion the first
time I went into the jacket, I would surely have died in the first
ten minutes. But I was well trained. I had behind me the thousands
of hours in the jacket, and, plus that, I had faith in what Morrell
had told me.

"Now, laugh, damn you, laugh," said the Warden to me. "Start that
smile you've been bragging about.

So, while my lungs panted for a little air, while my heart
threatened to burst, while my mind reeled, nevertheless I was able
to smile up into the Warden's face.

CHAPTER XI

The door clanged, shutting out all but a little light, and I was
left alone on my back. By the tricks I had long since learned in
the jacket, I managed to writhe myself across the floor an inch at a
time until the edge of the sole of my right shoe touched the door.
There was an immense cheer in this. I was not utterly alone. If
the need arose, I could at least rap knuckle talk to Morrell.

But Warden Atherton must have left strict injunctions on the guards,
for, though I managed to call Morrell and tell him I intended trying
the experiment, he was prevented by the guards from replying. Me
they could only curse, for, in so far as I was in the jacket for a
ten days' bout, I was beyond all threat of punishment.

I remember remarking at the time my serenity of mind. The customary
pain of the jacket was in my body, but my mind was so passive that I
was no more aware of the pain than was I aware of the floor beneath
me or the walls around me. Never was a man in better mental and
spiritual condition for such an experiment. Of course, this was
largely due to my extreme weakness. But there was more to it. I
had long schooled myself to be oblivious to pain. I had neither
doubts nor fears. All the content of my mind seemed to be an
absolute faith in the over-lordship of the mind. This passivity was
almost dream-like, and yet, in its way, it was positive almost to a
pitch of exaltation.

I began my concentration of will. Even then my body was numbing and
prickling through the loss of circulation. I directed my will to
the little toe of my right foot, and I willed that toe to cease to
be alive in my consciousness. I willed that toe to die--to die so
far as I, its lord, and a different thing entirely from it, was
concerned. There was the hard struggle. Morrell had warned me that
it would be so. But there was no flicker of doubt to disturb my
faith. I knew that that toe would die, and I knew when it was dead.
Joint by joint it had died under the compulsion of my will.

The rest was easy, but slow, I will admit. Joint by joint, toe by
toe, all the toes of both my feet ceased to be. And joint by joint,
the process went on. Came the time when my flesh below the ankles
had ceased. Came the time when all below my knees had ceased.

Such was the pitch of my perfect exaltation, that I knew not the
slightest prod of rejoicing at my success. I knew nothing save that
I was making my body die. All that was I was devoted to that sole
task. I performed the work as thoroughly as any mason laying
bricks, and I regarded the work as just about as commonplace as
would a brick-mason regard his work.

At the end of an hour my body was dead to the hips, and from the
hips up, joint by joint, I continued to will the ascending death.

It was when I reached the level of my heart that the first blurring
and dizzying of my consciousness' occurred. For fear that I should
lose consciousness, I willed to hold the death I had gained, and
shifted my concentration to my fingers. My brain cleared again, and
the death of my arms to the shoulders was most rapidly accomplished.

At this stage my body was all dead, so far as I was concerned, save
my head and a little patch of my chest. No longer did the pound and
smash of my compressed heart echo in my brain. My heart was beating
steadily but feebly. The joy of it, had I dared joy at such a
moment, would have been the cessation of sensations.

At this point my experience differs from Morrell's. Still willing
automatically, I began to grow dreamy, as one does in that
borderland between sleeping and waking. Also, it seemed as if a
prodigious enlargement of my brain was taking place within the skull
itself that did not enlarge. There were occasional glintings and
flashings of light as if even I, the overlord, had ceased for a
moment and the next moment was again myself, still the tenant of the
fleshly tenement that I was making to die.

Most perplexing was the seeming enlargement of brain. Without
having passed through the wall of skull, nevertheless it seemed to
me that the periphery of my brain was already outside my skull and
still expanding. Along with this was one of the most remarkable
sensations or experiences that I have ever encountered. Time and
space, in so far as they were the stuff of my consciousness,
underwent an enormous extension. Thus, without opening my eyes to
verify, I knew that the walls of my narrow cell had receded until it
was like a vast audience-chamber. And while I contemplated the
matter, I knew that they continued to recede. The whim struck me
for a moment that if a similar expansion were taking place with the
whole prison, then the outer walls of San Quentin must be far out in
the Pacific Ocean on one side and on the other side must be
encroaching on the Nevada desert. A companion whim was that since
matter could permeate matter, then the walls of my cell might well
permeate the prison walls, pass through the prison walls, and thus
put my cell outside the prison and put me at liberty. Of course,
this was pure fantastic whim, and I knew it at the time for what it
was.

The extension of time was equally remarkable. Only at long
intervals did my heart beat. Again a whim came to me, and I counted
the seconds, slow and sure, between my heart-beats. At first, as I
clearly noted, over a hundred seconds intervened between beats. But
as I continued to count the intervals extended so that I was made
weary of counting.

And while this illusion of the extension of time and space persisted
and grew, I found myself dreamily considering a new and profound
problem. Morrell had told me that he had won freedom from his body
by killing his body--or by eliminating his body from his
consciousness, which, of course, was in effect the same thing. Now,
my body was so near to being entirely dead that I knew in all
absoluteness that by a quick concentration of will on the yet-alive
patch of my torso it, too, would cease to be. But--and here was the
problem, and Morrell had not warned me: should I also will my head
to be dead? If I did so, no matter what befell the spirit of
Darrell Standing, would not the body of Darrell Standing be for ever
dead?

I chanced the chest and the slow-beating heart. The quick
compulsion of my will was rewarded. I no longer had chest nor
heart. I was only a mind, a soul, a consciousness--call it what you
will--incorporate in a nebulous brain that, while it still centred
inside my skull, was expanded, and was continuing to expand, beyond
my skull.

And then, with flashings of light, I was off and away. At a bound I
had vaulted prison roof  and California sky, and was among the
stars. I say "stars" advisedly. I walked among the stars. I was a
child. I was clad in frail, fleece-like, delicate-coloured robes
that shimmered in the cool starlight. These robes, of course, were
based upon my boyhood observance of circus actors and my boyhood
conception of the garb of young angels.

Nevertheless, thus clad, I trod interstellar space, exalted by the
knowledge that I was bound on vast adventure, where, at the end, I
would find all the cosmic formulae and have made clear to me the
ultimate secret of the universe. In my hand I carried a long glass
wand. It was borne in upon me that with the tip of this wand I must
touch each star in passing. And I knew, in all absoluteness, that
did I but miss one star I should be precipitated into some
unplummeted abyss of unthinkable and eternal punishment and guilt.

Long I pursued my starry quest. When I say "long," you must bear in
mind the enormous extension of time that had occurred in my brain.
For centuries I trod space, with the tip of my wand and with
unerring eye and hand tapping each star I passed. Ever the way grew
brighter. Ever the ineffable goal of infinite wisdom grew nearer.
And yet I made no mistake. This was no other self of mine. This
was no experience that had once been mine. I was aware all the time
that it was I, Darrell Standing, who walked among the stars and
tapped them with a wand of glass. In short, I knew that here was
nothing real, nothing that had ever been nor could ever be. I knew
that it was nothing else than a ridiculous orgy of the imagination,
such as men enjoy in drug dreams, in delirium, or in mere ordinary
slumber.

And then, as all went merry and well with me on my celestial quest,
the tip of my wand missed a star, and on the instant I knew I had
been guilty of a great crime. And on the instant a knock, vast and
compulsive, inexorable and mandatory as the stamp of the iron hoof
of doom, smote me and reverberated across the universe. The whole
sidereal system coruscated, reeled and fell in flame.

I was torn by an exquisite and disruptive agony. And on the instant
I was Darrell Standing, the life-convict, lying in his strait-jacket
in solitary. And I knew the immediate cause of that summons. It
was a rap of the knuckle by Ed Morrell, in Cell Five, beginning the
spelling of some message.

And now, to give some comprehension of the extension of time and
space that I was experiencing. Many days afterwards I asked Morrell
what he had tried to convey to me. It was a simple message, namely:
"Standing, are you there?"  He had tapped it rapidly, while the
guard was at the far end of the corridor into which the solitary
cells opened. As I say, he had tapped the message very rapidly.
And now behold! Between the first tap and the second I was off and
away among the stars, clad in fleecy garments, touching each star as
I passed in my pursuit of the formulae that would explain the last
mystery of life. And, as before, I pursued the quest for centuries.
Then came the summons, the stamp of the hoof of doom, the exquisite
disruptive agony, and again I was back in my cell in San Quentin.
It was the second tap of Ed Morrell's knuckle. The interval between
it and the first tap could have been no more than a fifth of a
second. And yet, so unthinkably enormous was the extension of time
to me, that in the course of that fifth of a second I had been away
star-roving for long ages.

Now I know, my reader, that the foregoing seems all a farrago. I
agree with you. It is farrago. It was experience, however. It was
just as real to me as is the snake beheld by a man in delirium
tremens.

Possibly, by the most liberal estimate, it may have taken Ed Morrell
two minutes to tap his question. Yet, to me, aeons elapsed between
the first tap of his knuckle and the last. No longer could I tread
my starry path with that ineffable pristine joy, for my way was
beset with dread of the inevitable summons that would rip and tear
me as it jerked me back to my straitjacket hell. Thus my aeons of
star-wandering were aeons of dread.

And all the time I knew it was Ed Morrell's knuckle that thus
cruelly held me earth-bound. I tried to speak to him, to ask him to
cease. But so thoroughly had I eliminated my body from my
consciousness that I was unable to resurrect it. My body lay dead
in the jacket, though I still inhabited the skull. In vain I strove
to will my foot to tap my message to Morrell. I reasoned I had a
foot. And yet, so thoroughly had I carried out the experiment, I
had no foot.

Next--and I know now that it was because Morrell had spelled his
message quite out--I pursued my way among the stars and was not
called back. After that, and in the course of it, I was aware,
drowsily, that I was falling asleep, and that it was delicious
sleep. From time to time, drowsily, I stirred--please, my reader,
don't miss that verb--I STIRRED. I moved my legs, my arms. I was
aware of clean, soft bed linen against my skin. I was aware of
bodily well-being. Oh, it was delicious! As thirsting men on the
desert dream of splashing fountains and flowing wells, so dreamed I
of easement from the constriction of the jacket, of cleanliness in
the place of filth, of smooth velvety skin of health in place of my
poor parchment-crinkled hide. But I dreamed with a difference, as
you shall see.

I awoke. Oh, broad and wide awake I was, although I did not open my
eyes. And please know that in all that follows I knew no surprise
whatever. Everything was the natural and the expected. I was I, be
sure of that. BUT I WAS NOT DARRELL STANDING. Darrell Standing had
no more to do with the being I was than did Darrell Standing's
parchment-crinkled skin have aught to do with the cool, soft skin
that was mine. Nor was I aware of any Darrell Standing--as I could
not well be, considering that Darrell Standing was as yet unborn and
would not be born for centuries. But you shall see.

I lay with closed eyes, lazily listening. From without came the
clacking of many hoofs moving orderly on stone flags. From the
accompanying jingle of metal bits of man-harness and steed-harness I
knew some cavalcade was passing by on the street beneath my windows.
Also, I wondered idly who it was. From somewhere--and I knew where,
for I knew it was from the inn yard--came the ring and stamp of
hoofs and an impatient neigh that I recognized as belonging to my
waiting horse.

Came steps and movements--steps openly advertised as suppressed with
the intent of silence and that yet were deliberately noisy with the
secret intent of rousing me if I still slept. I smiled inwardly at
the rascal's trick.

"Pons," I ordered, without opening my eyes, "water, cold water,
quick, a deluge. I drank over long last night, and now my gullet
scorches."

"And slept over long to-day," he scolded, as he passed me the water,
ready in his hand.

I sat up, opened my eyes, and carried the tankard to my lips with
both my hands. And as I drank I looked at Pons.

Now note two things. I spoke in French; I was not conscious that I
spoke in French. Not until afterward, back in solitary, when I
remembered what I am narrating, did I know that I had spoken in
French--ay, and spoken well. As for me, Darrell Standing, at
present writing these lines in Murderers' Row of Folsom Prison, why,
I know only high school French sufficient to enable me to read the
language. As for my speaking it--impossible. I can scarcely
intelligibly pronounce my way through a menu.

But to return. Pons was a little withered old man. He was born in
our house--I know, for it chanced that mention was made of it this
very day I am describing. Pons was all of sixty years. He was
mostly toothless, and, despite a pronounced limp that compelled him
to go slippity-hop, he was very alert and spry in all his movements.
Also, he was impudently familiar. This was because he had been in
my house sixty years. He had been my father's servant before I
could toddle, and after my father's death (Pons and I talked of it
this day) he became my servant. The limp he had acquired on a
stricken field in Italy, when the horsemen charged across. He had
just dragged my father clear of the hoofs when he was lanced through
the thigh, overthrown, and trampled. My father, conscious but
helpless from his own wounds, witnessed it all. And so, as I say,
Pons had earned such a right to impudent familiarity that at least
there was no gainsaying him by my father's son.

Pons shook his head as I drained the huge draught.

"Did you hear it boil?" I laughed, as I handed back the empty
tankard.

"Like your father," he said hopelessly. "But your father lived to
learn better, which I doubt you will do."

"He got a stomach affliction," I devilled, "so that one mouthful of
spirits turned it outside in. It were wisdom not to drink when
one's tank will not hold the drink."

While we talked Pons was gathering to my bedside my clothes for the
day.

"Drink on, my master," he answered. "It won't hurt you. You'll die
with a sound stomach."

"You mean mine is an iron-lined stomach?" I wilfully misunderstood
him.

"I mean--" he began with a quick peevishness, then broke off as he
realized my teasing and with a pout of his withered lips draped my
new sable cloak upon a chair-back. "Eight hundred ducats," he
sneered. "A thousand goats and a hundred fat oxen in a coat to keep
you warm. A score of farms on my gentleman's fine back."

"And in that a hundred fine farms, with a castle or two thrown in,
to say nothing, perhaps, of a palace," I said, reaching out my hand
and touching the rapier which he was just in the act of depositing
on the chair.

"So your father won with his good right arm," Pons retorted. "But
what your father won he held."

Here Pons paused to hold up to scorn my new scarlet satin doublet--a
wondrous thing of which I had been extravagant.

"Sixty ducats for that," Pons indicted. "Your father'd have seen
all the tailors and Jews of Christendom roasting in hell before he'd
a-paid such a price."

And while we dressed--that is, while Pons helped me to dress--I
continued to quip with him.

"It is quite clear, Pons, that you have not heard the news," I said
slyly.

Whereat up pricked his ears like the old gossip he was.

"Late news?" he queried. "Mayhap from the English Court?"

"Nay," I shook my head. "But news perhaps to you, but old news for
all of that. Have you not heard? The philosophers of Greece were
whispering it nigh two thousand years ago. It is because of that
news that I put twenty fat farms on my back, live at Court, and am
become a dandy. You see, Pons, the world is a most evil place, life
is most sad, all men die, and, being dead . . . well, are dead.
Wherefore, to escape the evil and the sadness, men in these days,
like me, seek amazement, insensibility, and the madnesses of
dalliance."

"But the news, master? What did the philosophers whisper about so
long ago?"

"That God was dead, Pons," I replied solemnly. "Didn't you know
that? God is dead, and I soon shall be, and I wear twenty fat farms
on my back."

"God lives," Pons asserted fervently. "God lives, and his kingdom
is at hand. I tell you, master, it is at hand. It may be no later
than to-morrow that the earth shall pass away."

"So said they in old Rome, Pons, when Nero made torches of them to
light his sports."

Pons regarded me pityingly.

"Too much learning is a sickness," he complained. "I was always
opposed to it. But you must have your will and drag my old body
about with you--a-studying astronomy and numbers in Venice, poetry
and all the Italian FOL-DE-ROLS in Florence, and astrology in Pisa,
and God knows what in that madman country of Germany. Pish for the
philosophers! I tell you, master, I, Pons, your servant, a poor old
man who knows not a letter from a pike-staff--I tell you God lives,
and the time you shall appear before him is short."  He paused with
sudden recollection, and added: "He is here, the priest you spoke
of."

On the instant I remembered my engagement.

"Why did you not tell me before?" I demanded angrily.

"What did it matter?" Pons shrugged his shoulders. "Has he not been
waiting two hours as it is?"

"Why didn't you call me?"

He regarded me with a thoughtful, censorious eye.

"And you rolling to bed and shouting like chanticleer, 'Sing cucu,
sing cucu, cucu nu nu cucu, sing cucu, sing cucu, sing cucu, sing
cucu.'"

He mocked me with the senseless refrain in an ear-jangling falsetto.
Without doubt I had bawled the nonsense out on my way to bed.

"You have a good memory," I commented drily, as I essayed a moment
to drape my shoulders with the new sable cloak ere I tossed it to
Pons to put aside. He shook his head sourly.

"No need of memory when you roared it over and over for the
thousandth time till half the inn was a-knock at the door to spit
you for the sleep-killer you were. And when I had you decently in
the bed, did you not call me to you and command, if the devil
called, to tell him my lady slept? And did you not call me back
again, and, with a grip on my arm that leaves it bruised and black
this day, command me, as I loved life, fat meat, and the warm fire,
to call you not of the morning save for one thing?"

"Which was?" I prompted, unable for the life of me to guess what I
could have said.

"Which was the heart of one, a black buzzard, you said, by name
Martinelli--whoever he may be--for the heart of Martinelli smoking
on a gold platter. The platter must be gold, you said; and you said
I must call you by singing, 'Sing cucu, sing cucu, sing cucu.'
Whereat you began to teach me how to sing, 'Sing cucu, sing cucu,
sing cucu.'"

And when Pons had said the name, I knew it at once for the priest,
Martinelli, who had been knocking his heels two mortal hours in the
room without.

When Martinelli was permitted to enter and as he saluted me by title
and name, I knew at once my name and all of it. I was Count
Guillaume de Sainte-Maure. (You see, only could I know then, and
remember afterward, what was in my conscious mind.)

The priest was Italian, dark and small, lean as with fasting or with
a wasting hunger not of this world, and his hands were as small and
slender as a woman's. But his eyes! They were cunning and
trustless, narrow-slitted and heavy-lidded, at one and the same time
as sharp as a ferret's and as indolent as a basking lizard's.

"There has been much delay, Count de Sainte-Maure," he began
promptly, when Pons had left the room at a glance from me. "He whom
I serve grows impatient."

"Change your tune, priest," I broke in angrily. "Remember, you are
not now in Rome."

"My august master--" he began.

"Rules augustly in Rome, mayhap," I again interrupted. "This is
France."

Martinelli shrugged his shoulders meekly and patiently, but his
eyes, gleaming like a basilisk's, gave his shoulders the lie.

"My august master has some concern with the doings of France," he
said quietly. "The lady is not for you. My master has other plans.
. ."  He moistened his thin lips with his tongue. "Other plans for
the lady . . . and for you."

Of course, by the lady I knew he referred to the great Duchess
Philippa, widow of Geoffrey, last Duke of Aquitaine. But great
duchess, widow, and all, Philippa was a woman, and young, and gay,
and beautiful, and, by my faith, fashioned for me.

"What are his plans?" I demanded bluntly.

"They are deep and wide, Count Sainte-Maure--too deep and wide for
me to presume to imagine, much less know or discuss with you or any
man."

"Oh, I know big things are afoot and slimy worms squirming
underground," I said.

"They told me you were stubborn-necked, but I have obeyed commands."

Martinelli arose to leave, and I arose with him.

"I said it was useless," he went on. "But the last chance to change
your mind was accorded you. My august master deals more fairly than
fair."

"Oh, well, I'll think the matter over," I said airily, as I bowed
the priest to the door.

He stopped abruptly at the threshold.

"The time for thinking is past," he said. "It is decision I came
for."

"I will think the matter over," I repeated, then added, as
afterthought: "If the lady's plans do not accord with mine, then
mayhap the plans of your master may fruit as he desires. For
remember, priest, he is no master of mine."

"You do not know my master," he said solemnly.

"Nor do I wish to know him," I retorted.

And I listened to the lithe, light step of the little intriguing
priest go down the creaking stairs.

Did I go into the minutiae of detail of all that I saw this half a
day and half a night that I was Count Guillaume de Sainte-Maure, not
ten books the size of this I am writing could contain the totality
of the matter. Much I shall skip; in fact, I shall skip almost all;
for never yet have I heard of a condemned man being reprieved in
order that he might complete his memoirs--at least, not in
California.

When I rode out in Paris that day it was the Paris of centuries
agone. The narrow streets were an unsanitary scandal of filth and
slime. But I must skip. And skip I shall, all of the afternoon's
events, all of the ride outside the walls, of the grand fete given
by Hugh de Meung, of the feasting and the drinking in which I took
little part. Only of the end of the adventure will I write, which
begins with where I stood jesting with Philippa herself--ah, dear
God, she was wondrous beautiful. A great lady--ay, but before that,
and after that, and always, a woman.

We laughed and jested lightly enough, as about us jostled the merry
throng; but under our jesting was the deep earnestness of man and
woman well advanced across the threshold of love and yet not too
sure each of the other. I shall not describe her. She was small,
exquisitely slender--but there, I am describing her. In brief, she
was the one woman in the world for me, and little I recked the long
arm of that gray old man in Rome could reach out half across Europe
between my woman and me.

And the Italian, Fortini, leaned to my shoulder and whispered:

"One who desires to speak."

"One who must wait my pleasure," I answered shortly.

"I wait no man's pleasure," was his equally short reply.

And, while my blood boiled, I remembered the priest, Martinelli, and
the gray old man at Rome. The thing was clear. It was deliberate.
It was the long arm. Fortini smiled lazily at me while I thus
paused for the moment to debate, but in his smile was the essence of
all insolence.

This, of all times, was the time I should have been cool. But the
old red anger began to kindle in me. This was the work of the
priest. This was the Fortini, poverished of all save lineage,
reckoned the best sword come up out of Italy in half a score of
years. To-night it was Fortini. If he failed the gray old man's
command to-morrow it would be another sword, the next day another.
And, perchance still failing, then might I expect the common bravo's
steel in my back or the common poisoner's philter in my wine, my
meat, or bread.

"I am busy," I said. "Begone."

"My business with you presses," was his reply.

Insensibly our voices had slightly risen, so that Philippa heard.

"Begone, you Italian hound," I said. "Take your howling from my
door. I shall attend to you presently."

"The moon is up," he said. "The grass is dry and excellent. There
is no dew. Beyond the fish-pond, an arrow's flight to the left, is
an open space, quiet and private."

"Presently you shall have your desire," I muttered impatiently.

But still he persisted in waiting at my shoulder.

"Presently," I said. "Presently I shall attend to you."

Then spoke Philippa, in all the daring spirit and the iron of her.

"Satisfy the gentleman's desire, Sainte-Maure. Attend to him now.
And good fortune go with you."  She paused to beckon to her her
uncle, Jean de Joinville, who was passing--uncle on her mother's
side, of the de Joinvilles of Anjou. "Good fortune go with you,"
she repeated, and then leaned to me so that she could whisper: "And
my heart goes with you, Sainte-Maure. Do not be long. I shall
await you in the big hall."

I was in the seventh heaven. I trod on air. It was the first frank
admittance of her love. And with such benediction I was made so
strong that I knew I could kill a score of Fortinis and snap my
fingers at a score of gray old men in Rome.

Jean de Joinville bore Philippa away in the press, and Fortini and I
settled our arrangements in a trice. We separated--he to find a
friend or so, and I to find a friend or so, and all to meet at the
appointed place beyond the fish-pond.

First I found Robert Lanfranc, and, next, Henry Bohemond. But
before I found them I encountered a windlestraw which showed which
way blew the wind and gave promise of a very gale. I knew the
windlestraw, Guy de Villehardouin, a raw young provincial, come up
the first time to Court, but a fiery little cockerel for all of
that. He was red-haired. His blue eyes, small and pinched close to
ether, were likewise red, at least in the whites of them; and his
skin, of the sort that goes with such types, was red and freckled.
He had quite a parboiled appearance.

As I passed him by a sudden movement he jostled me. Oh, of course,
the thing was deliberate. And he flamed at me while his hand
dropped to his rapier.

"Faith," thought I, "the gray old man has many and strange tools,"
while to the cockerel I bowed and murmured, "Your pardon for my
clumsiness. The fault was mine. Your pardon, Villehardouin."

But he was not to be appeased thus easily. And while he fumed and
strutted I glimpsed Robert Lanfranc, beckoned him to us, and
explained the happening.

"Sainte-Maure has accorded you satisfaction," was his judgment. "He
has prayed your pardon."

"In truth, yes," I interrupted in my suavest tones. "And I pray
your pardon again, Villehardouin, for my very great clumsiness. I
pray your pardon a thousand times. The fault was mine, though
unintentioned. In my haste to an engagement I was clumsy, most
woful clumsy, but without intention."

What could the dolt do but grudgingly accept the amends I so freely
proffered him? Yet I knew, as Lanfranc and I hastened on, that ere
many days, or hours, the flame-headed youth would see to it that we
measured steel together on the grass.

