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Title: The Jacket (The Star-Rover)

Author: Jack London

Release date: January 1, 1998 [eBook #1162]
                Most recently updated: April 24, 2021

Language: English

Credits: David Price


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

[Illustration]




The Jacket

(The Star-Rover)

by Jack London


Contents

 CHAPTER I.
 CHAPTER II.
 CHAPTER III.
 CHAPTER IV.
 CHAPTER V.
 CHAPTER VI.
 CHAPTER VII.
 CHAPTER VIII.
 CHAPTER IX.
 CHAPTER X.
 CHAPTER XI.
 CHAPTER XII.
 CHAPTER XIII.
 CHAPTER XIV.
 CHAPTER XV.
 CHAPTER XVI.
 CHAPTER XVII.
 CHAPTER XVIII.
 CHAPTER XIX.
 CHAPTER XX.
 CHAPTER XXI.
 CHAPTER XXII.




CHAPTER I.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER II.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Show me,” the Captain of the Yard must have demanded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Enough of what?” the Captain demanded.

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

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

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

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

And right there Cecil Winwood saw his mistake.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER III.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What about this dynamite?” he demanded. “Who knows anything about
dynamite?”

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER IV.


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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t know anything about what has happened . . .”, I began.

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

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

“I don’t know anything of any dynamite,” I protested.

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

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

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

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

“There is a stool in with me, fellows! He’s Ignatius Irvine! Watch out
what you say!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re a good one, Standing,” he cackled. “You never squealed.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER V.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I—would—do—twenty—hours—strait—in—the—jacket—for—a—five—cent—sack—”

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

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

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

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

“Hello,” I tapped

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER VI.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No!” I cried with great positiveness.

“You mean that isn’t its name?” the missionary asked.

I nodded.

“Then what is its name, my boy?”

“It’s name is . . .” I began, then concluded lamely, “I, forget.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Listen to the youngster,” my father chuckled. “You’d think he’d ben
there.”

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

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

And the name came to me!

“Samaria,” I said instantly.

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

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

This my father and mother denied.

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

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

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

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

“Ten of ’em. They’re all wavin’ their arms an’ yellin’ at the other
men.”

“But they don’t come near them?” was the query.

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

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

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

“And then?”

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

At this all three of my listeners broke into laughter.

“An’ I’m a big man!” I cried out angrily. “An’ I got a big sword!”

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

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

“Try him with another picture,” father suggested.

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

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

I shook my head.

“Never had no name