I explained no more to Lanfranc than my need of him, and he was
little interested to pry deeper into the matter. He was himself a
lively youngster of no more than twenty, but he had been trained to
arms, had fought in Spain, and had an honourable record on the
grass. Merely his black eyes flashed when he learned what was
toward, and such was his eagerness that it was he who gathered Henry
Bohemond in to our number.

When the three of us arrived in the open space beyond the fish-pond
Fortini and two friends were already waiting us. One was Felix
Pasquini, nephew to the Cardinal of that name, and as close in his
uncle's confidence as was his uncle close in the confidence of the
gray old man. The other was Raoul de Goncourt, whose presence
surprised me, he being too good and noble a man for the company he
kept.

We saluted properly, and properly went about the business. It was
nothing new to any of us. The footing was good, as promised. There
was no dew. The moon shone fair, and Fortini's blade and mine were
out and at earnest play.

This I knew: good swordsman as they reckoned me in France, Fortini
was a better. This, too, I knew: that I carried my lady's heart
with me this night, and that this night, because of me, there would
be one Italian less in the world. I say I knew it. In my mind the
issue could not be in doubt. And as our rapiers played I pondered
the manner I should kill him. I was not minded for a long contest.
Quick and brilliant had always been my way. And further, what of my
past gay months of carousal and of singing "Sing cucu, sing cucu,
sing cucu," at ungodly hours, I knew I was not conditioned for a
long contest. Quick and brilliant was my decision.

But quick and brilliant was a difficult matter with so consummate a
swordsman as Fortini opposed to me. Besides, as luck would have it,
Fortini, always the cold one, always the tireless-wristed, always
sure and long, as report had it, in going about such business, on
this night elected, too, the quick and brilliant.

It was nervous, tingling work, for as surely as I sensed his
intention of briefness, just as surely had he sensed mine. I doubt
that I could have done the trick had it been broad day instead of
moonlight. The dim light aided me. Also was I aided by divining,
the moment in advance, what he had in mind. It was the time attack,
a common but perilous trick that every novice knows, that has laid
on his back many a good man who attempted it, and that is so fraught
with danger to the perpetrator that swordsmen are not enamoured of
it.

We had been at work barely a minute, when I knew under all his
darting, flashing show of offence that Fortini meditated this very
time attack. He desired of me a thrust and lunge, not that he might
parry it but that he might time it and deflect it by the customary
slight turn of the wrist, his rapier point directed to meet me as my
body followed in the lunge. A ticklish thing--ay, a ticklish thing
in the best of light. Did he deflect a fraction of a second too
early, I should be warned and saved. Did he deflect a fraction of a
second too late, my thrust would go home to him.

"Quick and brilliant is it?" was my thought. "Very well, my Italian
friend, quick and brilliant shall it be, and especially shall it be
quick."

In a way, it was time attack against time attack, but I would fool
him on the time by being over-quick. And I was quick. As I said,
we had been at work scarcely a minute when it happened. Quick?
That thrust and lunge of mine were one. A snap of action it was, an
explosion, an instantaneousness. I swear my thrust and lunge were a
fraction of a second quicker than any man is supposed to thrust and
lunge. I won the fraction of a second. By that fraction of a
second too late Fortini attempted to deflect my blade and impale me
on his. But it was his blade that was deflected. It flashed past
my breast, and I was in--inside his weapon, which extended full
length in the empty air behind me--and my blade was inside of him,
and through him, heart-high, from right side of him to left side of
him and outside of him beyond.

It is a strange thing to do, to spit a live man on a length of
steel. I sit here in my cell, and cease from writing a space, while
I consider the matter. And I have considered it often, that
moonlight night in France of long ago, when I taught the Italian
hound quick and brilliant. It was so easy a thing, that perforation
of a torso. One would have expected more resistance. There would
have been resistance had my rapier point touched bone. As it was,
it encountered only the softness of flesh. Still it perforated so
easily. I have the sensation of it now, in my hand, my brain, as I
write. A woman's hat-pin could go through a plum pudding not more
easily than did my blade go through the Italian. Oh, there was
nothing amazing about it at the time to Guillaume de Sainte-Maure,
but amazing it is to me, Darrell Standing, as I recollect and ponder
it across the centuries. It is easy, most easy, to kill a strong,
live, breathing man with so crude a weapon as a piece of steel.
Why, men are like soft-shell crabs, so tender, frail, and vulnerable
are they.

But to return to the moonlight on the grass. My thrust made home,
there was a perceptible pause. Not at once did Fortini fall. Not
at once did I withdraw the blade. For a full second we stood in
pause--I, with legs spread, and arched and tense, body thrown
forward, right arm horizontal and straight out; Fortini, his blade
beyond me so far that hilt and hand just rested lightly against my
left breast, his body rigid, his eyes open and shining.

So statuesque were we for that second that I swear those about us
were not immediately aware of what had happened. Then Fortini
gasped and coughed slightly. The rigidity of his pose slackened.
The hilt and hand against my breast wavered, then the arm drooped to
his side till the rapier point rested on the lawn. By this time
Pasquini and de Goncourt had sprung to him and he was sinking into
their arms. In faith, it was harder for me to withdraw the steel
than to drive it in. His flesh clung about it as if jealous to let
it depart. Oh, believe me, it required a distinct physical effort
to get clear of what I had done.

But the pang of the withdrawal must have stung him back to life and
purpose, for he shook off his friends, straightened himself, and
lifted his rapier into position. I, too, took position, marvelling
that it was possible I had spitted him heart-high and yet missed any
vital spot. Then, and before his friends could catch him, his legs
crumpled under him and he went heavily to grass. They laid him on
his back, but he was already dead, his face ghastly still under the
moon, his right hand still a-clutch of the rapier.

Yes; it is indeed a marvellous easy thing to kill a man.

We saluted his friends and were about to depart, when Felix Pasquini
detained me.

"Pardon me," I said. "Let it be to-morrow."

"We have but to move a step aside," he urged, "where the grass is
still dry."

"Let me then wet it for you, Sainte-Maure," Lanfranc asked of me,
eager himself to do for an Italian.

I shook my head.

"Pasquini is mine," I answered. "He shall be first to-morrow."

"Are there others?" Lanfranc demanded.

"Ask de Goncourt," I grinned. "I imagine he is already laying claim
to the honour of being the third."

At this, de Goncourt showed distressed acquiescence. Lanfranc
looked inquiry at him, and de Goncourt nodded.

"And after him I doubt not comes the cockerel," I went on.

And even as I spoke the red-haired Guy de Villehardouin, alone,
strode to us across the moonlit grass.

"At least I shall have him," Lanfranc cried, his voice almost
wheedling, so great was his desire.

"Ask him," I laughed, then turned to Pasquini. "To-morrow," I said.
"Do you name time and place, and I shall be there."

"The grass is most excellent," he teased, "the place is most
excellent, and I am minded that Fortini has you for company this
night."

"'Twere better he were accompanied by a friend," I quipped. "And
now your pardon, for I must go."

But he blocked my path.

"Whoever it be," he said, "let it be now."

For the first time, with him, my anger began to rise.

"You serve your master well," I sneered.

"I serve but my pleasure," was his answer. "Master I have none."

"Pardon me if I presume to tell you the truth," I said.

"Which is?" he queried softly.

"That you are a liar, Pasquini, a liar like all Italians."

He turned immediately to Lanfranc and Bohemond.

"You heard," he said. "And after that you cannot deny me him."

They hesitated and looked to me for counsel of my wishes. But
Pasquini did not wait.

"And if you still have any scruples," he hurried on, "then allow me
to remove them . . . thus."

And he spat in the grass at my feet. Then my anger seized me and
was beyond me. The red wrath I call it--an overwhelming, all-
mastering desire to kill and destroy. I forgot that Philippa waited
for me in the great hall. All I knew was my wrongs--the
unpardonable interference in my affairs by the gray old man, the
errand of the priest, the insolence of Fortini, the impudence of
Villehardouin, and here Pasquini standing in my way and spitting in
the grass. I saw red. I thought red. I looked upon all these
creatures as rank and noisome growths that must be hewn out of my
path, out of the world. As a netted lion may rage against the
meshes, so raged I against these creatures. They were all about me.
In truth, I was in the trap. The one way out was to cut them down,
to crush them into the earth and stamp upon them.

"Very well," I said, calmly enough, although my passion was such
that my frame shook. "You first, Pasquini. And you next, de
Goncourt? And at the end, de Villehardouin?"

Each nodded in turn and Pasquini and I prepared to step aside.

"Since you are in haste," Henry Bohemond proposed to me, "and since
there are three of them and three of us, why not settle it at the
one time?"

"Yes, yes," was Lanfranc's eager cry. "Do you take de Goncourt. De
Villehardouin for mine."

But I waved my good friends back.

"They are here by command," I explained. "It is I they desire so
strongly that by my faith I have caught the contagion of their
desire, so that now I want them and will have them for myself."

I had observed that Pasquini fretted at my delay of speech-making,
and I resolved to fret him further.

"You, Pasquini," I announced, "I shall settle with in short account.
I would not that you tarried while Fortini waits your companionship.
You, Raoul de Goncourt, I shall punish as you deserve for being in
such bad company. You are getting fat and wheezy. I shall take my
time with you until your fat melts and your lungs pant and wheeze
like leaky bellows. You, de Villehardouin, I have not decided in
what manner I shall kill."

And then I saluted Pasquini, and we were at it. Oh, I was minded to
be rarely devilish this night. Quick and brilliant--that was the
thing. Nor was I unmindful of that deceptive moonlight. As with
Fortini would I settle with him if he dared the time attack. If he
did not, and quickly, then I would dare it.

Despite the fret I had put him in, he was cautious. Nevertheless I
compelled the play to be rapid, and in the dim light, depending less
than usual on sight and more than usual on feel, our blades were in
continual touch.

Barely was the first minute of play past when I did the trick. I
feigned a slight slip of the foot, and, in the recovery, feigned
loss of touch with Pasquini's blade. He thrust tentatively, and
again I feigned, this time making a needlessly wide parry. The
consequent exposure of myself was the bait I had purposely dangled
to draw him on. And draw him on I did. Like a flash he took
advantage of what he deemed an involuntary exposure. Straight and
true was his thrust, and all his will and body were heartily in the
weight of the lunge he made. And all had been feigned on my part
and I was ready for him. Just lightly did my steel meet his as our
blades slithered. And just firmly enough and no more did my wrist
twist and deflect his blade on my basket hilt. Oh, such a slight
deflection, a matter of inches, just barely sufficient to send his
point past me so that it pierced a fold of my satin doublet in
passing. Of course, his body followed his rapier in the lunge,
while, heart-high, right side, my rapier point met his body. And my
outstretched arm was stiff and straight as the steel into which it
elongated, and behind the arm and the steel my body was braced and
solid.

Heart-high, I say, my rapier entered Pasquini's side on the right,
but it did not emerge, on the left, for, well-nigh through him, it
met a rib (oh, man-killing is butcher's work!) with such a will that
the forcing overbalanced him, so that he fell part backward and part
sidewise to the ground. And even as he fell, and ere he struck,
with jerk and wrench I cleared my weapon of him.

De Goncourt was to him, but he waved de Goncourt to attend on me.
Not so swiftly as Fortini did Pasquini pass. He coughed and spat,
and, helped by de Villehardouin, propped his elbow under him, rested
his head on hand, and coughed and spat again.

"A pleasant journey, Pasquini," I laughed to him in my red anger.
"Pray hasten, for the grass where you lie is become suddenly wet and
if you linger you will catch your death of cold."

When I made immediately to begin with de Goncourt, Bohemond
protested that I should rest a space.

"Nay," I said. "I have not properly warmed up."  And to de
Goncourt, "Now will we have you dance and wheeze--Salute!"

De Goncourt's heart was not in the work. It was patent that he
fought under the compulsion of command. His play was old-fashioned,
as any middle-aged man's is apt to be, but he was not an indifferent
swordsman. He was cool, determined, dogged. But he was not
brilliant, and he was oppressed with foreknowledge of defeat. A
score of times, by quick and brilliant, he was mine. But I
refrained. I have said that I was devilish-minded. Indeed I was.
I wore him down. I backed him away from the moon so that he could
see little of me because I fought in my own shadow. And while I
wore him down until he began to wheeze as I had predicted, Pasquini,
head on hand and watching, coughed and spat out his life.

"Now, de Goncourt," I announced finally. "You see I have you quite
helpless. You are mine in any of a dozen ways. Be ready, brace
yourself, for this is the way I will."

And, so saying, I merely went from carte to tierce, and as he
recovered wildly and parried widely I returned to carte, took the
opening, and drove home heart-high and through and through. And at
sight of the conclusion Pasquini let go his hold on life, buried his
face in the grass, quivered a moment, and lay still.

"Your master will be four servants short this night," I assured de
Villehardouin, in the moment just ere we engaged.

And such an engagement! The boy was ridiculous. In what bucolic
school of fence he had been taught was beyond imagining. He was
downright clownish. "Short work and simple" was my judgment, while
his red hair seemed a-bristle with very rage and while he pressed me
like a madman.

Alas! It was his clownishness that undid me. When I had played
with him and laughed at him for a handful of seconds for the clumsy
boor he was, he became so angered that he forgot the worse than
little fence he knew. With an arm-wide sweep of his rapier, as
though it bore heft and a cutting edge, he whistled it through the
air and rapped it down on my crown. I was in amaze. Never had so
absurd a thing happened to me. He was wide open, and I could have
run him through forthright. But, as I said, I was in amaze, and the
next I knew was the pang of the entering steel as this clumsy
provincial ran me through and charged forward, bull-like, till his
hilt bruised my side and I was borne backward.

As I fell I could see the concern on the faces of Lanfranc and
Bohemond and the glut of satisfaction in the face of de
Villehardouin as he pressed me.

I was falling, but I never reached the grass. Came a blurr of
flashing lights, a thunder in my ears, a darkness, a glimmering of
dim light slowly dawning, a wrenching, racking pain beyond all
describing, and then I heard the voice of one who said:

"I can't feel anything."

I knew the voice. It was Warden Atherton's. And I knew myself for
Darrell Standing, just returned across the centuries to the jacket
hell of San Quentin. And I knew the touch of finger-tips on my neck
was Warden Atherton's. And I knew the finger-tips that displaced
his were Doctor Jackson's. And it was Doctor Jackson's voice that
said:

"You don't know how to take a man's pulse from the neck. There--
right there--put your fingers where mine are. D'ye get it? Ah, I
thought so. Heart weak, but steady as a chronometer."

"It's only twenty-four hours," Captain Jamie said, "and he was never
in like condition before."

"Putting it on, that's what he's doing, and you can stack on that,"
Al Hutchins, the head trusty, interjected.

"I don't know," Captain Jamie insisted. "When a man's pulse is that
low it takes an expert to find it--"

"Aw, I served my apprenticeship in the jacket," Al Hutchins sneered.
"And I've made you unlace me, Captain, when you thought I was
croaking, and it was all I could do to keep from snickering in your
face."

"What do you think, Doc?" Warden Atherton asked.

"I tell you the heart action is splendid," was the answer. "Of
course it is weak. That is only to be expected. I tell you
Hutchins is right. The man is feigning."

With his thumb he turned up one of my eyelids, whereat I opened my
other eye and gazed up at the group bending over me.

"What did I tell you?" was Doctor Jackson's cry of triumph.

And then, although it seemed the effort must crack my face, I
summoned all the will of me and smiled.

They held water to my lips, and I drank greedily. It must be
remembered that all this while I lay helpless on my back, my arms
pinioned along with my body inside the jacket. When they offered me
food--dry prison bread--I shook my head. I closed my eyes in
advertisement that I was tired of their presence. The pain of my
partial resuscitation was unbearable. I could feel my body coming
to life. Down the cords of my neck and into my patch of chest over
the heart darting pains were making their way. And in my brain the
memory was strong that Philippa waited me in the big hall, and I was
desirous to escape away back to the half a day and half a night I
had just lived in old France.

So it was, even as they stood about me, that I strove to eliminate
the live portion of my body from my consciousness. I was in haste
to depart, but Warden Atherton's voice held me back.

"Is there anything you want to complain about?" he asked.

Now I had but one fear, namely, that they would unlace me; so that
it must be understood that my reply was not uttered in braggadocio
but was meant to forestall any possible unlacing.

"You might make the jacket a little tighter," I whispered. "It's
too loose for comfort. I get lost in it. Hutchins is stupid. He
is also a fool. He doesn't know the first thing about lacing the
jacket. Warden, you ought to put him in charge of the loom-room.
He is a more profound master of inefficiency than the present
incumbent, who is merely stupid without being a fool as well. Now
get out, all of you, unless you can think of worse to do to me. In
which case, by all means remain. I invite you heartily to remain,
if you think in your feeble imaginings that you have devised fresh
torture for me."

"He's a wooz, a true-blue, dyed-in-the-wool wooz," Doctor Jackson
chanted, with the medico's delight in a novelty.

"Standing, you ARE a wonder," the Warden said. "You've got an iron
will, but I'll break it as sure as God made little apples."

"And you've the heart of a rabbit," I retorted. "One-tenth the
jacketing I have received in San Quentin would have squeezed your
rabbit heart out of your long ears."

Oh, it was a touch, that, for the Warden did have unusual ears.
They would have interested Lombroso, I am sure.

"As for me," I went on, "I laugh at you, and I wish no worse fate to
the loom-room than that you should take charge of it yourself. Why,
you've got me down and worked your wickedness on me, and still I
live and laugh in your face. Inefficient? You can't even kill me.
Inefficient? You couldn't kill a cornered rat with a stick of
dynamite--REAL dynamite, and not the sort you are deluded into
believing I have hidden away."

"Anything more?" he demanded, when I had ceased from my diatribe.

And into my mind flashed what I had told Fortini when he pressed his
insolence on me.

"Begone, you prison cur," I said. "Take your yapping from my door."

It must have been a terrible thing for a man of Warden Atherton's
stripe to be thus bearded by a helpless prisoner. His face whitened
with rage and his voice shook as he threatened:

"By God, Standing, I'll do for you yet."

"There is only one thing you can do," I said. "You can tighten this
distressingly loose jacket. If you won't, then get out. And I
don't care if you fail to come back for a week or for the whole ten
days."

And what can even the Warden of a great prison do in reprisal on a
prisoner upon whom the ultimate reprisal has already been wreaked?
It may be that Warden Atherton thought of some possible threat, for
he began to speak. But my voice had strengthened with the exercise,
and I began to sing, "Sing cucu, sing cucu, sing cucu."  And sing I
did until my door clanged and the bolts and locks squeaked and
grated fast.

CHAPTER XII

Now that I had learned the trick the way was easy. And I knew the
way was bound to become easier the more I travelled it. Once
establish a line of least resistance, every succeeding journey along
it will find still less resistance. And so, as you shall see, my
journeys from San Quentin life into other lives were achieved almost
automatically as time went by.

After Warden Atherton and his crew had left me it was a matter of
minutes to will the resuscitated portion of my body back into the
little death. Death in life it was, but it was only the little
death, similar to the temporary death produced by an anaesthetic.

And so, from all that was sordid and vile, from brutal solitary and
jacket hell, from acquainted flies and sweats of darkness and the
knuckle-talk of the living dead, I was away at a bound into time and
space.

Came the duration of darkness, and the slow-growing awareness of
other things and of another self. First of all, in this awareness,
was dust. It was in my nostrils, dry and acrid. It was on my lips.
It coated my face, my hands, and especially was it noticeable on the
finger-tips when touched by the ball of my thumb.

Next I was aware of ceaseless movement. All that was about me
lurched and oscillated. There was jolt and jar, and I heard what I
knew as a matter of course to be the grind of wheels on axles and
the grate and clash of iron tyres against rock and sand. And there
came to me the jaded voices of men, in curse and snarl of slow-
plodding, jaded animals.

I opened my eyes, that were inflamed with dust, and immediately
fresh dust bit into them. On the coarse blankets on which I lay the
dust was half an inch thick. Above me, through sifting dust, I saw
an arched roof of lurching, swaying canvas, and myriads of dust
motes descended heavily in the shafts of sunshine that entered
through holes in the canvas.

I was a child, a boy of eight or nine, and I was weary, as was the
woman, dusty-visaged and haggard, who sat up beside me and soothed a
crying babe in her arms. She was my mother; that I knew as a matter
of course, just as I knew, when I glanced along the canvas tunnel of
the wagon-top, that the shoulders of the man on the driver's seat
were the shoulders of my father.

When I started to crawl along the packed gear with which the wagon
was laden my mother said in a tired and querulous voice, "Can't you
ever be still a minute, Jesse?"

That was my name, Jesse. I did not know my surname, though I heard
my mother call my father John. I have a dim recollection of
hearing, at one time or another, the other men address my father as
Captain. I knew that he was the leader of this company, and that
his orders were obeyed by all.

I crawled out through the opening in the canvas and sat down beside
my father on the seat. The air was stifling with the dust that rose
from the wagons and the many hoofs of the animals. So thick was the
dust that it was like mist or fog in the air, and the low sun shone
through it dimly and with a bloody light.

Not alone was the light of this setting sun ominous, but everything
about me seemed ominous--the landscape, my father's face, the fret
of the babe in my mother's arms that she could not still, the six
horses my father drove that had continually to be urged and that
were without any sign of colour, so heavily had the dust settled on
them.

The landscape was an aching, eye-hurting desolation. Low hills
stretched endlessly away on every hand. Here and there only on
their slopes were occasional scrub growths of heat-parched brush.
For the most part the surface of the hills was naked-dry and
composed of sand and rock. Our way followed the sand-bottoms
between the hills. And the sand-bottoms were bare, save for spots
of scrub, with here and there short tufts of dry and withered grass.
Water there was none, nor sign of water, except for washed gullies
that told of ancient and torrential rains.

My father was the only one who had horses to his wagon. The wagons
went in single file, and as the train wound and curved I saw that
the other wagons were drawn by oxen. Three or four yoke of oxen
strained and pulled weakly at each wagon, and beside them, in the
deep sand, walked men with ox-goads, who prodded the unwilling
beasts along. On a curve I counted the wagons ahead and behind. I
knew that there were forty of them, including our own; for often I
had counted them before. And as I counted them now, as a child will
to while away tedium, they were all there, forty of them, all
canvas-topped, big and massive, crudely fashioned, pitching and
lurching, grinding and jarring over sand and sage-brush and rock.

To right and left of us, scattered along the train, rode a dozen or
fifteen men and youths on horses. Across their pommels were long-
barrelled rifles. Whenever any of them drew near to our wagon I
could see that their faces, under the dust, were drawn and anxious
like my father's. And my father, like them, had a long-barrelled
rifle close to hand as he drove.

Also, to one side, limped a score or more of foot-sore, yoke-galled,
skeleton oxen, that ever paused to nip at the occasional tufts of
withered grass, and that ever were prodded on by the tired-faced
youths who herded them. Sometimes one or another of these oxen
would pause and low, and such lowing seemed as ominous as all else
about me.

Far, far away I have a memory of having lived, a smaller lad, by the
tree-lined banks of a stream. And as the wagon jolts along, and I
sway on the seat with my father, I continually return and dwell upon
that pleasant water flowing between the trees. I have a sense that
for an interminable period I have lived in a wagon and travelled on,
ever on, with this present company.

But strongest of all upon me is what is strong upon all the company,
namely, a sense of drifting to doom. Our way was like a funeral
march. Never did a laugh arise. Never did I hear a happy tone of
voice. Neither peace nor ease marched with us. The faces of the
men and youths who outrode the train were grim, set, hopeless. And
as we toiled through the lurid dust of sunset often I scanned my
father's face in vain quest of some message of cheer. I will not
say that my father's face, in all its dusty haggardness, was
hopeless. It was dogged, and oh! so grim and anxious, most anxious.

A thrill seemed to run along the train. My father's head went up.
So did mine. And our horses raised their weary heads, scented the
air with long-drawn snorts, and for the nonce pulled willingly. The
horses of the outriders quickened their pace. And as for the herd
of scarecrow oxen, it broke into a forthright gallop. It was almost
ludicrous. The poor brutes were so clumsy in their weakness and
haste. They were galloping skeletons draped in mangy hide, and they
out-distanced the boys who herded them. But this was only for a
time. Then they fell back to a walk, a quick, eager, shambling,
sore-footed walk; and they no longer were lured aside by the dry
bunch-grass.

"What is it?" my mother asked from within the wagon.

"Water," was my father's reply. "It must be Nephi."

And my mother: "Thank God! And perhaps they will sell us food."

And into Nephi, through blood-red dust, with grind and grate and
jolt and jar, our great wagons rolled. A dozen scattered dwellings
or shanties composed the place. The landscape was much the same as
that through which we had passed. There were no trees, only scrub
growths and sandy bareness. But here were signs of tilled fields,
with here and there a fence. Also there was water. Down the stream
ran no current. The bed, however, was damp, with now and again a
water-hole into which the loose oxen and the saddle-horses stamped
and plunged their muzzles to the eyes. Here, too, grew an
occasional small willow.

"That must be Bill Black's mill they told us about," my father said,
pointing out a building to my mother, whose anxiousness had drawn
her to peer out over our shoulders.

An old man, with buckskin shirt and long, matted, sunburnt hair,
rode back to our wagon and talked with father. The signal was
given, and the head wagons of the train began to deploy in a circle.
The ground favoured the evolution, and, from long practice, it was
accomplished without a hitch, so that when the forty wagons were
finally halted they formed a circle. All was bustle and orderly
confusion. Many women, all tired-faced and dusty like my mother,
emerged from the wagons. Also poured forth a very horde of
children. There must have been at least fifty children, and it
seemed I knew them all of long time; and there were at least two
score of women. These went about the preparations for cooking
supper.

While some of the men chopped sage-brush and we children carried it
to the fires that were kindling, other men unyoked the oxen and let
them stampede for water. Next the men, in big squads, moved the
wagons snugly into place. The tongue of each wagon was on the
inside of the circle, and, front and rear, each wagon was in solid
contact with the next wagon before and behind. The great brakes
were locked fast; but, not content with this, the wheels of all the
wagons were connected with chains. This was nothing new to us
children. It was the trouble sign of a camp in hostile country.
One wagon only was left out of the circle, so as to form a gate to
the corral. Later on, as we knew, ere the camp slept, the animals
would be driven inside, and the gate-wagon would be chained like the
others in place. In the meanwhile, and for hours, the animals would
be herded by men and boys to what scant grass they could find.

While the camp-making went on my father, with several others of the
men, including the old man with the long, sunburnt hair, went away
on foot in the direction of the mill. I remember that all of us,
men, women, and even the children, paused to watch them depart; and
it seemed their errand was of grave import.

While they were away other men, strangers, inhabitants of desert
Nephi, came into camp and stalked about. They were white men, like
us, but they were hard-faced, stern-faced, sombre, and they seemed
angry with all our company. Bad feeling was in the air, and they
said things calculated to rouse the tempers of our men. But the
warning went out from the women, and was passed on everywhere to our
men and youths, that there must be no words.

One of the strangers came to our fire, where my mother was alone,
cooking. I had just come up with an armful of sage-brush, and I
stopped to listen and to stare at the intruder, whom I hated,
because it was in the air to hate, because I knew that every last
person in our company hated these strangers who were white-skinned
like us and because of whom we had been compelled to make our camp
in a circle.

This stranger at our fire had blue eyes, hard and cold and piercing.
His hair was sandy. His face was shaven to the chin, and from under
the chin, covering the neck and extending to the ears, sprouted a
sandy fringe of whiskers well-streaked with gray. Mother did not
greet him, nor did he greet her. He stood and glowered at her for
some time, he cleared his throat and said with a sneer:

"Wisht you was back in Missouri right now I bet."

I saw mother tighten her lips in self-control ere she answered:

"We are from Arkansas."

"I guess you got good reasons to deny where you come from," he next
said, "you that drove the Lord's people from Missouri."

Mother made no reply.

". . . Seein'," he went on, after the pause accorded her, "as you're
now comin' a-whinin' an' a-beggin' bread at our hands that you
persecuted."

Whereupon, and instantly, child that I was, I knew anger, the old,
red, intolerant wrath, ever unrestrainable and unsubduable.

"You lie!" I piped up. "We ain't Missourians. We ain't whinin'.
An' we ain't beggars. We got the money to buy."

"Shut up, Jesse!" my mother cried, landing the back of her hand
stingingly on my mouth. And then, to the stranger, "Go away and let
the boy alone."

"I'll shoot you full of lead, you damned Mormon!" I screamed and
sobbed at him, too quick for my mother this time, and dancing away
around the fire from the back-sweep of her hand.

As for the man himself, my conduct had not disturbed him in the
slightest. I was prepared for I knew not what violent visitation
from this terrible stranger, and I watched him warily while he
considered me with the utmost gravity.

At last he spoke, and he spoke solemnly, with solemn shaking of the
head, as if delivering a judgment.

"Like fathers like sons," he said. "The young generation is as bad
as the elder. The whole breed is unregenerate and damned. There is
no saving it, the young or the old. There is no atonement. Not
even the blood of Christ can wipe out its iniquities."

"Damned Mormon!" was all I could sob at him. "Damned Mormon!
Damned Mormon! Damned Mormon!"

And I continued to damn him and to dance around the fire before my
mother's avenging hand, until he strode away.

When my father, and the men who had accompanied him, returned, camp-
work ceased, while all crowded anxiously about him. He shook his
head.

"They will not sell?" some woman demanded.

Again he shook his head.

A man spoke up, a blue-eyed, blond-whiskered giant of thirty, who
abruptly pressed his way into the centre of the crowd.

"They say they have flour and provisions for three years, Captain,"
he said. "They have always sold to the immigration before. And now
they won't sell. And it ain't our quarrel. Their quarrel's with
the government, an' they're takin' it out on us. It ain't right,
Captain. It ain't right, I say, us with our women an' children, an'
California months away, winter comin' on, an' nothin' but desert in
between. We ain't got the grub to face the desert."

He broke off for a moment to address the whole crowd.

"Why, you-all don't know what desert is. This around here ain't
desert. I tell you it's paradise, and heavenly pasture, an' flowin'
with milk an' honey alongside what we're goin' to face."

"I tell you, Captain, we got to get flour first. If they won't sell
it, then we must just up an' take it."

Many of the men and women began crying out in approval, but my
father hushed them by holding up his hand.

"I agree with everything you say, Hamilton," he began.

But the cries now drowned his voice, and he again held up his hand.

"Except one thing you forgot to take into account, Hamilton--a thing
that you and all of us must take into account. Brigham Young has
declared martial law, and Brigham Young has an army. We could wipe
out Nephi in the shake of a lamb's tail and take all the provisions
we can carry. But we wouldn't carry them very far. Brigham's
Saints would be down upon us and we would be wiped out in another
shake of a lamb's tail. You know it. I know it. We all know it."

His words carried conviction to listeners already convinced. What
he had told them was old news. They had merely forgotten it in a
flurry of excitement and desperate need.

"Nobody will fight quicker for what is right than I will," father
continued. "But it just happens we can't afford to fight now. If
ever a ruction starts we haven't a chance. And we've all got our
women and children to recollect. We've got to be peaceable at any
price, and put up with whatever dirt is heaped on us."

"But what will we do with the desert coming?" cried a woman who
nursed a babe at her breast.

"There's several settlements before we come to the desert," father
answered. "Fillmore's sixty miles south. Then comes Corn Creek.
And Beaver's another fifty miles. Next is Parowan. Then it's
twenty miles to Cedar City. The farther we get away from Salt Lake
the more likely they'll sell us provisions."

"And if they won't?" the same woman persisted.

"Then we're quit of them," said my father. "Cedar City is the last
settlement. We'll have to go on, that's all, and thank our stars we
are quit of them. Two days' journey beyond is good pasture, and
water. They call it Mountain Meadows. Nobody lives there, and
that's the place we'll rest our cattle and feed them up before we
tackle the desert. Maybe we can shoot some meat. And if the worst
comes to the worst, we'll keep going as long as we can, then abandon
the wagons, pack what we can on our animals, and make the last
stages on foot. We can eat our cattle as we go along. It would be
better to arrive in California without a rag to our backs than to
leave our bones here; and leave them we will if we start a ruction."

With final reiterated warnings against violence of speech or act,
the impromptu meeting broke up. I was slow in falling asleep that
night. My rage against the Mormon had left my brain in such a
tingle that I was still awake when my father crawled into the wagon
after a last round of the night-watch. They thought I slept, but I
heard mother ask him if he thought that the Mormons would let us
depart peacefully from their land. His face was turned aside from
her as he busied himself with pulling off a boot, while he answered
her with hearty confidence that he was sure the Mormons would let us
go if none of our own company started trouble.

But I saw his face at that moment in the light of a small tallow
dip, and in it was none of the confidence that was in his voice. So
it was that I fell asleep, oppressed by the dire fate that seemed to
overhang us, and pondering upon Brigham Young who bulked in my child
imagination as a fearful, malignant being, a very devil with horns
and tail and all.

And I awoke to the old pain of the jacket in solitary. About me
were the customary four: Warden Atherton, Captain Jamie, Doctor
Jackson, and Al Hutchins. I cracked my face with my willed smile,
and struggled not to lose control under the exquisite torment of
returning circulation. I drank the water they held to me, waved
aside the proffered bread, and refused to speak. I closed my eyes
and strove to win back to the chain-locked wagon-circle at Nephi.
But so long as my visitors stood about me and talked I could not
escape.

One snatch of conversation I could not tear myself away from
hearing.

"Just as yesterday," Doctor Jackson said. "No change one way or the
other."

"Then he can go on standing it?" Warden Atherton queried.

"Without a quiver. The next twenty-four hours as easy as the last.
He's a wooz, I tell you, a perfect wooz. If I didn't know it was
impossible, I'd say he was doped."

"I know his dope," said the Warden. "It's that cursed will of his.
I'd bet, if he made up his mind, that he could walk barefoot across
red-hot stones, like those Kanaka priests from the South Seas."

Now perhaps it was the word "priests" that I carried away with me
through the darkness of another flight in time. Perhaps it was the
cue. More probably it was a mere coincidence. At any rate I awoke,
lying upon a rough rocky floor, and found myself on my back, my arms
crossed in such fashion that each elbow rested in the palm of the
opposite hand. As I lay there, eyes closed, half awake, I rubbed my
elbows with my palms and found that I was rubbing prodigious
calluses. There was no surprise in this. I accepted the calluses
as of long time and a matter of course.

I opened my eyes. My shelter was a small cave, no more than three
feet in height and a dozen in length. It was very hot in the cave.
Perspiration noduled the entire surface of my body. Now and again
several nodules coalesced and formed tiny rivulets. I wore no
clothing save a filthy rag about the middle. My skin was burned to
a mahogany brown. I was very thin, and I contemplated my thinness
with a strange sort of pride, as if it were an achievement to be so
thin. Especially was I enamoured of my painfully prominent ribs.
The very sight of the hollows between them gave me a sense of solemn
elation, or, rather, to use a better word, of sanctification.

My knees were callused like my elbows. I was very dirty. My beard,
evidently once blond, but now a dirt-stained and streaky brown,
swept my midriff in a tangled mass. My long hair, similarly stained
and tangled, was all about my shoulders, while wisps of it
continually strayed in the way of my vision so that sometimes I was
compelled to brush it aside with my hands. For the most part,
however, I contented myself with peering through it like a wild
animal from a thicket.

Just at the tunnel-like mouth of my dim cave the day reared itself
in a wall of blinding sunshine. After a time I crawled to the
entrance, and, for the sake of greater discomfort, lay down in the
burning sunshine on a narrow ledge of rock. It positively baked me,
that terrible sun, and the more it hurt me the more I delighted in
it, or in myself rather, in that I was thus the master of my flesh
and superior to its claims and remonstrances. When I found under me
a particularly sharp, but not too sharp, rock-projection, I ground
my body upon the point of it, rowelled my flesh in a very ecstasy of
mastery and of purification.

It was a stagnant day of heat. Not a breath of air moved over the
river valley on which I sometimes gazed. Hundreds of feet beneath
me the wide river ran sluggishly. The farther shore was flat and
sandy and stretched away to the horizon. Above the water were
scattered clumps of palm-trees.

On my side, eaten into a curve by the river, were lofty, crumbling
cliffs. Farther along the curve, in plain view from my eyrie,
carved out of the living rock, were four colossal figures. It was
the stature of a man to their ankle joints. The four colossi sat,
with hands resting on knees, with arms crumbled quite away, and
gazed out upon the river. At least three of them so gazed. Of the
fourth all that remained were the lower limbs to the knees and the
huge hands resting on the knees. At the feet of this one,
ridiculously small, crouched a sphinx; yet this sphinx was taller
than I.

I looked upon these carven images with contempt, and spat as I
looked. I knew not what they were, whether forgotten gods or
unremembered kings. But to me they were representative of the
vanity of earth-men and earth-aspirations.

And over all this curve of river and sweep of water and wide sands
beyond arched a sky of aching brass unflecked by the tiniest cloud.

The hours passed while I roasted in the sun. Often, for quite
decent intervals, I forgot my heat and pain in dreams and visions
and in memories. All this I knew--crumbling colossi and river and
sand and sun and brazen sky--was to pass away in the twinkling of an
eye. At any moment the trumps of the archangels might sound, the
stars fall out of the sky, the heavens roll up as a scroll, and the
Lord God of all come with his hosts for the final judgment.

Ah, I knew it so profoundly that I was ready for such sublime event.
That was why I was here in rags and filth and wretchedness. I was
meek and lowly, and I despised the frail needs and passions of the
flesh. And I thought with contempt, and with a certain
satisfaction, of the far cities of the plain I had known, all
unheeding, in their pomp and lust, of the last day so near at hand.
Well, they would see soon enough, but too late for them. And I
should see. But I was ready. And to their cries and lamentations
would I arise, reborn and glorious, and take my well-earned and
rightful place in the City of God.

At times, between dreams and visions in which I was verily and
before my time in the City of God, I conned over in my mind old
discussions and controversies. Yes, Novatus was right in his
contention that penitent apostates should never again be received
into the churches. Also, there was no doubt that Sabellianism was
conceived of the devil. So was Constantine, the arch-fiend, the
devil's right hand.

Continually I returned to contemplation of the nature of the unity
of God, and went over and over the contentions of Noetus, the
Syrian. Better, however, did I like the contentions of my beloved
teacher, Arius. Truly, if human reason could determine anything at
all, there must have been a time, in the very nature of sonship,
when the Son did not exist. In the nature of sonship there must
have been a time when the Son commenced to exist. A father must be
older than his son. To hold otherwise were a blasphemy and a
belittlement of God.

And I remembered back to my young days when I had sat at the feet of
Arius, who had been a presbyter of the city of Alexandria, and who
had been robbed of the bishopric by the blasphemous and heretical
Alexander. Alexander the Sabellianite, that is what he was, and his
feet had fast hold of hell.

Yes, I had been to the Council of Nicea, and seen it avoid the
issue. And I remembered when the Emperor Constantine had banished
Arius for his uprightness. And I remembered when Constantine
repented for reasons of state and policy and commanded Alexander--
the other Alexander, thrice cursed, Bishop of Constantinople--to
receive Arius into communion on the morrow. And that very night did
not Arius die in the street? They said it was a violent sickness
visited upon him in answer to Alexander's prayer to God. But I
said, and so said all we Arians, that the violent sickness was due
to a poison, and that the poison was due to Alexander himself,
Bishop of Constantinople and devil's poisoner.

And here I ground my body back and forth on the sharp stones, and
muttered aloud, drunk with conviction:

"Let the Jews and Pagans mock. Let them triumph, for their time is
short. And for them there will be no time after time."

I talked to myself aloud a great deal on that rocky shelf
overlooking the river. I was feverish, and on occasion I drank
sparingly of water from a stinking goatskin. This goatskin I kept
hanging in the sun that the stench of the skin might increase and
that there might be no refreshment of coolness in the water. Food
there was, lying in the dirt on my cave-floor--a few roots and a
chunk of mouldy barley-cake; and hungry I was, although I did not
eat.

All I did that blessed, livelong day was to sweat and swelter in the
sun, mortify my lean flesh upon the rock, gaze out of the
desolation, resurrect old memories, dream dreams, and mutter my
convictions aloud.

And when the sun set, in the swift twilight I took a last look at
the world so soon to pass. About the feet of the colossi I could
make out the creeping forms of beasts that laired in the once proud
works of men. And to the snarls of the beasts I crawled into my
hole, and, muttering and dozing, visioning fevered fancies and
praying that the last day come quickly, I ebbed down into the
darkness of sleep.

Consciousness came back to me in solitary, with the quartet of
torturers about me.

"Blasphemous and heretical Warden of San Quentin whose feet have
fast hold of hell," I gibed, after I had drunk deep of the water
they held to my lips. "Let the jailers and the trusties triumph.
Their time is short, and for them there is no time after time."

"He's out of his head," Warden Atherton affirmed.

"He's putting it over on you," was Doctor Jackson's surer judgment.

"But he refuses food," Captain Jamie protested.

"Huh, he could fast forty days and not hurt himself," the doctor
answered.

"And I have," I said, "and forty nights as well. Do me the favour
to tighten the jacket and then get out of here."

The head trusty tried to insert his forefinger inside the lacing.

"You couldn't get a quarter of an inch of slack with block and
tackle," he assured them.

"Have you any complaint to make, Standing?" the Warden asked.

"Yes," was my reply. "On two counts."

"What are they?"

"First," I said, "the jacket is abominably loose. Hutchins is an
ass. He could get a foot of slack if he wanted."

"What is the other count?" Warden Atherton asked.

"That you are conceived of the devil, Warden."

Captain Jamie and Doctor Jackson tittered, and the Warden, with a
snort, led the way out of my cell.

Left alone, I strove to go into the dark and gain back to the wagon
circle at Nephi. I was interested to know the outcome of that
doomed drifting of our forty great wagons across a desolate and
hostile land, and I was not at all interested in what came of the
mangy hermit with his rock-roweled ribs and stinking water-skin.
And I gained back, neither to Nephi nor the Nile, but to -

But here I must pause in the narrative, my reader, in order to
explain a few things and make the whole matter easier to your
comprehension. This is necessary, because my time is short in which
to complete my jacket-memoirs. In a little while, in a very little
while, they are going to take me out and hang me. Did I have the
full time of a thousand lifetimes, I could not complete the last
details of my jacket experiences. Wherefore I must briefen the
narrative.

First of all, Bergson is right. Life cannot be explained in
intellectual terms. As Confucius said long ago: "When we are so
ignorant of life, can we know death?"  And ignorant of life we truly
are when we cannot explain it in terms of the understanding. We
know life only phenomenally, as a savage may know a dynamo; but we
know nothing of life noumenonally, nothing of the nature of the
intrinsic stuff of life.

Secondly, Marinetti is wrong when he claims that matter is the only
mystery and the only reality. I say and as you, my reader, realize,
I speak with authority--I say that matter is the only illusion.
Comte called the world, which is tantamount to matter, the great
fetich, and I agree with Comte.

It is life that is the reality and the mystery. Life is vastly
different from mere chemic matter fluxing in high modes of notion.
Life persists. Life is the thread of fire that persists through all
the modes of matter. I know. I am life. I have lived ten thousand
generations. I have lived millions of years. I have possessed many
bodies. I, the possessor of these many bodies, have persisted. I
am life. I am the unquenched spark ever flashing and astonishing
the face of time, ever working my will and wreaking my passion on
the cloddy aggregates of matter, called bodies, which I have
transiently inhabited.

For look you. This finger of mine, so quick with sensation, so
subtle to feel, so delicate in its multifarious dexterities, so firm
and strong to crook and bend or stiffen by means of cunning
leverages--this finger is not I. Cut it off. I live. The body is
mutilated. I am not mutilated. The spirit that is I is whole.

Very well. Cut off all my fingers. I am I. The spirit is entire.
Cut off both hands. Cut off both arms at the shoulder-sockets. Cut
off both legs at the hip-sockets. And I, the unconquerable and
indestructible I, survive. Am I any the less for these mutilations,
for these subtractions of the flesh? Certainly not. Clip my hair.
Shave from me with sharp razors my lips, my nose, my ears--ay, and
tear out the eyes of me by the roots; and there, mewed in that
featureless skull that is attached to a hacked and mangled torso,
there in that cell of the chemic flesh, will still be I,
unmutilated, undiminished.

Oh, the heart still beats. Very well. Cut out the heart, or,
better, fling the flesh-remnant into a machine of a thousand blades
and make mincemeat of it--and I, I, don't you understand, all the
spirit and the mystery and the vital fire and life of me, am off and
away. I have not perished. Only the body has perished, and the
body is not I.

I believe Colonel de Rochas was correct when he asserted that under
the compulsion of his will he sent the girl Josephine, while she was
in hypnotic trance, back through the eighteen years she had lived,
back through the silence and the dark ere she had been born, back to
the light of a previous living when she was a bed-ridden old man,
the ex-artilleryman, Jean-Claude Bourdon. And I believe that
Colonel de Rochas did truly hypnotize this resurrected shade of the
old man and, by compulsion of will, send him back through the
seventy years of his life, back into the dark and through the dark
into the light of day when he had been the wicked old woman,
Philomene Carteron.

Already, have I not shown you, my reader, that in previous times,
inhabiting various cloddy aggregates of matter, I have been Count
Guillaume de Sainte-Maure, a mangy and nameless hermit of Egypt, and
the boy Jesse, whose father was captain of forty wagons in the great
westward emigration. And, also, am I not now, as I write these
lines, Darrell Sanding, under sentence of death in Folsom Prison and
one time professor of agronomy in the College of Agriculture of the
University of California?

Matter is the great illusion. That is, matter manifests itself in
form, and form is apparitional. Where, now, are the crumbling rock-
cliffs of old Egypt where once I laired me like a wild beast while I
dreamed of the City of God? Where, now, is the body of Guillaume de
Sainte-Maure that was thrust through on the moonlit grass so long
ago by the flame-headed Guy de Villehardouin? Where, now, are the
forty great wagons in the circle at Nephi, and all the men and women
and children and lean cattle that sheltered inside that circle? All
such things no longer are, for they were forms, manifestations of
fluxing matter ere they melted into the flux again. They have
passed and are not.

And now my argument becomes plain. The spirit is the reality that
endures. I am spirit, and I endure. I, Darrell Standing, the
tenant of many fleshly tenements, shall write a few more lines of
these memoirs and then pass on my way. The form of me that is my
body will fall apart when it has been sufficiently hanged by the
neck, and of it naught will remain in all the world of matter. In
the world of spirit the memory of it will remain. Matter has no
memory, because its forms are evanescent, and what is engraved on
its forms perishes with the forms.

One word more ere I return to my narrative. In all my journeys
through the dark into other lives that have been mine I have never
been able to guide any journey to a particular destination. Thus
many new experiences of old lives were mine before ever I chanced to
return to the boy Jesse at Nephi. Possibly, all told, I have lived
over Jesse's experiences a score of times, sometimes taking up his
career when he was quite small in the Arkansas settlements, and at
least a dozen times carrying on past the point where I left him at
Nephi. It were a waste of time to detail the whole of it; and so,
without prejudice to the verity of my account, I shall skip much
that is vague and tortuous and repetitional, and give the facts as I
have assembled them out of the various times, in whole and part, as
I relived them.

CHAPTER XIII

Long before daylight the camp at Nephi was astir. The cattle were
driven out to water and pasture. While the men unchained the wheels
and drew the wagons apart and clear for yoking in, the women cooked
forty breakfasts over forty fires. The children, in the chill of
dawn, clustered about the fires, sharing places, here and there,
with the last relief of the night-watch waiting sleepily for coffee.

It requires time to get a large train such as ours under way, for
its speed is the speed of the slowest. So the sun was an hour high
and the day was already uncomfortably hot when we rolled out of
Nephi and on into the sandy barrens. No inhabitant of the place saw
us off. All chose to remain indoors, thus making our departure as
ominous as they had made our arrival the night before.

Again it was long hours of parching heat and biting dust, sage-brush
and sand, and a land accursed. No dwellings of men, neither cattle
nor fences, nor any sign of human kind, did we encounter all that
day; and at night we made our wagon-circle beside an empty stream,
in the damp sand of which we dug many holes that filled slowly with
water seepage.

Our subsequent journey is always a broken experience to me. We made
camp so many times, always with the wagons drawn in circle, that to
my child mind a weary long time passed after Nephi. But always,
strong upon all of us, was that sense of drifting to an impending
and certain doom.

We averaged about fifteen miles a day. I know, for my father had
said it was sixty miles to Fillmore, the next Mormon settlement, and
we made three camps on the way. This meant four days of travel.
From Nephi to the last camp of which I have any memory we must have
taken two weeks or a little less.

At Fillmore the inhabitants were hostile, as all had been since Salt
Lake. They laughed at us when we tried to buy food, and were not
above taunting us with being Missourians.

When we entered the place, hitched before the largest house of the
dozen houses that composed the settlement were two saddle-horses,
dusty, streaked with sweat, and drooping. The old man I have
mentioned, the one with long, sunburnt hair and buckskin shirt and
who seemed a sort of aide or lieutenant to father, rode close to our
wagon and indicated the jaded saddle-animals with a cock of his
head.

"Not sparin' horseflesh, Captain," he muttered in a low voice. "An'
what in the name of Sam Hill are they hard-riding for if it ain't
for us?"

But my father had already noted the condition of the two animals,
and my eager eyes had seen him. And I had seen his eyes flash, his
lips tighten, and haggard lines form for a moment on his dusty face.
That was all. But I put two and two together, and knew that the two
tired saddle-horses were just one more added touch of ominousness to
the situation.

"I guess they're keeping an eye on us, Laban," was my father's sole
comment.

It was at Fillmore that I saw a man that I was to see again. He was
a tall, broad-shouldered man, well on in middle age, with all the
evidence of good health and immense strength--strength not alone of
body but of will. Unlike most men I was accustomed to about me, he
was smooth-shaven. Several days' growth of beard showed that he was
already well-grayed. His mouth was unusually wide, with thin lips
tightly compressed as if he had lost many of his front teeth. His
nose was large, square, and thick. So was his face square, wide
between the cheekbones, underhung with massive jaws, and topped with
a broad, intelligent forehead. And the eyes, rather small, a little
more than the width of an eye apart, were the bluest blue I had ever
seen.

It was at the flour-mill at Fillmore that I first saw this man.
Father, with several of our company, had gone there to try to buy
flour, and I, disobeying my mother in my curiosity to see more of
our enemies, had tagged along unperceived. This man was one of four
or five who stood in a group with the miller during the interview.

"You seen that smooth-faced old cuss?" Laban said to father, after
we had got outside and were returning to camp.

Father nodded.

"Well, that's Lee," Laban continued. "I seen'm in Salt Lake. He's
a regular son-of-a-gun. Got nineteen wives and fifty children, they
all say. An' he's rank crazy on religion. Now, what's he followin'
us up for through this God-forsaken country?"

Our weary, doomed drifting went on. The little settlements,
wherever water and soil permitted, were from twenty to fifty miles
apart. Between stretched the barrenness of sand and alkali and
drought. And at every settlement our peaceful attempts to buy food
were vain. They denied us harshly, and wanted to know who of us had
sold them food when we drove them from Missouri. It was useless on
our part to tell them we were from Arkansas. From Arkansas we truly
were, but they insisted on our being Missourians.

At Beaver, five days' journey south from Fillmore, we saw Lee again.
And again we saw hard-ridden horses tethered before the houses. But
we did not see Lee at Parowan.

Cedar City was the last settlement. Laban, who had ridden on ahead,
came back and reported to father. His first news was significant.

"I seen that Lee skedaddling out as I rid in, Captain. An' there's
more men-folk an' horses in Cedar City than the size of the place 'd
warrant."

But we had no trouble at the settlement. Beyond refusing to sell us
food, they left us to ourselves. The women and children stayed in
the houses, and though some of the men appeared in sight they did
not, as on former occasions, enter our camp and taunt us.

It was at Cedar City that the Wainwright baby died. I remember Mrs.
Wainwright weeping and pleading with Laban to try to get some cow's
milk.

"It may save the baby's life," she said. "And they've got cow's
milk. I saw fresh cows with my own eyes. Go on, please, Laban. It
won't hurt you to try. They can only refuse. But they won't. Tell
them it's for a baby, a wee little baby. Mormon women have mother's
hearts. They couldn't refuse a cup of milk for a wee little baby."

And Laban tried. But, as he told father afterward, he did not get
to see any Mormon women. He saw only the Mormon men, who turned him
away.

This was the last Mormon outpost. Beyond lay the vast desert, with,
on the other side of it, the dream land, ay, the myth land, of
California. As our wagons rolled out of the place in the early
morning I, sitting beside my father on the driver's seat, saw Laban
give expression to his feelings. We had gone perhaps half a mile,
and were topping a low rise that would sink Cedar City from view,
when Laban turned his horse around, halted it, and stood up in the
stirrups. Where he had halted was a new-made grave, and I knew it
for the Wainwright baby's--not the first of our graves since we had
crossed the Wasatch mountains.

He was a weird figure of a man. Aged and lean, long-faced, hollow-
checked, with matted, sunburnt hair that fell below the shoulders of
his buckskin shirt, his face was distorted with hatred and helpless
rage. Holding his long rifle in his bridle-hand, he shook his free
fist at Cedar City.

"God's curse on all of you!" he cried out. "On your children, and
on your babes unborn. May drought destroy your crops. May you eat
sand seasoned with the venom of rattlesnakes. May the sweet water
of your springs turn to bitter alkali. May . . ."

Here his words became indistinct as our wagons rattled on; but his
heaving shoulders and brandishing fist attested that he had only
begun to lay the curse. That he expressed the general feeling in
our train was evidenced by the many women who leaned from the
wagons, thrusting out gaunt forearms and shaking bony, labour-
malformed fists at the last of Mormondom. A man, who walked in the
sand and goaded the oxen of the wagon behind ours, laughed and waved
his goad. It was unusual, that laugh, for there had been no
laughter in our train for many days.

"Give 'm hell, Laban," he encouraged. "Them's my sentiments."

And as our train rolled on I continued to look back at Laban,
standing in his stirrups by the baby's grave. Truly he was a weird
figure, with his long hair, his moccasins, and fringed leggings. So
old and weather-beaten was his buckskin shirt that ragged filaments,
here and there, showed where proud fringes once had been. He was a
man of flying tatters. I remember, at his waist, dangled dirty
tufts of hair that, far back in the journey, after a shower of rain,
were wont to show glossy black. These I knew were Indian scalps,
and the sight of them always thrilled me.

"It will do him good," father commended, more to himself than to me.
"I've been looking for days for him to blow up."

"I wish he'd go back and take a couple of scalps," I volunteered.

My father regarded me quizzically.

"Don't like the Mormons, eh, son?"

I shook my head and felt myself swelling with the inarticulate hate
that possessed me.

"When I grow up," I said, after a minute, "I'm goin' gunning for
them."

"You, Jesse!" came my mother's voice from inside the wagon. "Shut
your mouth instanter."  And to my father: "You ought to be ashamed
letting the boy talk on like that."

Two days' journey brought us to Mountain Meadows, and here, well
beyond the last settlement, for the first time we did not form the
wagon-circle. The wagons were roughly in a circle, but there were
many gaps, and the wheels were not chained. Preparations were made
to stop a week. The cattle must be rested for the real desert,
though this was desert enough in all seeming. The same low hills of
sand were about us, but sparsely covered with scrub brush. The flat
was sandy, but there was some grass--more than we had encountered in
many days. Not more than a hundred feet from camp was a weak spring
that barely supplied human needs. But farther along the bottom
various other weak springs emerged from the hillsides, and it was at
these that the cattle watered.

We made camp early that day, and, because of the programme to stay a
week, there was a general overhauling of soiled clothes by the
women, who planned to start washing on the morrow. Everybody worked
till nightfall. While some of the men mended harness others
repaired the frames and ironwork of the wagons. Them was much
heating and hammering of iron and tightening of bolts and nuts. And
I remember coming upon Laban, sitting cross-legged in the shade of a
wagon and sewing away till nightfall on a new pair of moccasins. He
was the only man in our train who wore moccasins and buckskin, and I
have an impression that he had not belonged to our company when it
left Arkansas. Also, he had neither wife, nor family, nor wagon of
his own. All he possessed was his horse, his rifle, the clothes he
stood up in, and a couple of blankets that were hauled in the Mason
wagon.

Next morning it was that our doom fell. Two days' journey beyond
the last Mormon outpost, knowing that no Indians were about and
apprehending nothing from the Indians on any count, for the first
time we had not chained our wagons in the solid circle, placed
guards on the cattle, nor set a night-watch.

My awakening was like a nightmare. It came as a sudden blast of
sound. I was only stupidly awake for the first moments and did
nothing except to try to analyze and identify the various noises
that went to compose the blast that continued without let up. I
could hear near and distant explosions of rifles, shouts and curses
of men, women screaming, and children bawling. Then I could make
out the thuds and squeals of bullets that hit wood and iron in the
wheels and under-construction of the wagon. Whoever it was that was
shooting, the aim was too low. When I started to rise, my mother,
evidently just in the act of dressing, pressed me down with her
hand. Father, already up and about, at this stage erupted into the
wagon.

"Out of it!" he shouted. "Quick! To the ground!"

He wasted no time. With a hook-like clutch that was almost a blow,
so swift was it, he flung me bodily out of the rear end of the
wagon. I had barely time to crawl out from under when father,
mother, and the baby came down pell-mell where I had been.

"Here, Jesse!" father shouted to me, and I joined him in scooping
out sand behind the shelter of a wagon-wheel. We worked bare-handed
and wildly. Mother joined in.

"Go ahead and make it deeper, Jesse," father ordered,

He stood up and rushed away in the gray light, shouting commands as
he ran. (I had learned by now my surname. I was Jesse Fancher. My
father was Captain Fancher).

"Lie down!" I could hear him. "Get behind the wagon wheels and
burrow in the sand! Family men, get the women and children out of
the wagons! Hold your fire! No more shooting! Hold your fire and
be ready for the rush when it comes! Single men, join Laban at the
right, Cochrane at the left, and me in the centre! Don't stand up!
Crawl for it!"

But no rush came. For a quarter of an hour the heavy and irregular
firing continued. Our damage had come in the first moments of
surprise when a number of the early-rising men were caught exposed
in the light of the campfires they were building. The Indians--for
Indians Laban declared them to be--had attacked us from the open,
and were lying down and firing at us. In the growing light father
made ready for them. His position was near to where I lay in the
burrow with mother so that I heard him when he cried out:

"Now! all together!"

From left, right, and centre our rifles loosed in a volley. I had
popped my head up to see, and I could make out more than one
stricken Indian. Their fire immediately ceased, and I could see
them scampering back on foot across the open, dragging their dead
and wounded with them.

All was work with us on the instant. While the wagons were being
dragged and chained into the circle with tongues inside--I saw women
and little boys and girls flinging their strength on the wheel
spokes to help--we took toll of our losses. First, and gravest of
all, our last animal had been run off. Next, lying about the fires
they had been building, were seven of our men. Four were dead, and
three were dying. Other men, wounded, were being cared for by the
women. Little Rish Hardacre had been struck in the arm by a heavy
ball. He was no more than six, and I remember looking on with mouth
agape while his mother held him on her lap and his father set about
bandaging the wound. Little Rish had stopped crying. I could see
the tears on his cheeks while he stared wonderingly at a sliver of
broken bone sticking out of his forearm.

Granny White was found dead in the Foxwell wagon. She was a fat and
helpless old woman who never did anything but sit down all the time
and smoke a pipe. She was the mother of Abby Foxwell. And Mrs.
Grant had been killed. Her husband sat beside her body. He was
very quiet. There were no tears in his eyes. He just sat there,
his rifle across his knees, and everybody left him alone.

Under father's directions the company was working like so many
beavers. The men dug a big rifle pit in the centre of the corral,
forming a breastwork out of the displaced sand. Into this pit the
women dragged bedding, food, and all sorts of necessaries from the
wagons. All the children helped. There was no whimpering, and
little or no excitement. There was work to be done, and all of us
were folks born to work.

The big rifle pit was for the women and children. Under the wagons,
completely around the circle, a shallow trench was dug and an
earthwork thrown up. This was for the fighting men.

Laban returned from a scout. He reported that the Indians had
withdrawn the matter of half a mile, and were holding a powwow.
Also he had seen them carry six of their number off the field, three
of which, he said, were deaders.

From time to time, during the morning of that first day, we observed
clouds of dust that advertised the movements of considerable bodies
of mounted men. These clouds of dust came toward us, hemming us in
on all sides. But we saw no living creature. One cloud of dirt
only moved away from us. It was a large cloud, and everybody said
it was our cattle being driven off. And our forty great wagons that
had rolled over the Rockies and half across the continent stood in a
helpless circle. Without cattle they could roll no farther.

At noon Laban came in from another scout. He had seen fresh Indians
arriving from the south, showing that we were being closed in. It
was at this time that we saw a dozen white men ride out on the crest
of a low hill to the east and look down on us.

"That settles it," Laban said to father. "The Indians have been put
up to it."

"They're white like us," I heard Abby Foxwell complain to mother.
"Why don't they come in to us?"

"They ain't whites," I piped up, with a wary eye for the swoop of
mother's hand. "They're Mormons."

That night, after dark, three of our young men stole out of camp. I
saw them go. They were Will Aden, Abel Milliken, and Timothy Grant.

"They are heading for Cedar City to get help," father told mother
while he was snatching a hasty bite of supper.

Mother shook her head.

"There's plenty of Mormons within calling distance of camp," she
said. "If they won't help, and they haven't shown any signs, then
the Cedar City ones won't either."

"But there are good Mormons and bad Mormons--" father began.

"We haven't found any good ones so far," she shut him off.

Not until morning did I hear of the return of Abel Milliken and
Timothy Grant, but I was not long in learning. The whole camp was
downcast by reason of their report. The three had gone only a few
miles when they were challenged by white men. As soon as Will Aden
spoke up, telling that they were from the Fancher Company, going to
Cedar City for help, he was shot down. Milliken and Grant escaped
back with the news, and the news settled the last hope in the hearts
of our company. The whites were behind the Indians, and the doom so
long apprehended was upon us.

This morning of the second day our men, going for water, were fired
upon. The spring was only a hundred feet outside our circle, but
the way to it was commanded by the Indians who now occupied the low
hill to the east. It was close range, for the hill could not have
been more than fifteen rods away. But the Indians were not good
shots, evidently, for our men brought in the water without being
hit.

Beyond an occasional shot into camp the morning passed quietly. We
had settled down in the rifle pit, and, being used to rough living,
were comfortable enough. Of course it was bad for the families of
those who had been killed, and there was the taking care of the
wounded. I was for ever stealing away from mother in my insatiable
curiosity to see everything that was going on, and I managed to see
pretty much of everything. Inside the corral, to the south of the
big rifle pit, the men dug a hole and buried the seven men and two
women all together. Only Mrs. Hastings, who had lost her husband
and father, made much trouble. She cried and screamed out, and it
took the other women a long time to quiet her.

On the low hill to the east the Indians kept up a tremendous
powwowing and yelling. But beyond an occasional harmless shot they
did nothing.

"What's the matter with the ornery cusses?" Laban impatiently wanted
to know. "Can't they make up their minds what they're goin' to do,
an' then do it?"

It was hot in the corral that afternoon. The sun blazed down out of
a cloudless sky, and there was no wind. The men, lying with their
rifles in the trench under the wagons, were partly shaded; but the
big rifle pit, in which were over a hundred women and children, was
exposed to the full power of the sun. Here, too, were the wounded
men, over whom we erected awnings of blankets. It was crowded and
stifling in the pit, and I was for ever stealing out of it to the
firing-line, and making a great to-do at carrying messages for
father.

Our grave mistake had been in not forming the wagon-circle so as to
inclose the spring. This had been due to the excitement of the
first attack, when we did not know how quickly it might be followed
by a second one. And now it was too late. At fifteen rods'
distance from the Indian position on the hill we did not dare
unchain our wagons. Inside the corral, south of the graves, we
constructed a latrine, and, north of the rifle pit in the centre, a
couple of men were told off by father to dig a well for water.

In the mid-afternoon of that day, which was the second day, we saw
Lee again. He was on foot, crossing diagonally over the meadow to
the north-west just out of rifle-shot from us. Father hoisted one
of mother's sheets on a couple of ox-goads lashed together. This
was our white flag. But Lee took no notice of it, continuing on his
way.

Laban was for trying a long shot at him, but father stopped him,
saying that it was evident the whites had not made up their minds
what they were going to do with us, and that a shot at Lee might
hurry them into making up their minds the wrong way.

"Here, Jesse," father said to me, tearing a strip from the sheet and
fastening it to an ox-goad. "Take this and go out and try to talk
to that man. Don't tell him anything about what's happened to us.
Just try to get him to come in and talk with us."

As I started to obey, my chest swelling with pride in my mission,
Jed Dunham cried out that he wanted to go with me. Jed was about my
own age.

"Dunham, can your boy go along with Jesse?" father asked Jed's
father. "Two's better than one. They'll keep each other out of
mischief."

So Jed and I, two youngsters of nine, went out under the white flag
to talk with the leader of our enemies. But Lee would not talk.
When he saw us coming he started to sneak away. We never got within
calling distance of him, and after a while he must have hidden in
the brush; for we never laid eyes on him again, and we knew he
couldn't have got clear away.

Jed and I beat up the brush for hundreds of yards all around. They
hadn't told us how long we were to be gone, and since the Indians
did not fire on us we kept on going. We were away over two hours,
though had either of us been alone he would have been back in a
quarter of the time. But Jed was bound to outbrave me, and I was
equally bound to outbrave him.

Our foolishness was not without profit. We walked, boldly about
under our white flag, and learned how thoroughly our camp was
beleaguered. To the south of our train, not more than half a mile
away, we made out a large Indian camp. Beyond, on the meadow, we
could see Indian boys riding hard on their horses.

Then there was the Indian position on the hill to the east. We
managed to climb a low hill so as to look into this position. Jed
and I spent half an hour trying to count them, and concluded, with
much guessing, that there must be at least a couple of hundred.
Also, we saw white men with them and doing a great deal of talking.

North-east of our train, not more than four hundred yards from it,
we discovered a large camp of whites behind a low rise of ground.
And beyond we could see fifty or sixty saddle-horses grazing. And a
mile or so away, to the north, we saw a tiny cloud of dust
approaching. Jed and I waited until we saw a single man, riding
fast, gallop into the camp of the whites.

When we got back into the corral the first thing that happened to me
was a smack from mother for having stayed away so long; but father
praised Jed and me when we gave our report.

"Watch for an attack now maybe, Captain," Aaron Cochrane said to
father. "That man the boys seen has rid in for a purpose. The
whites are holding the Indians till they get orders from higher up.
Maybe that man brung the orders one way or the other. They ain't
sparing horseflesh, that's one thing sure."

Half an hour after our return Laban attempted a scout under a white
flag. But he had not gone twenty feet outside the circle when the
Indians opened fire on him and sent him back on the run.

Just before sundown I was in the rifle pit holding the baby, while
mother was spreading the blankets for a bed. There were so many of
us that we were packed and jammed. So little room was there that
many of the women the night before had sat up and slept with their
heads bowed on their knees. Right alongside of me, so near that
when he tossed his arms about he struck me on the shoulder, Silas
Dunlap was dying. He had been shot in the head in the first attack,
and all the second day was out of his head and raving and singing
doggerel. One of his songs, that he sang over and over, until it
made mother frantic nervous, was:

"Said the first little devil to the second little devil,
'Give me some tobaccy from your old tobaccy box.'
Said the second little devil to the first little devil,
'Stick close to your money and close to your rocks,
An' you'll always have tobaccy in your old tobaccy box.'"

I was sitting directly alongside of him, holding the baby, when the
attack burst on us. It was sundown, and I was staring with all my
eyes at Silas Dunlap who was just in the final act of dying. His
wife, Sarah, had one hand resting on his forehead. Both she and her
Aunt Martha were crying softly. And then it came--explosions and
bullets from hundreds of rifles. Clear around from east to west, by
way of the north, they had strung out in half a circle and were
pumping lead in our position. Everybody in the rifle pit flattened
down. Lots of the younger children set up a-squalling, and it kept
the women busy hushing them. Some of the women screamed at first,
but not many.

Thousands of shots must haven rained in on us in the next few
minutes. How I wanted to crawl out to the trench under the wagons
where our men were keeping up a steady but irregular fire! Each was
shooting on his own whenever he saw a man to pull trigger on. But
mother suspected me, for she made me crouch down and keep right on
holding the baby.

I was just taking a look at Silas Dunlap--he was still quivering--
when the little Castleton baby was killed. Dorothy Castleton,
herself only about ten, was holding it, so that it was killed in her
arms. She was not hurt at all. I heard them talking about it, and
they conjectured that the bullet must have struck high on one of the
wagons and been deflected down into the rifle pit. It was just an
accident, they said, and that except for such accidents we were safe
where we were.

When I looked again Silas Dunlap was dead, and I suffered distinct
disappointment in being cheated out of witnessing that particular
event. I had never been lucky enough to see a man actually die
before my eyes.

Dorothy Castleton got hysterics over what had happened, and yelled
and screamed for a long time and she set Mrs. Hastings going again.
Altogether such a row was raised that father sent Watt Cummings
crawling back to us to find out what was the matter.

Well along into twilight the heavy firing ceased, although there
were scattering shots during the night. Two of our men were wounded
in this second attack, and were brought into the rifle pit. Bill
Tyler was killed instantly, and they buried him, Silas Dunlap, and
the Castleton baby, in the dark alongside of the others.

All during the night men relieved one another at sinking the well
deeper; but the only sign of water they got was damp sand. Some of
the men fetched a few pails of water from the spring, but were fired
upon, and they gave it up when Jeremy Hopkins had his left hand shot
off at the wrist.

Next morning, the third day, it was hotter and dryer than ever. We
awoke thirsty, and there was no cooking. So dry were our mouths
that we could not eat. I tried a piece of stale bread mother gave
me, but had to give it up. The firing rose and fell. Sometimes
there were hundreds shooting into the camp. At other times came
lulls in which not a shot was fired. Father was continually
cautioning our men not to waste shots because we were running short
of ammunition.

And all the time the men went on digging the well. It was so deep
that they were hoisting the sand up in buckets. The men who hoisted
were exposed, and one of them was wounded in the shoulder. He was
Peter Bromley, who drove oxen for the Bloodgood wagon, and he was
engaged to marry Jane Bloodgood. She jumped out of the rifle pit
and ran right to him while the bullets were flying and led him back
into shelter. About midday the well caved in, and there was lively
work digging out the couple who were buried in the sand. Amos
Wentworth did not come to for an hour. After that they timbered the
well with bottom boards from the wagons and wagon tongues, and the
digging went on. But all they could get, and they were twenty feet
down, was damp sand. The water would not seep.

By this time the conditions in the rifle pit were terrible. The
children were complaining for water, and the babies, hoarse from
much crying, went on crying. Robert Carr, another wounded man, lay
about ten feet from mother and me. He was out of his head, and kept
thrashing his arms about and calling for water. And some of the
women were almost as bad, and kept raving against the Mormons and
Indians. Some of the women prayed a great deal, and the three grown
Demdike sisters, with their mother, sang gospel hymns. Other women
got damp sand that was hoisted out of the bottom of the well, and
packed it against the bare bodies of the babies to try to cool and
soothe them.

The two Fairfax brothers couldn't stand it any longer, and, with
pails in their hands, crawled out under a wagon and made a dash for
the spring. Giles never got half way, when he went down. Roger
made it there and back without being hit. He brought two pails
part-full, for some splashed out when he ran. Giles crawled back,
and when they helped him into the rifle pit he was bleeding at the
mouth and coughing.

Two part-pails of water could not go far among over a hundred of us,
not counting the, men. Only the babies, and the very little
children, and the wounded men, got any. I did not get a sip,
although mother dipped a bit of cloth into the several spoonfuls she
got for the baby and wiped my mouth out. She did not even do that
for herself, for she left me the bit of damp rag to chew.

The situation grew unspeakably worse in the afternoon. The quiet
sun blazed down through the clear windless air and made a furnace of
our hole in the sand. And all about us were the explosions of
rifles and yells of the Indians. Only once in a while did father
permit a single shot from the trench, and at that only by our best
marksmen, such as Laban and Timothy Grant. But a steady stream of
lead poured into our position all the time. There were no more
disastrous ricochets, however; and our men in the trench, no longer
firing, lay low and escaped damage. Only four were wounded, and
only one of them very badly.

Father came in from the trench during a lull in the firing. He sat
for a few minutes alongside mother and me without speaking. He
seemed to be listening to all the moaning and crying for water that
was going up. Once he climbed out of the rifle pit and went over to
investigate the well. He brought back only damp sand, which he
plastered thick on the chest and shoulders of Robert Carr. Then he
went to where Jed Dunham and his mother were, and sent for Jed's
father to come in from the trench. So closely packed were we that
when anybody moved about inside the rifle pit he had to crawl
carefully over the bodies of those lying down.

After a time father came crawling back to us.

"Jesse, he asked, "are you afraid of the Indians?"

I shook my head emphatically, guessing that I was to be seat on
another proud mission.

"Are you afraid of the damned Mormons?"

"Not of any damned Mormon," I answered, taking advantage of the
opportunity to curse our enemies without fear of the avenging back
of mother's hand.

I noted the little smile that curled his tired lips for the moment
when he heard my reply.

"Well, then, Jesse," he said, "will you go with Jed to the spring
for water?"

I was all eagerness.

"We're going to dress the two of you up as girls," he continued, "so
that maybe they won't fire on you."

I insisted on going as I was, as a male human that wore pants; but I
surrendered quickly enough when father suggested that he would find
some other boy to dress up and go along with Jed.

A chest was fetched in from the Chattox wagon. The Chattox girls
were twins and of about a size with Jed and me. Several of the
women got around to help. They were the Sunday dresses of the
Chattox twins, and had come in the chest all the way from Arkansas.

In her anxiety mother left the baby with Sarah Dunlap, and came as
far as the trench with me. There, under a wagon and behind the
little breast-work of sand, Jed and I received our last
instructions. Then we crawled out and stood up in the open. We
were dressed precisely alike--white stockings, white dresses, with
big blue sashes, and white sunbonnets. Jed's right and my left hand
were clasped together. In each of our free hands we carried two
small pails.

"Take it easy," father cautioned, as we began our advance. "Go
slow. Walk like girls."

Not a shot was fired. We made the spring safely, filled our pails,
and lay down and took a good drink ourselves. With a full pail in
each hand we made the return trip. And still not a shot was fired.

I cannot remember how many journeys we made--fully fifteen or
twenty. We walked slowly, always going out with hands clasped,
always coming back slowly with four pails of water. It was
astonishing how thirsty we were. We lay down several times and took
long drinks.

But it was too much for our enemies. I cannot imagine that the
Indians would have withheld their fire for so long, girls or no
girls, had they not obeyed instructions from the whites who were
with them. At any rate Jed and I were just starting on another trip
when a rifle went off from the Indian hill, and then another.

"Come back!" mother cried out.

I looked at Jed, and found him looking at me. I knew he was
stubborn and had made up his mind to be the last one in. So I
started to advance, and at the same instant he started.

"You!--Jesse!" cried my mother. And there was more than a smacking
in the way she said it.

Jed offered to clasp hands, but I shook my head.

"Run for it," I said.

And while we hotfooted it across the sand it seemed all the rifles
on Indian hill were turned loose on us. I got to the spring a
little ahead, so that Jed had to wait for me to fill my pails.

"Now run for it," he told me; and from the leisurely way he went
about filling his own pails I knew he was determined to be in last.

So I crouched down, and, while I waited, watched the puffs of dust
raised by the bullets. We began the return side by side and
running.

"Not so fast," I cautioned him, "or you'll spill half the water."

That stung him, and he slacked back perceptibly. Midway I stumbled
and fell headlong. A bullet, striking directly in front of me,
filled my eyes with sand. For the moment I thought I was shot.

"Done it a-purpose," Jed sneered as I scrambled to my feet. He had
stood and waited for me.

I caught his idea. He thought I had fallen deliberately in order to
spill my water and go back for more. This rivalry between us was a
serious matter--so serious, indeed, that I immediately took
advantage of what he had imputed and raced back to the spring. And
Jed Dunham, scornful of the bullets that were puffing dust all
around him, stood there upright in the open and waited for me. We
came in side by side, with honours even in our boys' foolhardiness.
But when we delivered the water Jed had only one pailful. A bullet
had gone through the other pail close to the bottom.

Mother took it out on me with a lecture on disobedience. She must
have known, after what I had done, that father wouldn't let her
smack me; for, while she was lecturing, father winked at me across
her shoulder. It was the first time he had ever winked at me.

Back in the rifle pit Jed and I were heroes. The women wept and
blessed us, and kissed us and mauled us. And I confess I was proud
of the demonstration, although, like Jed, I let on that I did not
like all such making-over. But Jeremy Hopkins, a great bandage
about the stump of his left wrist, said we were the stuff white men
were made out of--men like Daniel Boone, like Kit Carson, and Davy
Crockett. I was prouder of that than all the rest.

The remainder of the day I seem to have been bothered principally
with the pain of my right eye caused by the sand that had been
kicked into it by the bullet. The eye was bloodshot, mother said;
and to me it seemed to hurt just as much whether I kept it open or
closed. I tried both ways.

Things were quieter in the rifle pit, because all had had water,
though strong upon us was the problem of how the next water was to
be procured. Coupled with this was the known fact that our
ammunition was almost exhausted. A thorough overhauling of the
wagons by father had resulted in finding five pounds of powder. A
very little more was in the flasks of the men.

I remembered the sundown attack of the night before, and anticipated
it this time by crawling to the trench before sunset. I crept into
a place alongside of Laban. He was busy chewing tobacco, and did
not notice me. For some time I watched him, fearing that when he
discovered me he would order me back. He would take a long squint
out between the wagon wheels, chew steadily a while, and then spit
carefully into a little depression he had made in the sand.

"How's tricks?" I asked finally. It was the way he always addressed
me.

"Fine," he answered. "Most remarkable fine, Jesse, now that I can
chew again. My mouth was that dry that I couldn't chew from sun-up
to when you brung the water."

Here a man showed head and shoulders over the top of the little hill
to the north-east occupied by the whites. Laban sighted his rifle
on him for a long minute. Then he shook his head.

"Four hundred yards. Nope, I don't risk it. I might get him, and
then again I mightn't, an' your dad is mighty anxious about the
powder."

"What do you think our chances are?" I asked, man-fashion, for,
after my water exploit, I was feeling very much the man.

Laban seemed to consider carefully for a space ere he replied.

"Jesse, I don't mind tellin' you we're in a damned bad hole. But
we'll get out, oh, we'll get out, you can bet your bottom dollar."

"Some of us ain't going to get out," I objected.

"Who, for instance?" he queried.

"Why, Bill Tyler, and Mrs. Grant, and Silas Dunlap, and all the
rest."

"Aw, shucks, Jesse--they're in the ground already. Don't you know
everybody has to bury their dead as they traipse along? They've ben
doin' it for thousands of years I reckon, and there's just as many
alive as ever they was. You see, Jesse, birth and death go hand-in-
hand. And they're born as fast as they die--faster, I reckon,
because they've increased and multiplied. Now you, you might a-got
killed this afternoon packin' water. But you're here, ain't you, a-
gassin' with me an' likely to grow up an' be the father of a fine
large family in Californy. They say everything grows large in
Californy."

This cheerful way of looking at the matter encouraged me to dare
sudden expression of a long covetousness.

"Say, Laban, supposin' you got killed here--"

"Who?--me?" he cried.

"I'm just sayin' supposin'," I explained.

"Oh, all right then. Go on. Supposin' I am killed?"

"Will you give me your scalps?"

"Your ma'll smack you if she catches you a-wearin' them," he
temporized.

"I don't have to wear them when she's around. Now if you got
killed, Laban, somebody'd have to get them scalps. Why not me?"

"Why not?" he repeated. "That's correct, and why not you? All
right, Jesse. I like you, and your pa. The minute I'm killed the
scalps is yourn, and the scalpin' knife, too. And there's Timothy
Grant for witness. Did you hear, Timothy?"

Timothy said he had heard, and I lay there speechless in the
stifling trench, too overcome by my greatness of good fortune to be
able to utter a word of gratitude.

I was rewarded for my foresight in going to the trench. Another
general attack was made at sundown, and thousands of shots were
fired into us. Nobody on our side was scratched. On the other
hand, although we fired barely thirty shots, I saw Laban and Timothy
Grant each get an Indian. Laban told me that from the first only
the Indians had done the shooting. He was certain that no white had
fired a shot. All of which sorely puzzled him. The whites neither
offered us aid nor attacked us, and all the while were on visiting
terms with the Indians who were attacking us.

Next morning found the thirst harsh upon us. I was out at the first
hint of light. There had been a heavy dew, and men, women, and
children were lapping it up with their tongues from off the wagon-
tongues, brake-blocks, and wheel-tyres.

There was talk that Laban had returned from a scout just before
daylight; that he had crept close to the position of the whites;
that they were already up; and that in the light of their camp-fires
he had seen them praying in a large circle. Also he reported from
what few words he caught that they were praying about us and what
was to be done with us.

"May God send them the light then," I heard one of the Demdike
sisters say to Abby Foxwell.

"And soon," said Abby Foxwell, "for I don't know what we'll do a
whole day without water, and our powder is about gone."

Nothing happened all morning. Not a shot was fired. Only the sun
blazed down through the quiet air. Our thirst grew, and soon the
babies were crying and the younger children whimpering and
complaining. At noon Will Hamilton took two large pails and started
for the spring. But before he could crawl under the wagon Ann
Demdike ran and got her arms around him and tried to hold him back.
But he talked to her, and kissed her, and went on. Not a shot was
fired, nor was any fired all the time he continued to go out and
bring back water.

"Praise God!" cried old Mrs. Demdike. "It is a sign. They have
relented."

This was the opinion of many of the women.

About two o'clock, after we had eaten and felt better, a white man
appeared, carrying a white flag. Will Hamilton went out and talked
to him, came back and talked with father and the rest of our men,
and then went out to the stranger again. Farther back we could see
a man standing and looking on, whom we recognized as Lee.

With us all was excitement. The women were so relieved that they
were crying and kissing one another, and old Mrs. Demdike and others
were hallelujahing and blessing God. The proposal, which our men
had accepted, was that we would put ourselves under the flag of
truce and be protected from the Indians.

"We had to do it," I heard father tell mother.

He was sitting, droop-shouldered and dejected, on a wagon-tongue.

"But what if they intend treachery?" mother asked.

He shrugged his shoulders.

"We've got to take the chance that they don't," he said. "Our
ammunition is gone."

Some of our men were unchaining one of our wagons and rolling it out
of the way. I ran across to see what was happening. In came Lee
himself, followed by two empty wagons, each driven by one man.
Everybody crowded around Lee. He said that they had had a hard time
with the Indians keeping them off of us, and that Major Higbee, with
fifty of the Mormon militia, were ready to take us under their
charge.

But what made father and Laban and some of the men suspicious was
when Lee said that we must put all our rifles into one of the wagons
so as not to arouse the animosity of the Indians. By so doing we
would appear to be the prisoners of the Mormon militia.

Father straightened up and was about to refuse when he glanced to
Laban, who replied in an undertone. "They ain't no more use in our
hands than in the wagon, seein' as the powder's gone."

Two of our wounded men who could not walk were put into the wagons,
and along with them were put all the little children. Lee seemed to
be picking them out over eight and under eight. Jed and I were
large for our age, and we were nine besides; so Lee put us with the
older bunch and told us we were to march with the women on foot.

When he took our baby from mother and put it in a wagon she started
to object. Then I saw her lips draw tightly together, and she gave
in. She was a gray-eyed, strong-featured, middle-aged woman, large-
boned and fairly stout. But the long journey and hardship had told
on her, so that she was hollow-cheeked and gaunt, and like all the
women in the company she wore an expression of brooding, never-
ceasing anxiety.

It was when Lee described the order of march that Laban came to me.
Lee said that the women and the children that walked should go first
in the line, following behind the two wagons. Then the men, in
single file, should follow the women. When Laban heard this he came
to me, untied the scalps from his belt, and fastened them to my
waist.

"But you ain't killed yet," I protested.

"You bet your life I ain't," he answered lightly.

"I've just reformed, that's all. This scalp-wearin' is a vain thing
and heathen."  He stopped a moment as if he had forgotten something,
then, as he turned abruptly on his heel to regain the men of our
company, he called over his shoulder, "Well, so long, Jesse."

I was wondering why he should say good-bye when a white man came
riding into the corral. He said Major Higbee had sent him to tell
us to hurry up, because the Indians might attack at any moment.

So the march began, the two wagons first. Lee kept along with the
women and walking children. Behind us, after waiting until we were
a couple of hundred feet in advance, came our men. As we emerged
from the corral we could see the militia just a short distance away.
They were leaning on their rifles and standing in a long line about
six feet apart. As we passed them I could not help noticing how
solemn-faced they were. They looked like men at a funeral. So did
the women notice this, and some of them began to cry.

I walked right behind my mother. I had chosen this position so that
she would not catch-sight of my scalps. Behind me came the three
Demdike sisters, two of them helping the old mother. I could hear
Lee calling all the time to the men who drove the wagons not to go
so fast. A man that one of the Demdike girls said must be Major
Higbee sat on a horse watching us go by. Not an Indian was in
sight.

By the time our men were just abreast of the militia--I had just
looked back to try to see where Jed Dunham was--the thing happened.
I heard Major Higbee cry out in a loud voice, "Do your duty!"  All
the rifles of the militia seemed to go off at once, and our men were
falling over and sinking down. All the Demdike women went down at
one time. I turned quickly to see how mother was, and she was down.
Right alongside of us, out of the bushes, came hundreds of Indians,
all shooting. I saw the two Dunlap sisters start on the run across
the sand, and took after them, for whites and Indians were all
killing us. And as I ran I saw the driver of one of the wagons
shooting the two wounded men. The horses of the other wagon were
plunging and rearing and their driver was trying to hold them.

It was when the little boy that was I was running after the Dunlap
girls that blackness came upon him. All memory there ceases, for
Jesse Fancher there ceased, and, as Jesse Fancher, ceased for ever.
The form that was Jesse Fancher, the body that was his, being matter
and apparitional, like an apparition passed and was not. But the
imperishable spirit did not cease. It continued to exist, and, in
its next incarnation, became the residing spirit of that
apparitional body known as Darrell Standing's which soon is to be
taken out and hanged and sent into the nothingness whither all
apparitions go.

There is a lifer here in Folsom, Matthew Davies, of old pioneer
stock, who is trusty of the scaffold and execution chamber. He is
an old man, and his folks crossed the plains in the early days. I
have talked with him, and he has verified the massacre in which
Jesse Fancher was killed. When this old lifer was a child there was
much talk in his family of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. The
children in the wagons, he said, were saved, because they were too
young to tell tales.

All of which I submit. Never, in my life of Darrell Standing, have
I read a line or heard a word spoken of the Fancher Company that
perished at Mountain Meadows. Yet, in the jacket in San Quentin
prison, all this knowledge came to me. I could not create this
knowledge out of nothing, any more than could I create dynamite out
of nothing. This knowledge and these facts I have related have but
one explanation. They are out of the spirit content of me--the
spirit that, unlike matter, does not perish.

In closing this chapter I must state that Matthew Davies also told
me that some years after the massacre Lee was taken by United States
Government officials to the Mountain Meadows and there executed on
the site of our old corral.

CHAPTER XIV

When, at the conclusion of my first ten days' term in the jacket, I
was brought back to consciousness by Doctor Jackson's thumb pressing
open an eyelid, I opened both eyes and smiled up into the face of
Warden Atherton.

"Too cussed to live and too mean to die," was his comment.

"The ten days are up, Warden," I whispered.

"Well, we're going to unlace you," he growled.

"It is not that," I said. "You observed my smile. You remember we
had a little wager. Don't bother to unlace me first. Just give the
Bull Durham and cigarette papers to Morrell and Oppenheimer. And
for full measure here's another smile."

"Oh, I know your kind, Standing," the Warden lectured. "But it
won't get you anything. If I don't break you, you'll break all
strait-jacket records."

"He's broken them already," Doctor Jackson said. "Who ever heard of
a man smiling after ten days of it?"

"Well and bluff," Warden Atherton answered. "Unlace him, Hutchins."

"Why such haste?" I queried, in a whisper, of course, for so low had
life ebbed in me that it required all the little strength I
possessed and all the will of me to be able to whisper even. "Why
such haste? I don't have to catch a train, and I am so confounded
comfortable as I am that I prefer not to be disturbed."

But unlace me they did, rolling me out of the fetid jacket and upon
the floor, an inert, helpless thing.

"No wonder he was comfortable," said Captain Jamie. "He didn't feel
anything. He's paralysed."

"Paralysed your grandmother," sneered the Warden. "Get him up on
his feat and you'll see him stand."

Hutchins and the doctor dragged me to my feet.

"Now let go!" the Warden commanded.

Not all at once could life return into the body that had been
practically dead for ten days, and as a result, with no power as yet
over my flesh, I gave at the knees, crumpled, pitched sidewise, and
gashed my forehead against the wall.

"You see," said Captain Jamie.

"Good acting," retorted the Warden. "That man's got nerve to do
anything."

"You're right, Warden," I whispered from the floor. "I did it on
purpose. It was a stage fall. Lift me up again, and I'll repeat
it. I promise you lots of fun."

I shall not dwell upon the agony of returning circulation. It was
to become an old story with me, and it bore its share in cutting the
lines in my face that I shall carry to the scaffold.

When they finally left me I lay for the rest of the day stupid and
half-comatose. There is such a thing as anaesthesia of pain,
engendered by pain too exquisite to be borne. And I have known that
anaesthesia.

By evening I was able to crawl about my cell, but not yet could I
stand up. I drank much water, and cleansed myself as well as I
could; but not until next day could I bring myself to eat, and then
only by deliberate force of my will.

The program me, as given me by Warden Atherton, was that I was to
rest up and recuperate for a few days, and then, if in the meantime
I had not confessed to the hiding-place of the dynamite, I should be
given another ten days in the jacket.

"Sorry to cause you so much trouble, Warden," I had said in reply.
"It's a pity I don't die in the jacket and so put you out of your
misery."

At this time I doubt that I weighed an ounce over ninety pounds.
Yet, two years before, when the doors of San Quentin first closed on
me, I had weighed one hundred and sixty-five pounds. It seems
incredible that there was another ounce I could part with and still
live. Yet in the months that followed, ounce by ounce I was reduced
until I know I must have weighed nearer eighty than ninety pounds.
I do know, after I managed my escape from solitary and struck the
guard Thurston on the nose, that before they took me to San Rafael
for trial, while I was being cleaned and shaved I weighed eighty-
nine pounds.

There are those who wonder how men grow hard. Warden Atherton was a
hard man. He made me hard, and my very hardness reacted on him and
made him harder. And yet he never succeeded in killing me. It
required the state law of California, a hanging judge, and an
unpardoning governor to send me to the scaffold for striking a
prison guard with my fist. I shall always contend that that guard
had a nose most easily bleedable. I was a bat-eyed, tottery
skeleton at the time. I sometimes wonder if his nose really did
bleed. Of course he swore it did, on the witness stand. But I have
known prison guards take oath to worse perjuries than that.

Ed Morrell was eager to know if I had succeeded with the experiment;
but when he attempted to talk with me he was shut up by Smith, the
guard who happened to be on duty in solitary.

"That's all right, Ed," I rapped to him. "You and Jake keep quiet,
and I'll tell you about it. Smith can't prevent you from listening,
and he can't prevent me from talking. They have done their worst,
and I am still here."

"Cut that out, Standing!" Smith bellowed at me from the corridor on
which all the cells opened.

Smith was a peculiarly saturnine individual, by far the most cruel
and vindictive of our guards. We used to canvass whether his wife
bullied him or whether he had chronic indigestion.

I continued rapping with my knuckles, and he came to the wicket to
glare in at me.

"I told you to out that out," he snarled.

"Sorry," I said suavely. "But I have a sort of premonition that I
shall go right on rapping. And--er--excuse me for asking a personal
question--what are you going to do about it?"

"I'll--" he began explosively, proving, by his inability to conclude
the remark, that he thought in henids.

"Yes?" I encouraged. "Just what, pray?"

"I'll have the Warden here," he said lamely.

"Do, please. A most charming gentleman, to be sure. A shining
example of the refining influences that are creeping into our
prisons. Bring him to me at once. I wish to report you to him."

"Me?"

"Yes, just precisely you," I continued. "You persist, in a rude and
boorish manner, in interrupting my conversation with the other
guests in this hostelry."

And Warden Atherton came. The door was unlocked, and he blustered
into my cell. But oh, I was so safe! He had done his worst. I was
beyond his power.

"I'll shut off your grub," he threatened.

"As you please," I answered. "I'm used to it. I haven't eaten for
ten days, and, do you know, trying to begin to eat again is a
confounded nuisance.

"Oh, ho, you're threatening me, are you? A hunger strike, eh?"

"Pardon me," I said, my voice sulky with politeness. "The
proposition was yours, not mine. Do try and be logical on occasion.
I trust you will believe me when I tell you that your illogic is far
more painful for me to endure than all your tortures."

"Are you going to stop your knuckle-talking?" he demanded.

"No; forgive me for vexing you--for I feel so strong a compulsion to
talk with my knuckles that--"

"For two cents I'll put you back in the jacket," he broke in.

"Do, please. I dote on the jacket. I am the jacket baby. I get
fat in the jacket. Look at that arm."  I pulled up my sleeve and
showed a biceps so attenuated that when I flexed it it had the
appearance of a string. "A real blacksmith's biceps, eh, Warden?
Cast your eyes on my swelling chest. Sandow had better look out for
his laurels. And my abdomen--why, man, I am growing so stout that
my case will be a scandal of prison overfeeding. Watch out, Warden,
or you'll have the taxpayers after you."

"Are you going to stop knuckle-talk?" he roared.

"No, thanking you for your kind solicitude. On mature deliberation
I have decided that I shall keep on knuckle-talking."

He stared at me speechlessly for a moment, and then, out of sheer
impotency, turned to go.

"One question, please."

"What is it?" he demanded over his shoulder.

"What are you going to do about it?"

From the choleric exhibition he gave there and then it has been an
unceasing wonder with me to this day that he has not long since died
of apoplexy.

Hour by hour, after the warden's discomfited departure, I rapped on
and on the tale of my adventures. Not until that night, when Pie-
Face Jones came on duty and proceeded to steal his customary naps,
were Morrell and Oppenheimer able to do any talking.

"Pipe dreams," Oppenheimer rapped his verdict.

Yes, was my thought; our experiences ARE the stuff of our dreams.

"When I was a night messenger I hit the hop once," Oppenheimer
continued. "And I want to tell you you haven't anything on me when
it came to seeing things. I guess that is what all the novel-
writers do--hit the hop so as to throw their imagination into the
high gear."

But Ed Morrell, who had travelled the same road as I, although with
different results, believed my tale. He said that when his body
died in the jacket, and he himself went forth from prison, he was
never anybody but Ed Morrell. He never experienced previous
existences. When his spirit wandered free, it wandered always in
the present. As he told us, just as he was able to leave his body
and gaze upon it lying in the jacket on the cell floor, so could he
leave the prison, and, in the present, revisit San Francisco and see
what was occurring. In this manner he had visited his mother twice,
both times finding her asleep. In this spirit-roving he said he had
no power over material things. He could not open or close a door,
move any object, make a noise, nor manifest his presence. On the
other hand, material things had no power over him. Walls and doors
were not obstacles. The entity, or the real thing that was he, was
thought, spirit.

"The grocery store on the corner, half a block from where mother
lived, changed hands," he told us. "I knew it by the different sign
over the place. I had to wait six months after that before I could
write my first letter, but when I did I asked mother about it. And
she said yes, it had changed."

"Did you read that grocery sign?" Jake Oppenheimer asked.

"Sure thing I did," was Morrell's response. "Or how could I have
known it?"

"All right," rapped Oppenheimer the unbelieving. "You can prove it
easy. Some time, when they shift some decent guards on us that will
give us a peep at a newspaper, you get yourself thrown into the
jacket, climb out of your body, and sashay down to little old
'Frisco. Slide up to Third and Market just about two or three a.m.
when they are running the morning papers off the press. Read the
latest news. Then make a swift sneak for San Quentin, get here
before the newspaper tug crosses the bay, and tell me what you read.
Then we'll wait and get a morning paper, when it comes in, from a
guard. Then, if what you told me is in that paper, I am with you to
a fare-you-well."

It was a good test. I could not but agree with Oppenheimer that
such a proof would be absolute. Morrell said he would take it up
some time, but that he disliked to such an extent the process of
leaving 'his body that he would not make the attempt until such time
that his suffering in the jacket became too extreme to be borne.

"That is the way with all of them--won't come across with the
goods," was Oppenheimer's criticism. "My mother believed in
spirits. When I was a kid she was always seeing them and talking
with them and getting advice from them. But she never come across
with any goods from them. The spirits couldn't tell her where the
old man could nail a job or find a gold-mine or mark an eight-spot
in Chinese lottery. Not on your life. The bunk they told her was
that the old man's uncle had had a goitre, or that the old man's
grandfather had died of galloping consumption, or that we were going
to move house inside four months, which last was dead easy, seeing
as we moved on an average of six times a year."

I think, had Oppenheimer had the opportunity for thorough education,
he would have made a Marinetti or a Haeckel. He was an earth-man in
his devotion to the irrefragable fact, and his logic was admirable
though frosty. "You've got to show me," was the ground rule by
which he considered all things. He lacked the slightest iota of
faith. This was what Morrell had pointed out. Lack of faith had
prevented Oppenheimer from succeeding in achieving the little death
in the jacket.

You will see, my reader, that it was not all hopelessly bad in
solitary. Given three minds such as ours, there was much with which
to while away the time. It might well be that we kept one another
from insanity, although I must admit that Oppenheimer rotted five
years in solitary entirely by himself, ere Morrell joined him, and
yet had remained sane.

On the other hand, do not make the mistake of thinking that life in
solitary was one wild orgy of blithe communion and exhilarating
psychological research.

We had much and terrible pain. Our guards were brutes--your hang-
dogs, citizen. Our surroundings were vile. Our food was filthy,
monotonous, innutritious. Only men, by force of will, could live on
so unbalanced a ration. I know that our prize cattle, pigs, and
sheep on the University Demonstration Farm at Davis would have faded
away and died had they received no more scientifically balanced a
ration than what we received.

We had no books to read. Our very knuckle-talk was a violation of
the rules. The world, so far as we were concerned, practically did
not exist. It was more a ghost-world. Oppenheimer, for instance,
had never seen an automobile or a motor-cycle. News did
occasionally filter in--but such dim, long-after-the-event, unreal
news. Oppenheimer told me he had not learned of the Russo-Japanese
war until two years after it was over.

We were the buried alive, the living dead. Solitary was our tomb,
in which, on occasion, we talked with our knuckles like spirits
rapping at a seance.

News? Such little things were news to us. A change of bakers--we
could tell it by our bread. What made Pie-face Jones lay off a
week? Was it vacation or sickness? Why was Wilson, on the night
shift for only ten days, transferred elsewhere? Where did Smith get
that black eye? We would speculate for a week over so trivial a
thing as the last.

Some convict given a month in solitary was an event. And yet we
could learn nothing from such transient and ofttimes stupid Dantes
who would remain in our inferno too short a time to learn knuckle-
talk ere they went forth again into the bright wide world of the
living.

Still, again, all was not so trivial in our abode of shadows. As
example, I taught Oppenheimer to play chess. Consider how
tremendous such an achievement is--to teach a man, thirteen cells
away, by means of knuckle-raps; to teach him to visualize a
chessboard, to visualize all the pieces, pawns and positions, to
know the various manners of moving; and to teach him it all so
thoroughly that he and I, by pure visualization, were in the end
able to play entire games of chess in our minds. In the end, did I
say? Another tribute to the magnificence of Oppenheimer's mind: in
the end he became my master at the game--he who had never seen a
chessman in his life.

What image of a bishop, for instance, could possibly form in his
mind when I rapped our code-sign for BISHOP? In vain and often I
asked him this very question. In vain he tried to describe in words
that mental image of something he had never seen but which
nevertheless he was able to handle in such masterly fashion as to
bring confusion upon me countless times in the course of play.

I can only contemplate such exhibitions of will and spirit and
conclude, as I so often conclude, that precisely there resides
reality. The spirit only is real. The flesh is phantasmagoria and
apparitional. I ask you how--I repeat, I ask you HOW matter or
flesh in any form can play chess on an imaginary board with
imaginary pieces, across a vacuum of thirteen cell spanned only with
knuckle-taps?

CHAPTER XV

I was once Adam Strang, an Englishman. The period of my living, as
near as I can guess it, was somewhere between 1550 and 1650, and I
lived to a ripe old age, as you shall see. It has been a great
regret to me, ever since Ed Morrell taught me the way of the little
death, that I had not been a more thorough student of history. I
should have been able to identity and place much that is obscure to
me. As it is, I am compelled to grope and guess my way to times and
places of my earlier existences.

A peculiar thing about my Adam Strang existence is that I recollect
so little of the first thirty years of it. Many times, in the
jacket, has Adam Strang recrudesced, but always he springs into
being full-statured, heavy-thewed, a full thirty years of age.

I, Adam Strang, invariably assume my consciousness on a group of
low, sandy islands somewhere under the equator in what must be the
western Pacific Ocean. I am always at home there, and seem to have
been there some time. There are thousands of people on these
islands, although I am the only white man. The natives are a
magnificent breed, big-muscled, broad-shouldered, tall. A six-foot
man is a commonplace. The king, Raa Kook, is at least six inches
above six feet, and though he would weigh fully three hundred
pounds, is so equitably proportioned that one could not call him
fat. Many of his chiefs are as large, while the women are not much
smaller than the men.

There are numerous islands in the group, over all of which Raa Kook
is king, although the cluster of islands to the south is restive and
occasionally in revolt. These natives with whom I live are
Polynesian, I know, because their hair is straight and black. Their
skin is a sun-warm golden-brown. Their speech, which I speak
uncommonly easy, is round and rich and musical, possessing a paucity
of consonants, being composed principally of vowels. They love
flowers, music, dancing, and games, and are childishly simple and
happy in their amusements, though cruelly savage in their angers and
wars.

I, Adam Strang, know my past, but do not seem to think much about
it. I live in the present. I brood neither over past nor future.
I am careless, improvident, uncautious, happy out of sheer well-
being and overplus of physical energy. Fish, fruits, vegetables,
and seaweed--a full stomach--and I am content. I am high in place
with Raa Kook, than whom none is higher, not even Abba Taak, who is
highest over the priest. No man dare lift hand or weapon to me. I
am taboo--sacred as the sacred canoe-house under the floor of which
repose the bones of heaven alone knows how many previous kings of
Raa Kook's line.

I know all about how I happened to be wrecked and be there alone of
all my ship's company--it was a great drowning and a great wind; but
I do not moon over the catastrophe. When I think back at all,
rather do I think far back to my childhood at the skirts of my milk-
skinned, flaxen-haired, buxom English mother. It is a tiny village
of a dozen straw-thatched cottages in which I lived. I hear again
blackbirds and thrushes in the hedges, and see again bluebells
spilling out from the oak woods and over the velvet turf like a
creaming of blue water. And most of all I remember a great, hairy-
fetlocked stallion, often led dancing, sidling, and nickering down
the narrow street. I was frightened of the huge beast and always
fled screaming to my mother, clutching her skirts and hiding in them
wherever I might find her.

But enough. The childhood of Adam Strang is not what I set out to
write.

I lived for several years on the islands which are nameless to me,
and upon which I am confident I was the first white man. I was
married to Lei-Lei, the king's sister, who was a fraction over six
feet and only by that fraction topped me. I was a splendid figure
of a man, broad-shouldered, deep-chested, well-set-up. Women of any
race, as you shall see, looked on me with a favouring eye. Under my
arms, sun-shielded, my skin was milk-white as my mother's. My eyes
were blue. My moustache, beard and hair were that golden-yellow
such as one sometimes sees in paintings of the northern sea-kings.
Ay--I must have come of that old stock, long-settled in England,
and, though born in a countryside cottage, the sea still ran so salt
in my blood that I early found my way to ships to become a sea-cuny.
That is what I was--neither officer nor gentleman, but sea-cuny,
hard-worked, hard-bitten, hard-enduring.

I was of value to Raa Kook, hence his royal protection. I could
work in iron, and our wrecked ship had brought the first iron to Raa
Kook's land. On occasion, ten leagues to the north-west, we went in
canoes to get iron from the wreck. The hull had slipped off the
reef and lay in fifteen fathoms. And in fifteen fathoms we brought
up the iron. Wonderful divers and workers under water were these
natives. I learned to do my fifteen fathoms, but never could I
equal them in their fishy exploits. On the land, by virtue of my
English training and my strength, I could throw any of them. Also,
I taught them quarter-staff, until the game became a very contagion
and broken heads anything but novelties.

Brought up from the wreck was a journal, so torn and mushed and
pulped by the sea-water, with ink so run about, that scarcely any of
it was decipherable. However, in the hope that some antiquarian
scholar may be able to place more definitely the date of the events
I shall describe, I here give an extract. The peculiar spelling may
give the clue. Note that while the letter S is used, it more
commonly is replaced by the letter F.

The wind being favourable, gave us an opportunity of examining and
drying some of our provifion, particularly, fome Chinefe hams and
dry filh, which conftituted part of our victualling. Divine service
alfo was performed on deck. In the afternoon the wind was
foutherly, with frefh gales, but dry, fo that we were able the
following morning to clean between decks, and alfo to fumigate the
fhip with gunpowder.

But I must hasten, for my narrative is not of Adam Strang the
shipwrecked sea-cuny on a coral isle, but of Adam Strang, later
named Yi Yong-ik, the Mighty One, who was one time favourite of the
powerful Yunsan, who was lover and husband of the Lady Om of the
princely house of Min, and who was long time beggar and pariah in
all the villages of all the coasts and roads of Cho-Sen. (Ah, ha, I
have you there--Cho-Sen. It means the land of the morning calm. In
modern speech it is called Korea.)

Remember, it was between three and four centuries back that I lived,
the first white man, on the coral isles of Raa Kook. In those
waters, at that time, the keels of ships were rare. I might well
have lived out my days there, in peace and fatness, under the sun
where frost was not, had it not been for the Sparwehr. The Sparwehr
was a Dutch merchantman daring the uncharted seas for Indies beyond
the Indies. And she found me instead, and I was all she found.

Have I not said that I was a gay-hearted, golden, bearded giant of
an irresponsible boy that had never grown up? With scarce a pang,
when the Sparwehrs' water-casks were filled, I left Raa Kook and his
pleasant land, left Lei-Lei and all her flower-garlanded sisters,
and with laughter on my lips and familiar ship-smells sweet in my
nostrils, sailed away, sea-cuny once more, under Captain Johannes
Maartens.

A marvellous wandering, that which followed on the old Sparwehr. We
were in quest of new lands of silk and spices. In truth, we found
fevers, violent deaths, pestilential paradises where death and
beauty kept charnel-house together. That old Johannes Maartens,
with no hint of romance in that stolid face and grizzly square head
of his, sought the islands of Solomon, the mines of Golconda--ay, he
sought old lost Atlantis which he hoped to find still afloat
unscuppered. And he found head-hunting, tree-dwelling anthropophagi
instead.

We landed on strange islands, sea-pounded on their shores and
smoking at their summits, where kinky-haired little animal-men made
monkey-wailings in the jungle, planted their forest run-ways with
thorns and stake-pits, and blew poisoned splinters into us from out
the twilight jungle bush. And whatsoever man of us was wasp-stung
by such a splinter died horribly and howling. And we encountered
other men, fiercer, bigger, who faced us on the beaches in open
fight, showering us with spears and arrows, while the great tree
drums and the little tom-toms rumbled and rattled war across the
tree-filled hollows, and all the hills were pillared with signal-
smokes.

Hendrik Hamel was supercargo and part owner of the Sparwehr
adventure, and what he did not own was the property of Captain
Johannes Maartens. The latter spoke little English, Hendrik Hamel
but little more. The sailors, with whom I gathered, spoke Dutch
only. But trust a sea-cuny to learn Dutch--ay, and Korean, as you
shall see.

Toward the end we came to the charted country of Japan. But the
people would have no dealings with us, and two sworded officials, in
sweeping robes of silk that made Captain Johannes Maartens' mouth
water, came aboard of us and politely requested us to begone. Under
their suave manners was the iron of a warlike race, and we knew, and
went our way.

We crossed the Straits of Japan and were entering the Yellow Sea on
our way to China, when we laid the Sparwehr on the rocks. She was a
crazy tub the old Sparwehr, so clumsy and so dirty with whiskered
marine-life on her bottom that she could not get out of her own way.
Close-hauled, the closest she could come was to six points of the
wind; and then she bobbed up and down, without way, like a derelict
turnip. Galliots were clippers compared with her. To tack her
about was undreamed of; to wear her required all hands and half a
watch. So situated, we were caught on a lee shore in an eight-point
shift of wind at the height of a hurricane that had beaten our souls
sick for forty-eight hours.

We drifted in upon the land in the chill light of a stormy dawn
across a heartless cross-sea mountain high. It was dead of winter,
and between smoking snow-squalls we could glimpse the forbidding
coast, if coast it might be called, so broken was it. There were
grim rock isles and islets beyond counting, dim snow-covered ranges
beyond, and everywhere upstanding cliffs too steep for snow, outjuts
of headlands, and pinnacles and slivers of rock upthrust from the
boiling sea.

There was no name to this country on which we drove, no record of it
ever having been visited by navigators. Its coast-line was only
hinted at in our chart. From all of which we could argue that the
inhabitants were as inhospitable as the little of their land we
could see.

The Sparwehr drove in bow-on upon a cliff. There was deep water to
its sheer foot, so that our sky-aspiring bowsprit crumpled at the
impact and snapped short off. The foremast went by the board, with
a great snapping of rope-shrouds and stays, and fell forward against
the cliff.

I have always admired old Johannes Maartens. Washed and rolled off
the high poop by a burst of sea, we were left stranded in the waist
of the ship, whence we fought our way for'ard to the steep-pitched
forecastle-head. Others joined us. We lashed ourselves fast and
counted noses. We were eighteen. The rest had perished.

Johannes Maartens touched me and pointed upward through cascading
salt-water from the back-fling of the cliff. I saw what he desired.
Twenty feet below the truck the foremast ground and crunched against
a boss of the cliff. Above the boss was a cleft. He wanted to know
if I would dare the leap from the mast-head into the cleft.
Sometimes the distance was a scant six feet. At other times it was
a score, for the mast reeled drunkenly to the rolling and pounding
of the hull on which rested its splintered butt.

I began the climb. But they did not wait. One by one they unlashed
themselves and followed me up the perilous mast. There was reason
for haste, for at any moment the Sparwehr might slip off into deep
water. I timed my leap, and made it, landing in the cleft in a
scramble and ready to lend a hand to those who leaped after. It was
slow work. We were wet and half freezing in the wind-drive.
Besides, the leaps had to be timed to the roll of the hull and the
sway of the mast.

The cook was the first to go. He was snapped off the mast-end, and
his body performed cart-wheels in its fall. A fling of sea caught
him and crushed him to a pulp against the cliff. The cabin boy, a
bearded man of twenty-odd, lost hold, slipped, swung around the
mast, and was pinched against the boss of rock. Pinched? The life
squeezed from him on the instant. Two others followed the way of
the cook. Captain Johannes Maartens was the last, completing the
fourteen of us that clung on in the cleft. An hour afterward the
Sparwehr slipped off and sank in deep water.

Two days and nights saw us near to perishing on that cliff, for
there was way neither up nor down. The third morning a fishing-boat
found us. The men were clad entirely in dirt white, with their long
hair done up in a curious knot on their pates--the marriage knot, as
I was afterward to learn, and also, as I was to learn, a handy thing
to clutch hold of with one hand whilst you clouted with the other
when an argument went beyond words.

The boat went back to the village for help, and most of the
villagers, most of their gear, and most of the day were required to
get us down. They were a poor and wretched folk, their food
difficult even for the stomach of a sea-cuny to countenance. Their
rice was brown as chocolate. Half the husks remained in it, along
with bits of chaff, splinters, and unidentifiable dirt which made
one pause often in the chewing in order to stick into his mouth
thumb and forefinger and pluck out the offending stuff. Also, they
ate a sort of millet, and pickles of astounding variety and ungodly
hot.

Their houses were earthen-walled and straw-thatched. Under the
floors ran flues through which the kitchen smoke escaped, warming
the sleeping-room in its passage. Here we lay and rested for days,
soothing ourselves with their mild and tasteless tobacco, which we
smoked in tiny bowls at the end of yard-long pipes. Also, there was
a warm, sourish, milky-looking drink, heady only when taken in
enormous doses. After guzzling I swear gallons of it, I got singing
drunk, which is the way of sea-cunies the world over. Encouraged by
my success, the others persisted, and soon we were all a-roaring,
little reeking of the fresh snow gale piping up outside, and little
worrying that we were cast away in an uncharted, God-forgotten land.
Old Johannes Maartens laughed and trumpeted and slapped his thighs
with the best of us. Hendrik Hamel, a cold-blooded, chilly-poised
dark brunette of a Dutchman with beady black eyes, was as rarely
devilish as the rest of us, and shelled out silver like any drunken
sailor for the purchase of more of the milky brew. Our carrying-on
was a scandal; but the women fetched the drink while all the village
that could crowd in jammed the room to witness our antics.

The white man has gone around the world in mastery, I do believe,
because of his unwise uncaringness. That has been the manner of his
going, although, of course, he was driven on by restiveness and lust
for booty. So it was that Captain Johannes Maartens, Hendrik Hamel,
and the twelve sea-cunies of us roystered and bawled in the fisher
village while the winter gales whistled across the Yellow Sea.

From the little we had seen of the land and the people we were not
impressed by Cho-Sen. If these miserable fishers were a fair sample
of the natives, we could understand why the land was unvisited of
navigators. But we were to learn different. The village was on an
in-lying island, and its headmen must have sent word across to the
mainland; for one morning three big two-masted junks with lateens of
rice-matting dropped anchor off the beach.

When the sampans came ashore Captain Johannes Maartens was all
interest, for here were silks again. One strapping Korean, all in
pale-tinted silks of various colours, was surrounded by half a dozen
obsequious attendants, also clad in silk. Kwan Yung-jin, as I came
to know his name, was a YANG-BAN, or noble; also he was what might
be called magistrate or governor of the district or province. This
means that his office was appointive, and that he was a tithe-
squeezer or tax-farmer.

Fully a hundred soldiers were also landed and marched into the
village. They were armed with three-pronged spears, slicing spears,
and chopping spears, with here and there a matchlock of so heroic
mould that there were two soldiers to a matchlock, one to carry and
set the tripod on which rested the muzzle, the other to carry and
fire the gun. As I was to learn, sometimes the gun went off,
sometimes it did not, all depending upon the adjustment of the fire-
punk and the condition of the powder in the flash-pan.

So it was that Kwan-Yung-jin travelled. The headmen of the village
were cringingly afraid of him, and for good reason, as we were not
overlong in finding out. I stepped forward as interpreter, for
already I had the hang of several score of Korean words. He scowled
and waved me aside. But what did I reek? I was as tall as he,
outweighed him by a full two stone, and my skin was white, my hair
golden. He turned his back and addressed the head man of the
village while his six silken satellites made a cordon between us.
While he talked more soldiers from the ship carried up several
shoulder-loads of inch-planking. These planks were about six feet
long and two feet wide, and curiously split in half lengthwise.
Nearer one end than the other was a round hole larger than a man's
neck.

Kwan Yung-jin gave a command. Several of the soldiers approached
Tromp, who was sitting on the ground nursing a felon. Now Tromp was
a rather stupid, slow-thinking, slow-moving cuny, and before he knew
what was doing one of the planks, with a scissors-like opening and
closing, was about his neck and clamped. Discovering his
predicament, he set up a bull-roaring and dancing, till all had to
back away to give him clear space for the flying ends of his plank.

Then the trouble began, for it was plainly Kwan Yung-jin's intention
to plank all of us. Oh, we fought, bare-fisted, with a hundred
soldiers and as many villagers, while Kwan Yung-jin stood apart in
his silks and lordly disdain. Here was where I earned my name Yi
Yong-ik, the Mighty. Long after our company was subdued and planked
I fought on. My fists were of the hardness of topping-mauls, and I
had the muscles and will to drive them.

To my joy, I quickly learned that the Koreans did not understand a
fist-blow and were without the slightest notion of guarding. They
went down like tenpins, fell over each other in heaps. But Kwan
Yung-jin was my man, and all that saved him when I made my rush was
the intervention of his satellites. They were flabby creatures. I
made a mess of them and a muss and muck of their silks ere the
multitude could return upon me. There were so many of them. They
clogged my blows by the sneer numbers of them, those behind shoving
the front ones upon me. And how I dropped them! Toward the end
they were squirming three-deep under my feet. But by the time the
crews of the three junks and most of the village were on top of me I
was fairly smothered. The planking was easy.

"God in heaven, what now!" asked Vandervoot, another cuny, when we
had been bundled aboard a junk.

We sat on the open deck, like so many trussed fowls, when he asked
the question, and the next moment, as the junk heeled to the breeze,
we shot down the deck, planks and all, fetching up in the lee-
scuppers with skinned necks. And from the high poop Kwan Yung-jin
gazed down at us as if he did not see us. For many years to come
Vandervoot was known amongst us as "What-Now Vandervoot."  Poor
devil! He froze to death one night on the streets of Keijo; with
every door barred against him.

To the mainland we were taken and thrown into a stinking, vermin-
infested prison. Such was our introduction to the officialdom of
Cho-Sen. But I was to be revenged for all of us on Kwan Yung-jin,
as you shall see, in the days when the Lady Om was kind and power
was mine.

In prison we lay for many days. We learned afterward the reason.
Kwan Yung-jin had sent a dispatch to Keijo, the capital, to find
what royal disposition was to be made of us. In the meantime we
were a menagerie. From dawn till dark our barred windows were
besieged by the natives, for no member of our race had they ever
seen before. Nor was our audience mere rabble. Ladies, borne in
palanquins on the shoulders of coolies, came to see the strange
devils cast up by the sea, and while their attendants drove back the
common folk with whips, they would gaze long and timidly at us. Of
them we saw little, for their faces were covered, according to the
custom of the country. Only dancing girls, low women, and granddams
ever were seen abroad with exposed faces.

I have often thought that Kwan Yung-jin suffered from indigestion,
and that when the attacks were acute he took it out on us. At any
rate, without rhyme or reason, whenever the whim came to him, we
were all taken out on the street before the prison and well beaten
with sticks to the gleeful shouts of the multitude. The Asiatic is
a cruel beast, and delights in spectacles of human suffering.

At any rate we were pleased when an end to our beatings came. This
was caused by the arrival of Kim. Kim? All I can say, and the best
I can say, is that he was the whitest man I ever encountered in Cho-
Sen. He was a captain of fifty men when I met him. He was in
command of the palace guards before I was done doing my best by him.
And in the end he died for the Lady Om's sake and for mine. Kim--
well, Kim was Kim.

Immediately he arrived the planks were taken from our necks and we
were lodged in the beet inn the place boasted. We were still
prisoners, but honourable prisoners, with a guard of fifty mounted
soldiers. The next day we were under way on the royal highroad,
fourteen sailormen astride the dwarf horses that obtain in Cho-Sen,
and bound for Keijo itself. The Emperor, so Kim told me, had
expressed a desire to gaze upon the strangeness of the sea devils.

It was a journey of many days, half the length of Cho-Sen, north and
south as it lies. It chanced, at the first off-saddling, that I
strolled around to witness the feeding of the dwarf horses. And
what I witnessed set me bawling, "What now, Vandervoot?" till all
our crew came running. As I am a living man what the horses were
feeding on was bean soup, hot bean soup at that, and naught else did
they have on all the journey but hot bean soup. It was the custom
of the country.

They were truly dwarf horses. On a wager with Kim I lifted one,
despite his squeals and struggles, squarely across my shoulders, so
that Kim's men, who had already heard my new name, called me Yi
Yong-ik, the Mighty One. Kim was a large man as Koreans go, and
Koreans are a tall muscular race, and Kim fancied himself a bit.
But, elbow to elbow and palm to palm, I put his arm down at will.
And his soldiers and the gaping villagers would look on and murmur
"Yi Yong-ik."

In a way we were a travelling menagerie. The word went on ahead, so
that all the country folk flocked to the roadside to see us pass.
It was an unending circus procession. In the towns at night our
inns were besieged by multitudes, so that we got no peace until the
soldiers drove them off with lance-pricks and blows. But first Kim
would call for the village strong men and wrestlers for the fun of
seeing me crumple them and put them in the dirt.

Bread there was none, but we ate white rice (the strength of which
resides in one's muscles not long), a meat which we found to be dog
(which animal is regularly butchered for food in Cho-Sen), and the
pickles ungodly hot but which one learns to like exceeding well.
And there was drink, real drink, not milky slush, but white, biting
stuff distilled from rice, a pint of which would kill a weakling and
make a strong man mad and merry. At the walled city of Chong-ho I
put Kim and the city notables under the table with the stuff--or on
the table, rather, for the table was the floor where we squatted to
cramp-knots in my hams for the thousandth time. And again all
muttered "Yi Yong-ik," and the word of my prowess passed on before
even to Keijo and the Emperor's Court.

I was more an honoured guest than a prisoner, and invariably I rode
by Kim's side, my long legs near reaching the ground, and, where the
going was deep, my feet scraping the muck. Kim was young. Kim was
human. Kim was universal. He was a man anywhere in any country.
He and I talked and laughed and joked the day long and half the
night. And I verify ate up the language. I had a gift that way
anyway. Even Kim marvelled at the way I mastered the idiom. And I
learned the Korean points of view, the Korean humour, the Korean
soft places, weak places, touchy places. Kim taught me flower
songs, love songs, drinking songs. One of the latter was his own,
of the end of which I shall give you a crude attempt at translation.
Kim and Pak, in their youth, swore a pact to abstain from drinking,
which pact was speedily broken. In old age Kim and Pak sing:

"No, no, begone! The merry bowl
Again shall bolster up my soul
Against itself. What, good man, hold!
Canst tell me where red wine is sold?
Nay, just beyond yon peach-tree? There?
Good luck be thine; I'll thither fare."

Hendrik Hamel, scheming and crafty, ever encouraged and urged me in
my antic course that brought Kim's favour, not alone to me, but
through me to Hendrik Hamel and all our company. I here mention
Hendrik Hamel as my adviser, for it has a bearing on much that
followed at Keijo in the winning of Yunsan's favour, the Lady Om's
heart, and the Emperor's tolerance. I had the will and the
fearlessness for the game I played, and some of the wit; but most of
the wit I freely admit was supplied me by Hendrik Hamel.

And so we journeyed up to Keijo, from walled city to walled city
across a snowy mountain land that was hollowed with innumerable fat
farming valleys. And every evening, at fall of day, beacon fires
sprang from peak to peak and ran along the land. Always Kim watched
for this nightly display. From all the coasts of Cho-Sen, Kim told
me, these chains of fire-speech ran to Keijo to carry their message
to the Emperor. One beacon meant the land was in peace. Two
beacons meant revolt or invasion. We never saw but one beacon. And
ever, as we rode, Vandervoot brought up the rear, wondering, "God in
heaven, what now?"

Keijo we found a vast city where all the population, with the
exception of the nobles or yang-bans, dressed in the eternal white.
This, Kim explained, was an automatic determination and
advertisement of caste. Thus, at a glance, could one tell, the
status of an individual by the degrees of cleanness or of filthiness
of his garments. It stood to reason that a coolie, possessing but
the clothes he stood up in, must be extremely dirty. And to reason
it stood that the individual in immaculate white must possess many
changes and command the labour of laundresses to keep his changes
immaculate. As for the yang-bans who wore the pale, vari-coloured
silks, they were beyond such common yardstick of place.

After resting in an inn for several days, during which time we
washed our garments and repaired the ravages of shipwreck and
travel, we were summoned before the Emperor. In the great open
space before the palace wall were colossal stone dogs that looked
more like tortoises. They crouched on massive stone pedestals of
twice the height of a tall man. The walls of the palace were huge
and of dressed stone. So thick were these walls that they could
defy a breach from the mightiest of cannon in a year-long siege.
The mere gateway was of the size of a palace in itself, rising
pagoda-like, in many retreating stories, each story fringed with
tile-roofing. A smart guard of soldiers turned out at the gateway.
These, Kim told me, were the Tiger Hunters of Pyeng-yang, the
fiercest and most terrible fighting men of which Cho-Sen could
boast.

But enough. On mere description of the Emperor's palace a thousand
pages of my narrative could be worthily expended. Let it suffice
that here we knew power in all its material expression. Only a
civilization deep and wide and old and strong could produce this
far-walled, many-gabled roof of kings.

To no audience-hall were we sea-cunies led, but, as we took it, to a
feasting-hall. The feasting was at its end, and all the throng was
in a merry mood. And such a throng! High dignitaries, princes of
the blood, sworded nobles, pale priests, weather-tanned officers of
high command, court ladies with faces exposed, painted KI-SANG or
dancing girls who rested from entertaining, and duennas, waiting
women, eunuchs, lackeys, and palace slaves a myriad of them.

All fell away from us, however, when the Emperor, with a following
of intimates, advanced to look us over. He was a merry monarch,
especially so for an Asiatic. Not more than forty, with a clear,
pallid skin that had never known the sun, he was paunched and weak-
legged. Yet he had once been a fine man. The noble forehead
attested that. But the eyes were bleared and weak-lidded, the lips
twitching and trembling from the various excesses in which he
indulged, which excesses, as I was to learn, were largely devised
and pandered by Yunsan, the Buddhist priest, of whom more anon.

In our sea-garments we mariners were a motley crew, and motley was
the cue of our reception. Exclamations of wonder at our strangeness
gave way to laughter. The ki-sang invaded us, dragging us about,
making prisoners of us, two or three of them to one of us, leading
us about like go many dancing boars and putting us through our
antics. It was offensive, true, but what could poor sea-cunies do?
What could old Johannes Maartens do, with a bevy of laughing girls
about him, tweaking his nose, pinching his arms, tickling his ribs
till he pranced? To escape such torment Hans Amden cleared a space
and gave a clumsy-footed Hollandish breakdown till all the Court
roared its laughter.

It was offensive to me who had been equal and boon companion of Kim
for many days. I resisted the laughing ki-sang. I braced my legs
and stood upright with folded arms; nor could pinch or tickle bring
a quiver from me. Thus they abandoned me for easier prey.

"For God's sake, man, make an impression," Hendrik Hamel, who had
struggled to me with three ki-sang dragging behind, mumbled.

Well might he mumble, for whenever he opened his mouth to speak they
crammed it with sweets.

"Save us from this folly," he persisted, ducking his head about to
avoid their sweet-filled palms. "We must have dignity, understand,
dignity. This will ruin us. They are making tame animals of us,
playthings. When they grow tired of us they will throw us out.
You're doing the right thing. Stick to it. Stand them off.
Command respect, respect for all of us--"

The last was barely audible, for by this time the ki-sang had
stuffed his mouth to speechlessness.

As I have said, I had the will and the fearlessness, and I racked my
sea-cuny brains for the wit. A palace eunuch, tickling my neck with
a feather from behind, gave me my start. I had already drawn
attention by my aloofness and imperviousness to the attacks of the
ki-sang, so that many were looking on at the eunuch's baiting of me.
I gave no sign, made no move, until I had located him and distanced
him. Then, like a shot, without turning head or body, merely by my
arm I fetched him an open, back-handed slap. My knuckles landed
flat on his cheek and jaw. There was a crack like a spar parting in
a gale. He was bowled clean over, landing in a heap on the floor a
dozen feet away.

There was no laughter, only cries of surprise and murmurings and
whisperings of "Yi Yong-ik."  Again I folded my arms and stood with
a fine assumption of haughtiness. I do believe that I, Adam Strang,
had among other things the soul of an actor in me. For see what
follows. I was now the most significant of our company. Proud-
eyed, disdainful, I met unwavering the eyes upon me and made them
drop, or turn away--all eyes but one. These were the eyes of a
young woman, whom I judged, by richness of dress and by the half-
dozen women fluttering at her back, to be a court lady of
distinction. In truth, she was the Lady Om, princess of the house
of Min. Did I say young? She was fully my own age, thirty, and for
all that and her ripeness and beauty a princess still unmarried, as
I was to learn.

She alone looked me in the eyes without wavering until it was I who
turned away. She did not look me down, for there was neither
challenge nor antagonism in her eyes--only fascination. I was loth
to admit this defeat by one small woman, and my eyes, turning aside,
lighted on the disgraceful rout of my comrades and the trailing ki-
sang and gave me the pretext. I clapped my hands in the Asiatic
fashion when one gives command.

"Let be!" I thundered in their own language, and in the form one
addressee underlings.

Oh, I had a chest and a throat, and could bull-roar to the hurt of
ear-drums. I warrant so loud a command had never before cracked the
sacred air of the Emperor's palace.

The great room was aghast. The women were startled, and pressed
toward one another as for safety. The ki-sang released the cunies
and shrank away giggling apprehensively. Only the Lady Om made no
sign nor motion but continued to gaze wide-eyed into my eyes which
had returned to hers.

Then fell a great silence, as if all waited some word of doom. A
multitude of eyes timidly stole back and forth from the Emperor to
me and from me to the Emperor. And I had wit to keep the silence
and to stand there, arms folded, haughty and remote.

"He speaks our language," quoth the Emperor at the last; and I swear
there was such a relinquishment of held breaths that the whole room
was one vast sigh.

"I was born with this language," I replied, my cuny wits running
rashly to the first madness that prompted. "I spoke it at my
mother's breast. I was the marvel of my land. Wise men journeyed
far to see me and to hear. But no man knew the words I spoke. In
the many years since I have forgotten much, but now, in Cho-Sen, the
words come back like long-lost friends."

An impression I certainly made. The Emperor swallowed and his lips
twitched ere he asked:

"How explain you this?"

"I am an accident," I answered, following the wayward lead my wit
had opened. "The gods of birth were careless, and I was mislaid in
a far land and nursed by an alien people. I am Korean, and now, at
last, I have come to my home."

What an excited whispering and conferring took place. The Emperor
himself interrogated Kim.

"He was always thus, our speech in his mouth, from the time he came
out of the sea," Kim lied like the good fellow he was.

"Bring me yang-ban's garments as befits me," I interrupted, "and you
shall see."  As I was led away in compliance, I turned on the ki-
sang. "And leave my slaves alone. They have journeyed far and are
weary. They are my faithful slaves."

In another room Kim helped me change, sending the lackeys away; and
quick and to the point was the dress-rehearsal he gave me. He knew
no more toward what I drove than did I, but he was a good fellow.

The funny thing, once back in the crowd and spouting Korean which I
claimed was rusty from long disuse, was that Hendrik Hamel and the
rest, too stubborn-tongued to learn new speech, did not know a word
I uttered.

"I am of the blood of the house of Koryu," I told the Emperor, "that
ruled at Songdo many a long year agone when my house arose on the
ruins of Silla."

Ancient history, all, told me by Kim on the long ride, and he
struggled with his face to hear me parrot his teaching.

"These," I said, when the Emperor had asked me about my company,
"these are my slaves, all except that old churl there"--I indicated
Johannes Maartens--"who is the son of a freed man."  I told Hendrik
Hamel to approach. "This one," I wantoned on, "was born in my
father's house of a seed slave who was born there before him. He is
very close to me. We are of an age, born on the same day, and on
that day my father gave him me."

Afterwards, when Hendrik Hamel was eager to know all that I had
said, and when I told him, he reproached me and was in a pretty
rage.

"The fat's in the fire, Hendrik," quoth I. "What I have done has
been out of witlessness and the need to be saying something. But
done it is. Nor you nor I can pluck forth the fat. We must act our
parts and make the best of it."

Taiwun, the Emperor's brother, was a sot of sots, and as the night
wore on he challenged me to a drinking. The Emperor was delighted,
and commanded a dozen of the noblest sots to join in the bout. The
women were dismissed, and we went to it, drink for drink, measure
for measure. Kim I kept by me, and midway along, despite Hendrik
Hamel's warning scowls, dismissed him and the company, first
requesting, and obtaining, palace lodgment instead of the inn.

Next day the palace was a-buzz with my feast, for I had put Taiwun
and all his champions snoring on the mats and walked unaided to my
bed. Never, in the days of vicissitude that came later, did Taiwun
doubt my claim of Korean birth. Only a Korean, he averred, could
possess so strong a head.

The palace was a city in itself, and we were lodged in a sort of
summer-house that stood apart. The princely quarters were mine, of
course, and Hamel and Maartens, with the rest of the grumbling
cunies, had to content themselves with what remained.

I was summoned before Yunsan, the Buddhist priest I have mentioned.
It was his first glimpse of me and my first of him. Even Kim he
dismissed from me, and we sat alone on deep mats in a twilight room.
Lord, Lord, what a man and a mind was Yunsan! He made to probe my
soul. He knew things of other lands and places that no one in Cho-
Sen dreamed to know. Did he believe my fabled birth? I could not
guess, for his face was less changeful than a bowl of bronze.

What Yunsan's thoughts were only Yunsan knew. But in him, this
poor-clad, lean-bellied priest, I sensed the power behind power in
all the palace and in all Cho-Sen. I sensed also, through the drift
of speech, that he had use of me. Now was this use suggested by the
Lady Om?--a nut I gave Hendrik Hamel to crack. I little knew, and
less I cared, for I lived always in the moment and let others
forecast, forfend, and travail their anxiety.

I answered, too, the summons of the Lady Om, following a sleek-
faced, cat-footed eunuch through quiet palace byways to her
apartments. She lodged as a princess of the blood should lodge.
She, too, had a palace to herself, among lotus ponds where grow
forests of trees centuries old but so dwarfed that they reached no
higher than my middle. Bronze bridges, so delicate and rare that
they looked as if fashioned by jewel-smiths, spanned her lily ponds,
and a bamboo grove screened her palace apart from all the palace.

My head was awhirl. Sea-cuny that I was, I was no dolt with women,
and I sensed more than idle curiosity in her sending for me. I had
heard love-tales of common men and queens, and was a-wondering if
now it was my fortune to prove such tales true.

The Lady Om wasted little time. There were women about her, but she
regarded their presence no more than a carter his horses. I sat
beside her on deep mats that made the room half a couch, and wine
was given me and sweets to nibble, served on tiny, foot-high tables
inlaid with pearl.

Lord, Lord, I had but to look into her eyes--But wait. Make no
mistake. The Lady Om was no fool. I have said she was of my own
age. All of thirty she was, with the poise of her years. She knew
what she wanted. She knew what she did not want. It was because of
this she had never married, although all pressure that an Asiatic
court could put upon a woman had been vainly put upon her to compel
her to marry Chong Mong-ju. He was a lesser cousin of the great Min
family, himself no fool, and grasping so greedily for power as to
perturb Yunsan, who strove to retain all power himself and keep the
palace and Cho-Sen in ordered balance. Thus Yunsan it was who in
secret allied himself with the Lady Om, saved her from her cousin,
used her to trim her cousin's wings. But enough of intrigue. It
was long before I guessed a tithe of it, and then largely through
the Lady Om's confidences and Hendrik Hamel's conclusions.

The Lady Om was a very flower of woman. Women such as she are born
rarely, scarce twice a century the whole world over. She was
unhampered by rule or convention. Religion, with her, was a series
of abstractions, partly learned from Yunsan, partly worked out for
herself. Vulgar religion, the public religion, she held, was a
device to keep the toiling millions to their toil. She had a will
of her own, and she had a heart all womanly. She was a beauty--yes,
a beauty by any set rule of the world. Her large black eyes were
neither slitted nor slanted in the Asiatic way. They were long,
true, but set squarely, and with just the slightest hint of
obliqueness that was all for piquancy.

I have said she was no fool. Behold! As I palpitated to the
situation, princess and sea-cuny and love not a little that
threatened big, I racked my cuny's brains for wit to carry the thing
off with manhood credit. It chanced, early in this first meeting,
that I mentioned what I had told all the Court, that I was in truth
a Korean of the blood of the ancient house of Koryu.

"Let be," she said, tapping my lips with her peacock fan. "No
child's tales here. Know that with me you are better and greater
than of any house of Koryu. You are . . ."

She paused, and I waited, watching the daring grow in her eyes.

"You are a man," she completed. "Not even in my sleep have I ever
dreamed there was such a man as you on his two legs upstanding in
the world."

Lord, Lord! and what could a poor sea-cuny do? This particular sea-
cuny, I admit, blushed through his sea tan till the Lady Om's eyes
were twin pools of roguishness in their teasing deliciousness and my
arms were all but about her. And she laughed tantalizingly and
alluringly, and clapped her hands for her women, and I knew that the
audience, for this once, was over. I knew, also, there would be
other audiences, there must be other audiences.

Back to Hamel, my head awhirl.

"The woman," said he, after deep cogitation. He looked at me and
sighed an envy I could not mistake. "It is your brawn, Adam Strang,
that bull throat of yours, your yellow hair. Well, it's the game,
man. Play her, and all will be well with us. Play her, and I shall
teach you how."

I bristled. Sea-cuny I was, but I was man, and to no man would I be
beholden in my way with women. Hendrik Hamel might be one time
part-owner of the old Sparwehr, with a navigator's knowledge of the
stars and deep versed in books, but with women, no, there I would
not give him better.

He smiled that thin-lipped smile of his, and queried:

"How like you the Lady Om?"

"In such matters a cuny is naught particular," I temporized.

"How like you her?" he repeated, his beady eyes boring into me.

"Passing well, ay, and more than passing well, if you will have it."

"Then win to her," he commanded, "and some day we will get ship and
escape from this cursed land. I'd give half the silks of the Indies
for a meal of Christian food again."

He regarded me intently.

"Do you think you can win to her?" he questioned.

I was half in the air at the challenge. He smiled his satisfaction.

"But not too quickly," he advised. "Quick things are cheap things.
Put a prize upon yourself. Be chary of your kindnesses. Make a
value of your bull throat and yellow hair, and thank God you have
them, for they are of more worth in a woman's eyes than are the
brains of a dozen philosophers."

Strange whirling days were those that followed, what of my audiences
with the Emperor, my drinking bouts with Taiwun, my conferences with
Yunsan, and my hours with the Lady Om. Besides, I sat up half the
nights, by Hamel's command, learning from Kim all the minutiae of
court etiquette and manners, the history of Korea and of gods old
and new, and the forms of polite speech, noble speech, and coolie
speech. Never was sea-cuny worked so hard. I was a puppet--puppet
to Yunsan, who had need of me; puppet to Hamel, who schemed the wit
of the affair that was so deep that alone I should have drowned.
Only with the Lady Om was I man, not puppet . . . and yet, and yet,
as I look back and ponder across time, I have my doubts. I think
the Lady Om, too, had her will with me, wanting me for her heart's
desire. Yet in this she was well met, for it was not long ere she
was my heart's desire, and such was the immediacy of my will that
not her will, nor Hendrik Hamel's, nor Yunsan's, could hold back my
arms from about her.

In the meantime, however, I was caught up in a palace intrigue I
could not fathom. I could catch the drift of it, no more, against
Chong Mong-ju, the princely cousin of the Lady Om. Beyond my
guessing there were cliques and cliques within cliques that made a
labyrinth of the palace and extended to all the Seven Coasts. But I
did not worry. I left that to Hendrik Hamel. To him I reported
every detail that occurred when he was not with me; and he, with
furrowed brows, sitting darkling by the hour, like a patient spider
unravelled the tangle and spun the web afresh. As my body slave he
insisted upon attending me everywhere; being only barred on occasion
by Yunsan. Of course I barred him from my moments with the Lady Om,
but told him in general what passed, with exception of tenderer
incidents that were not his business.

I think Hamel was content to sit back and play the secret part. He
was too cold-blooded not to calculate that the risk was mine. If I
prospered, he prospered. If I crashed to ruin, he might creep out
like a ferret. I am convinced that he so reasoned, and yet it did
not save him in the end, as you shall see.

"Stand by me," I told Kim, "and whatsoever you wish shall be yours.
Have you a wish?"

"I would command the Tiger Hunters of Pyeng-Yang, and so command the
palace guards," he answered.

"Wait," said I, "and that will you do. I have said it."

The how of the matter was beyond me. But he who has naught can
dispense the world in largess; and I, who had naught, gave Kim
captaincy of the palace guards. The best of it is that I did fulfil
my promise. Kim did come to command the Tiger Hunters, although it
brought him to a sad end.

Scheming and intriguing I left to Hamel and Yunsan, who were the
politicians. I was mere man and lover, and merrier than theirs was
the time I had. Picture it to yourself--a hard-bitten, joy-loving
sea-cuny, irresponsible, unaware ever of past or future, wining and
dining with kings, the accepted lover of a princess, and with brains
like Hamel's and Yunsan's to do all planning and executing for me.

More than once Yunsan almost divined the mind behind my mind; but
when he probed Hamel, Hamel proved a stupid slave, a thousand times
less interested in affairs of state and policy than was he
interested in my health and comfort and garrulously anxious about my
drinking contests with Taiwun. I think the Lady Om guessed the
truth and kept it to herself; wit was not her desire, but, as Hamel
had said, a bull throat and a man's yellow hair.

Much that pawed between us I shall not relate, though the Lady Om is
dear dust these centuries. But she was not to be denied, nor was I;
and when a man and woman will their hearts together heads may fall
and kingdoms crash and yet they will not forgo.

Came the time when our marriage was mooted--oh, quietly, at first,
most quietly, as mere palace gossip in dark corners between eunuchs
and waiting-women. But in a palace the gossip of the kitchen
scullions will creep to the throne. Soon there was a pretty to-do.
The palace was the pulse of Cho-Sen, and when the palace rocked,
Cho-Sen trembled. And there was reason for the rocking. Our
marriage would be a blow straight between the eyes of Chong Mong-ju.
He fought, with a show of strength for which Yunsan was ready.
Chong Mong-ju disaffected half the provincial priesthood, until they
pilgrimaged in processions a mile long to the palace gates and
frightened the Emperor into a panic.

But Yunsan held like a rock. The other half of the provincial
priesthood was his, with, in addition, all the priesthood of the
great cities such as Keijo, Fusan, Songdo, Pyen-Yang, Chenampo, and
Chemulpo. Yunsan and the Lady Om, between them, twisted the Emperor
right about. As she confessed to me afterward, she bullied him with
tears and hysteria and threats of a scandal that would shake the
throne. And to cap it all, at the psychological moment, Yunsan
pandered the Emperor to novelties of excess that had been long
preparing.

"You must grow your hair for the marriage knot," Yunsan warned me
one day, with the ghost of a twinkle in his austere eyes, more
nearly facetious and human than I had ever beheld him.

Now it is not meet that a princess espouse a sea-cuny, or even a
claimant of the ancient blood of Koryu, who is without power, or
place, or visible symbols of rank. So it was promulgated by
imperial decree that I was a prince of Koryu. Next, after breaking
the bones and decapitating the then governor of the five provinces,
himself an adherent of Chong Mong-ju, I was made governor of the
seven home provinces of ancient Koryu. In Cho-Sen seven is the
magic number. To complete this number two of the provinces were
taken over from the hands of two more of Chong Mong-ju's adherents.

Lord, Lord, a sea-cuny . . . and dispatched north over the Mandarin
Road with five hundred soldiers and a retinue at my back! I was a
governor of seven provinces, where fifty thousand troops awaited me.
Life, death, and torture, I carried at my disposal. I had a
treasury and a treasurer, to say nothing of a regiment of scribes.
Awaiting me also was a full thousand of tax-farmers; who squeezed
the last coppers from the toiling people.

The seven provinces constituted the northern march. Beyond lay what
is now Manchuria, but which was known by us as the country of the
Hong-du, or "Red Heads."  They were wild raiders, on occasion
crossing the Yalu in great masses and over-running northern Cho-Sen
like locusts. It was said they were given to cannibal practices. I
know of experience that they were terrible fighters, most difficult
to convince of a beating.

A whirlwind year it was. While Yunsan and the Lady Om at Keijo
completed the disgrace of Chong Mong-ju, I proceeded to make a
reputation for myself. Of course it was really Hendrik Hamel at my
back, but I was the fine figure-head that carried it off. Through
me Hamel taught our soldiers drill and tactics and taught the Red
Heads strategy. The fighting was grand, and though it took a year,
the year's end saw peace on the northern border and no Red Heads but
dead Red Heads on our side the Yalu.

I do not know if this invasion of the Red Heads is recorded in
Western history, but if so it will give a clue to the date of the
times of which I write. Another clue: when was Hideyoshi the
Shogun of Japan? In my time I heard the echoes of the two
invasions, a generation before, driven by Hideyoshi through the
heart of Cho-Sen from Fusan in the south to as far north as Pyeng-
Yang. It was this Hideyoshi who sent back to Japan a myriad tubs of
pickled ears and noses of Koreans slain in battle. I talked with
many old men and women who had seen the fighting and escaped the
pickling.

Back to Keijo and the Lady Om. Lord, Lord, she was a woman. For
forty years she was my woman. I know. No dissenting voice was
raised against the marriage. Chong Mong-ju, clipped of power, in
disgrace, had retired to sulk somewhere on the far north-east coast.
Yunsan was absolute. Nightly the single beacons flared their
message of peace across the land. The Emperor grew more weak-legged
and blear-eyed what of the ingenious deviltries devised for him by
Yunsan. The Lady Om and I had won to our hearts' desires. Kim was
in command of the palace guards. Kwan Yung-jin, the provincial
governor who had planked and beaten us when we were first cast away,
I had shorn of power and banished for ever from appearing within the
walls of Keijo.

Oh, and Johannes Maartens. Discipline is well hammered into a sea-
cuny, and, despite my new greatness, I could never forget that he
had been my captain in the days we sought new Indies in the
Sparwehr. According to my tale first told in Court, he was the only
free man in my following. The rest of the cunies, being considered
my slaves, could not aspire to office of any sort under the crown.
But Johannes could, and did. The sly old fox! I little guessed his
intent when he asked me to make him governor of the paltry little
province of Kyong-ju. Kyong-ju had no wealth of farms or fisheries.
The taxes scarce paid the collecting, and the governorship was
little more than an empty honour. The place was in truth a
graveyard--a sacred graveyard, for on Tabong Mountain were shrined
and sepultured the bones of the ancient kings of Silla. Better
governor of Kyong-ju than retainer of Adam Strang, was what I
thought was in his mind; nor did I dream that it was except for fear
of loneliness that caused him to take four of the cunies with him.

Gorgeous were the two years that followed. My seven provinces I
governed mainly though needy yang-bans selected for me by Yunsan.
An occasional inspection, done in state and accompanied by the Lady
Om, was all that was required of me. She possessed a summer palace
on the south coast, which we frequented much. Then there were man's
diversions. I became patron of the sport of wrestling, and revived
archery among the yang-bans. Also, there was tiger-hunting in the
northern mountains.

A remarkable thing was the tides of Cho-Sen. On our north-east
coast there was scarce a rise and fall of a foot. On our west coast
the neap tides ran as high as sixty feet. Cho-Sen had no commerce,
no foreign traders. There was no voyaging beyond her coasts, and no
voyaging of other peoples to her coasts. This was due to her
immemorial policy of isolation. Once in a decade or a score of
years Chinese ambassadors arrived, but they came overland, around
the Yellow Sea, across the country of the Hong-du, and down the
Mandarin Road to Keijo. The round trip was a year-long journey.
Their mission was to exact from our Emperor the empty ceremonial of
acknowledgment of China's ancient suzerainty.

But Hamel, from long brooding, was ripening for action. His plans
grew apace. Cho-Sen was Indies enough for him could he but work it
right. Little he confided, but when he began to play to have me
made admiral of the Cho-Sen navy of junks, and to inquire more than
casually of the details of the store-places of the imperial
treasury, I could put two and two together.

Now I did not care to depart from Cho-Sen except with the Lady Om.
When I broached the possibility of it she told me, warm in my arms,
that I was her king and that wherever I led she would follow. As
you shall see it was truth, full truth, that she uttered.

It was Yunsan's fault for letting Chong Mong-ju live. And yet it
was not Yunsan's fault. He had not dared otherwise. Disgraced at
Court, nevertheless Chong Mong-ju had been too popular with the
provincial priesthood. Yunsan had been compelled to hold his hand,
and Chong Mong-ju, apparently sulking on the north-east coast, had
been anything but idle. His emissaries, chiefly Buddhist priests,
were everywhere, went everywhere, gathering in even the least of the
provincial magistrates to allegiance to him. It takes the cold
patience of the Asiatic to conceive and execute huge and complicated
conspiracies. The strength of Chong Mong-ju's palace clique grew
beyond Yunsan's wildest dreaming. Chong Mong-ju corrupted the very
palace guards, the Tiger Hunters of Pyeng-Yang whom Kim commanded.
And while Yunsan nodded, while I devoted myself to sport and to the
Lady Om, while Hendrik Hamel perfected plans for the looting of the
Imperial treasury, and while Johannes Maartens schemed his own
scheme among the tombs of Tabong Mountain, the volcano of Chong
Mong-ju's devising gave no warning beneath us.

Lord, Lord, when the storm broke! It was stand out from under, all
hands, and save your necks. And there were necks that were not
saved. The springing of the conspiracy was premature. Johannes
Maartens really precipitated the catastrophe, and what he did was
too favourable for Chong Mong-ju not to advantage by.

For, see. The people of Cho-Sen are fanatical ancestor-worshippers,
and that old pirate of a booty-lusting Dutchman, with his four
cunies, in far Kyong-ju, did no less a thing than raid the tombs of
the gold-coffined, long-buried kings of ancient Silla. The work was
done in the night, and for the rest of the night they travelled for
the sea-coast. But the following day a dense fog lay over the land
and they lost their way to the waiting junk which Johannes Maartens
had privily outfitted. He and the cunies were rounded in by Yi Sun-
sin, the local magistrate, one of Chong Mong-ju's adherents. Only
Herman Tromp escaped in the fog, and was able, long after, to tell
me of the adventure.

That night, although news of the sacrilege was spreading through
Cho-Sen and half the northern provinces had risen on their
officials, Keijo and the Court slept in ignorance. By Chong Mong-
ju's orders the beacons flared their nightly message of peace. And
night by night the peace-beacons flared, while day and night Chong
Mong-ju's messengers killed horses on all the roads of Cho-Sen. It
was my luck to see his messenger arrive at Keijo. At twilight, as I
rode out through the great gate of the capital, I saw the jaded
horse fall and the exhausted rider stagger in on foot; and I little
dreamed that that man carried my destiny with him into Keijo.

His message sprang the palace revolution. I was not due to return
until midnight, and by midnight all was over. At nine in the
evening the conspirators secured possession of the Emperor in his
own apartments. They compelled him to order the immediate
attendance of the heads of all departments, and as they presented
themselves, one by one, before his eyes, they were cut down.
Meantime the Tiger Hunters were up and out of hand. Yunsan and
Hendrik Hamel were badly beaten with the flats of swords and made
prisoners. The seven other cunies escaped from the palace along
with the Lady Om. They were enabled to do this by Kim, who held the
way, sword in hand, against his own Tiger Hunters. They cut him
down and trod over him. Unfortunately he did not die of his wounds.

Like a flaw of wind on a summer night the revolution, a palace
revolution of course, blew and was past. Chong Mong-ju was in the
saddle. The Emperor ratified whatever Chong Mong-ju willed. Beyond
gasping at the sacrilege of the king's tombs and applauding Chong
Mong-ju, Cho-Sen was unperturbed. Heads of officials fell
everywhere, being replaced by Chong Mong-ju's appointees; but there
were no risings against the dynasty.

And now to what befell us. Johannes Maartens and his three cunies,
after being exhibited to be spat upon by the rabble of half the
villages and walled cities of Cho-Sen, were buried to their necks in
the ground of the open space before the palace gate. Water was
given them that they might live longer to yearn for the food,
steaming hot and savoury and changed hourly, that was place
temptingly before them. They say old Johannes Maartens lived
longest, not giving up the ghost for a full fifteen days.

Kim was slowly crushed to death, bone by bone and joint by joint, by
the torturers, and was a long time in dying. Hamel, whom Chong
Mong-ju divined as my brains, was executed by the paddle--in short,
was promptly and expeditiously beaten to death to the delighted
shouts of the Keijo populace. Yunsan was given a brave death. He
was playing a game of chess with the jailer, when the Emperor's, or,
rather, Chong Mong-ju's, messenger arrived with the poison-cup.
"Wait a moment," said Yunsan. "You should be better-mannered than
to disturb a man in the midst of a game of chess. I shall drink
directly the game is over."  And while the messenger waited Yunsan
finished the game, winning it, then drained the cup.

It takes an Asiatic to temper his spleen to steady, persistent,
life-long revenge. This Chong Mong-ju did with the Lady Om and me.
He did not destroy us. We were not even imprisoned. The Lady Om
was degraded of all rank and divested of all possessions. An
imperial decree was promulgated and posted in the last least village
of Cho-Sen to the effect that I was of the house of Koryu and that
no man might kill me. It was further declared that the eight sea-
cunies who survived must not be killed. Neither were they to be
favoured. They were to be outcasts, beggars on the highways. And
that is what the Lady Om and I became, beggars on the highways.

Forty long years of persecution followed, for Chong Mong-ju's hatred
of the Lady Om and me was deathless. Worse luck, he was favoured
with long life as well as were we cursed with it. I have said the
Lady Om was a wonder of a woman. Beyond endlessly repeating that
statement, words fail me, with which to give her just appreciation.
Somewhere I have heard that a great lady once said to her lover: "A
tent and a crust of bread with you."  In effect that is what the
Lady Om said to me. More than to say it, she lived the last letter
of it, when more often than not crusts were not plentiful and the
sky itself was our tent.

Every effort I made to escape beggary was in the end frustrated by
Chong Mong-ju. In Song-do I became a fuel-carrier, and the Lady Om
and I shared a hut that was vastly more comfortable than the open
road in bitter winter weather. But Chong Mong-ju found me out, and
I was beaten and planked and put out upon the road. That was a
terrible winter, the winter poor "What-Now" Vandervoot froze to
death on the streets of Keijo.

In Pyeng-yang I became a water-carrier, for know that that old city,
whose walls were ancient even in the time of David, was considered
by the people to be a canoe, and that, therefore, to sink a well
inside the walls would be to scupper the city. So all day long
thousands of coolies, water-jars yoked to their shoulders, tramp out
the river gate and back. I became one of these, until Chong Mong-ju
sought me out, and I was beaten and planked and set upon the
highway.

Ever it was the same. In far Wiju I became a dog-butcher, killing
the brutes publicly before my open stall, cutting and hanging the
caresses for sale, tanning the hides under the filth of the feet of
the passers-by by spreading the hides, raw-side up, in the muck of
the street. But Chong Mong-ju found me out. I was a dyer's helper
in Pyonhan, a gold-miner in the placers of Kang-wun, a rope-maker
and twine-twister in Chiksan. I plaited straw hats in Padok,
gathered grass in Whang-hai, and in Masenpo sold myself to a rice
farmer to toil bent double in the flooded paddies for less than a
coolie's pay. But there was never a time or place that the long arm
of Chong Mong-ju did not reach out and punish and thrust me upon the
beggar's way.

The Lady Om and I searched two seasons and found a single root of
the wild mountain ginseng, which is esteemed so rare and precious a
thing by the doctors that the Lady Om and I could have lived a year
in comfort from the sale of our one root. But in the selling of it
I was apprehended, the root confiscated, and I was better beaten and
longer planked than ordinarily.

Everywhere the wandering members of the great Peddlers' Guild
carried word of me, of my comings and goings and doings, to Chong
Mong-ju at Keijo. Only twice, in all the days after my downfall,
did I meet Chong Mong-ju face to face. The first time was a wild
winter night of storm in the high mountains of Kang-wun. A few
hoarded coppers had bought for the Lady Om and me sleeping space in
the dirtiest and coldest corner of the one large room of the inn.
We were just about to begin on our meagre supper of horse-beans and
wild garlic cooked into a stew with a scrap of bullock that must
have died of old age, when there was a tinkling of bronze pony bells
and the stamp of hoofs without. The doors opened, and entered Chong
Mong-ju, the personification of well-being, prosperity and power,
shaking the snow from his priceless Mongolian furs. Place was made
for him and his dozen retainers, and there was room for all without
crowding, when his eyes chanced to light on the Lady Om and me.

"The vermin there in the corner--clear it out," he commanded.

And his horse-boys lashed us with their whips and drove us out into
the storm. But there was to be another meeting, after long years,
as you shall see.

There was no escape. Never was I permitted to cross the northern
frontier. Never was I permitted to put foot to a sampan on the sea.
The Peddlers' Guild carried these commands of Chong Mong-ju to every
village and every soul in all Cho-Sen. I was a marked man.

Lord, Lord, Cho-Sen, I know your every highway and mountain path,
all your walled cities and the least of your villages. For two-
score years I wandered and starved over you, and the Lady Om ever
wandered and starved with me. What we in extremity have eaten!--
Leavings of dog's flesh, putrid and unsaleable, flung to us by the
mocking butchers; MINARI, a water-cress gathered from stagnant pools
of slime; spoiled KIMCHI that would revolt the stomachs of peasants
and that could be smelled a mile. Ay--I have stolen bones from
curs, gleaned the public road for stray grains of rice, robbed
ponies of their steaming bean-soup on frosty nights.

It is not strange that I did not die. I knew and was upheld by two
things: the first, the Lady Om by my side; the second, the certain
faith that the time would come when my thumbs and fingers would
fast-lock in the gullet of Chong Mong-ju.

Turned always away at the city gates of Keijo, where I sought Chong
Mong-ju, we wandered on, through seasons and decades of seasons,
across Cho-Sen, whose every inch of road was an old story to our
sandals. Our history and identity were wide-scattered as the land
was wide. No person breathed who did not know us and our
punishment. There were coolies and peddlers who shouted insults at
the Lady Om and who felt the wrath of my clutch in their topknots,
the wrath of my knuckles in their faces. There were old women in
far mountain villages who looked on the beggar woman by my side, the
lost Lady Om, and sighed and shook their heads while their eyes
dimmed with tears. And there were young women whose faces warmed
with compassion as they gazed on the bulk of my shoulders, the blue
of my eyes, and my long yellow hair--I who had once been a prince of
Koryu and the ruler of provinces. And there were rabbles of
children that tagged at our heels, jeering and screeching, pelting
us with filth of speech and of the common road.

Beyond the Yalu, forty miles wide, was the strip of waste that
constituted the northern frontier and that ran from sea to sea. It
was not really waste land, but land that had been deliberately made
waste in carrying out Cho-Sen's policy of isolation. On this forty-
mile strip all farms, villages and cities had been destroyed. It
was no man's land, infested with wild animals and traversed by
companies of mounted Tiger Hunters whose business was to kill any
human being they found. That way there was no escape for us, nor
was there any escape for us by sea.

As the years passed my seven fellow-cunies came more to frequent
Fusan. It was on the south-east coast where the climate was milder.
But more than climate, it lay nearest of all Cho-Sen to Japan.
Across the narrow straits, just farther than the eye can see, was
the one hope of escape Japan, where doubtless occasional ships of
Europe came. Strong upon me is the vision of those seven ageing men
on the cliffs of Fusan yearning with all their souls across the sea
they would never sail again.

At times junks of Japan were sighted, but never lifted a familiar
topsail of old Europe above the sea-rim. Years came and went, and
the seven cunies and myself and the Lady Om, passing through middle
life into old age, more and more directed our footsteps to Fusan.
And as the years came and went, now one, now another failed to
gather at the usual place. Hans Amden was the first to die. Jacob
Brinker, who was his road-mate, brought the news. Jacob Brinker was
the last of the seven, and he was nearly ninety when he died,
outliving Tromp a scant two years. I well remember the pair of
them, toward the last, worn and feeble, in beggars' rags, with
beggars' bowls, sunning themselves side by side on the cliffs,
telling old stories and cackling shrill-voiced like children. And
Tromp would maunder over and over of how Johannes Maartens and the
cunies robbed the kings on Tabong Mountain, each embalmed in his
golden coffin with an embalmed maid on either side; and of how these
ancient proud ones crumbled to dust within the hour while the cunies
cursed and sweated at junking the coffins.

As sure as loot is loot, old Johannes Maartens would have got away
and across the Yellow Sea with his booty had it not been for the fog
next day that lost him. That cursed fog! A song was made of it,
that I heard and hated through all Cho-Sen to my dying day. Here
run two lines of it:

"Yanggukeni chajin anga
Wheanpong tora deunda,
The thick fog of the Westerners
Broods over Whean peak."

For forty years I was a beggar of Cho-Sen. Of the fourteen of us
that were cast away only I survived. The Lady Om was of the same
indomitable stuff, and we aged together. She was a little,
weazened, toothless old woman toward the last; but ever she was the
wonder woman, and she carried my heart in hers to the end. For an
old man, three score and ten, I still retained great strength. My
face was withered, my yellow hair turned white, my broad shoulders
shrunken, and yet much of the strength of my sea-cuny days resided
in the muscles left me.

Thus it was that I was able to do what I shall now relate. It was a
spring morning on the cliffs of Fusan, hard by the highway, that the
Lady Om and I sat warming in the sun. We were in the rags of
beggary, prideless in the dust, and yet I was laughing heartily at
some mumbled merry quip of the Lady Om when a shadow fell upon us.
It was the great litter of Chong Mong-ju, borne by eight coolies,
with outriders before and behind and fluttering attendants on either
side.

Two emperors, civil war, famine, and a dozen palace revolutions had
come and gone; and Chong Mong-ju remained, even then the great power
at Keijo. He must have been nearly eighty that spring morning on
the cliffs when he signalled with palsied hand for his litter to be
rested down that he might gaze upon us whom he had punished for so
long.

"Now, O my king," the Lady Om mumbled low to me, then turned to
whine an alms of Chong Mong-ju, whom she affected not to recognize.

And I knew what was her thought. Had we not shared it for forty
years? And the moment of its consummation had come at last. So I,
too, affected not to recognize my enemy, and, putting on an idiotic
senility, I, too, crawled in the dust toward the litter whining for
mercy and charity.

The attendants would have driven me back, but with age-quavering
cackles Chong Mong-ju restrained them. He lifted himself on a
shaking elbow, and with the other shaking hand drew wider apart the
silken curtains. His withered old face was transfigured with
delight as he gloated on us.

"O my king," the Lady Om whined to me in her beggar's chant; and I
knew all her long-tried love and faith in my emprise were in that
chant.

And the red wrath was up in me, ripping and tearing at my will to be
free. Small wonder that I shook with the effort to control. The
shaking, happily, they took for the weakness of age. I held up my
brass begging bowl, and whined more dolefully, and bleared my eyes
to hide the blue fire I knew was in them, and calculated the
distance and my strength for the leap.

Then I was swept away in a blaze of red. There was a crashing of
curtains and curtain-poles and a squawking and squalling of
attendants as my hands closed on Chong Mong-ju's throat. The litter
over-turned, and I scarce knew whether I was heads or heels, but my
clutch never relaxed.

In the confusion of cushions and quilts and curtains, at first few
of the attendants' blows found me. But soon the horsemen were in,
and their heavy whip-butts began to fall on my head, while a
multitude of hands clawed and tore at me. I was dizzy, but not
unconscious, and very blissful with my old fingers buried in that
lean and scraggly old neck I had sought for so long. The blows
continued to rain on my head, and I had whirling thoughts in which I
likened myself to a bulldog with jaws fast-locked. Chong Mong-ju
could not escape me, and I know he was well dead ere darkness, like
that of an anaesthetic, descended upon me there on the cliffs of
Fusan by the Yellow Sea.

CHAPTER XVI

Warden Atherton, when he thinks of me, must feel anything but pride.
I have taught him what spirit is, humbled him with my own spirit
that rose invulnerable, triumphant, above all his tortures. I sit
here in Folsom, in Murderers' Row, awaiting my execution; Warden
Atherton still holds his political job and is king over San Quentin
and all the damned within its walls; and yet, in his heart of
hearts, he knows that I am greater than he.

In vain Warden Atherton tried to break my spirit. And there were
times, beyond any shadow of doubt, when he would have been glad had
I died in the jacket. So the long inquisition went on. As he had
told me, and as he told me repeatedly, it was dynamite or curtains.

Captain Jamie was a veteran in dungeon horrors, yet the time came
when he broke down under the strain I put on him and on the rest of
my torturers. So desperate did he become that he dared words with
the Warden and washed his hands of the affair. From that day until
the end of my torturing he never set foot in solitary.

Yes, and the time came when Warden Atherton grew afraid, although he
still persisted in trying to wring from me the hiding-place of the
non-existent dynamite. Toward the last he was badly shaken by Jake
Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer was fearless and outspoken. He had passed
unbroken through all their prison hells, and out of superior will
could beard them to their teeth. Morrell rapped me a full account
of the incident. I was unconscious in the jacket at the time.

"Warden," Oppenheimer had said, "you've bitten off more than you can
chew. It ain't a case of killing Standing. It's a case of killing
three men, for as sure as you kill him, sooner or later Morrell and
I will get the word out and what you have done will be known from
one end of California to the other. You've got your choice. You've
either got to let up on Standing or kill all three of us.
Standing's got your goat. So have I. So has Morrell. You are a
stinking coward, and you haven't got the back-bone and guts to carry
out the dirty butcher's work you'd like to do."

Oppenheimer got a hundred hours in the jacket for it, and, when he
was unlaced, spat in the Warden's face and received a second hundred
hours on end. When he was unlaced this time, the Warden was careful
not to be in solitary. That he was shaken by Oppenheimer's words
there is no doubt.

But it was Doctor Jackson who was the arch-fiend. To him I was a
novelty, and he was ever eager to see how much more I could stand
before I broke.

"He can stand twenty days off the bat," he bragged to the Warden in
my presence.

"You are conservative," I broke in. "I can stand forty days.
Pshaw! I can stand a hundred when such as you administer it."  And,
remembering my sea-cuny's patience of forty years' waiting ere I got
my hands on Chong Mong-ju's gullet, I added: "You prison curs, you
don't know what a man is. You think a man is made in your own
cowardly images. Behold, I am a man. You are feeblings. I am your
master. You can't bring a squeal out of me. You think it
remarkable, for you know how easily you would squeal."

Oh, I abused them, called them sons of toads, hell's scullions,
slime of the pit. For I was above them, beyond them. They were
slaves. I was free spirit. My flesh only lay pent there in
solitary. I was not pent. I had mastered the flesh, and the
spaciousness of time was mine to wander in, while my poor flesh, not
even suffering, lay in the little death in the jacket.

Much of my adventures I rapped to my two comrades. Morrell
believed, for he had himself tasted the little death. But
Oppenheimer, enraptured with my tales, remained a sceptic to the
end. His regret was naive, and at times really pathetic, in that I
had devoted my life to the science of agriculture instead of to
fiction writing.

"But, man," I reasoned with him, "what do I know of myself about
this Cho-Sen? I am able to identify it with what is to-day called
Korea, and that is about all. That is as far as my reading goes.
For instance, how possibly, out of my present life's experience,
could I know anything about kimchi? Yet I know kimchi. It is a
sort of sauerkraut. When it is spoiled it stinks to heaven. I tell
you, when I was Adam Strang, I ate kimchi thousands of times. I
know good kimchi, bad kimchi, rotten kimchi. I know the best kimchi
is made by the women of Wosan. Now how do I know that? It is not
in the content of my mind, Darrell Standing's mind. It is in the
content of Adam Strang's mind, who, through various births and
deaths, bequeathed his experiences to me, Darrell Standing, along
with the rest of the experiences of those various other lives that
intervened. Don't you see, Jake? That is how men come to be, to
grow, how spirit develops."

"Aw, come off," he rapped back with the quick imperative knuckles I
knew so well. "Listen to your uncle talk now. I am Jake
Oppenheimer. I always have been Jake Oppenheimer. No other guy is
in my makings. What I know I know as Jake Oppenheimer. Now what do
I know? I'll tell you one thing. I know kimchi. Kimchi is a sort
of sauerkraut made in a country that used to be called Cho-Sen. The
women of Wosan make the best kimchi, and when kimchi is spoiled it
stinks to heaven. You keep out of this, Ed. Wait till I tie the
professor up.

"Now, professor, how do I know all this stuff about kimchi? It is
not in the content of my mind."

"But it is," I exulted. "I put it there."

"All right, old boss. Then who put it into your mind?"

"Adam Strang."

"Not on your tintype. Adam Strang is a pipe-dream. You read it
somewhere."

"Never," I averred. "The little I read of Korea was the war
correspondence at the time of the Japanese-Russian War."

"Do you remember all you read?" Oppenheimer queried.

"No."

"Some you forget?"

"Yes, but--"

"That's all, thank you," he interrupted, in the manner of a lawyer
abruptly concluding a cross-examination after having extracted a
fatal admission from a witness.

It was impossible to convince Oppenheimer of my sincerity. He
insisted that I was making it up as I went along, although he
applauded what he called my "to-be-continued-in-our-next," and, at
the times they were resting me up from the jacket, was continually
begging and urging me to run off a few more chapters.

"Now, professor, cut out that high-brow stuff," he would interrupt
Ed Morrell's and my metaphysical discussions, "and tell us more
about the ki-sang and the cunies. And, say, while you're about it,
tell us what happened to the Lady Om when that rough-neck husband of
hers choked the old geezer and croaked."

How often have I said that form perishes. Let me repeat. Form
perishes. Matter has no memory. Spirit only remembers, as here, in
prison cells, after the centuries, knowledge of the Lady Om and
Chong Mong-ju persisted in my mind, was conveyed by me into Jake
Oppenheimer's mind, and by him was reconveyed into my mind in the
argot and jargon of the West. And now I have conveyed it into your
mind, my reader. Try to eliminate it from your mind. You cannot.
As long as you live what I have told will tenant your mind. Mind?
There is nothing permanent but mind. Matter fluxes, crystallizes,
and fluxes again, and forms are never repeated. Forms disintegrate
into the eternal nothingness from which there is no return. Form is
apparitional and passes, as passed the physical forms of the Lady Om
and Chong Mong-ju. But the memory of them remains, shall always
remain as long as spirit endures, and spirit is indestructible.

"One thing sticks out as big as a house," was Oppenheimer's final
criticism of my Adam Strang adventure. "And that is that you've
done more hanging around Chinatown dumps and hop-joints than was
good for a respectable college professor. Evil communications, you
know. I guess that's what brought you here."

Before I return to my adventures I am compelled to tell one
remarkable incident that occurred in solitary. It is remarkable in
two ways. It shows the astounding mental power of that child of the
gutters, Jake Oppenheimer; and it is in itself convincing proof of
the verity of my experiences when in the jacket coma.

"Say, professor," Oppenheimer tapped to me one day. "When you was
spieling that Adam Strang yarn, I remember you mentioned playing
chess with that royal souse of an emperor's brother. Now is that
chess like our kind of chess?"

Of course I had to reply that I did not know, that I did not
remember the details after I returned to my normal state. And of
course he laughed good-naturedly at what he called my foolery. Yet
I could distinctly remember that in my Adam Strang adventure I had
frequently played chess. The trouble was that whenever I came back
to consciousness in solitary, unessential and intricate details
faded from my memory.

It must be remembered that for convenience I have assembled my
intermittent and repetitional jacket experiences into coherent and
consecutive narratives. I never knew in advance where my journeys
in time would take me. For instance, I have a score of different
times returned to Jesse Fancher in the wagon-circle at Mountain
Meadows. In a single ten-days' bout in the jacket I have gone back
and back, from life to life, and often skipping whole series of
lives that at other times I have covered, back to prehistoric time,
and back of that to days ere civilization began.

So I resolved, on my next return from Adam Strang's experiences,
whenever it might be, that I should, immediately, I on resuming
consciousness, concentrate upon what visions and memories. I had
brought back of chess playing. As luck would have it, I had to
endure Oppenheimer's chaffing for a full month ere it happened. And
then, no sooner out of jacket and circulation restored, than I
started knuckle-rapping the information.

Further, I taught Oppenheimer the chess Adam Strang had played in
Cho-Sen centuries agone. It was different from Western chess, and
yet could not but be fundamentally the same, tracing back to a
common origin, probably India. In place of our sixty-four squares
there are eighty-one squares. We have eight pawns on a side; they
have nine; and though limited similarly, the principle of moving is
different.

Also, in the Cho-Sen game, there are twenty pieces and pawns against
our sixteen, and they are arrayed in three rows instead of two.
Thus, the nine pawns are in the front row; in the middle row are two
pieces resembling our castles; and in the back row, midway, stands
the king, flanked in order on either side by "gold money," "silver
money," "knight," and "spear."  It will be observed that in the Cho-
Sen game there is no queen. A further radical variation is that a
captured piece or pawn is not removed from the board. It becomes
the property of the captor and is thereafter played by him.

Well, I taught Oppenheimer this game--a far more difficult
achievement than our own game, as will be admitted, when the
capturing and recapturing and continued playing of pawns and pieces
is considered. Solitary is not heated. It would be a wickedness to
ease a convict from any spite of the elements. And many a dreary
day of biting cold did Oppenheimer and I forget that and the
following winter in the absorption of Cho-Sen chess.

But there was no convincing him that I had in truth brought this
game back to San Quentin across the centuries. He insisted that I
had read about it somewhere, and, though I had forgotten the
reading, the stuff of the reading was nevertheless in the content of
my mind, ripe to be brought out in any pipe-dream. Thus he turned
the tenets and jargon of psychology back on me.

"What's to prevent your inventing it right here in solitary?" was
his next hypothesis. "Didn't Ed invent the knuckle-talk? And ain't
you and me improving on it right along? I got you, bo. You
invented it. Say, get it patented. I remember when I was night-
messenger some guy invented a fool thing called Pigs in Clover and
made millions out o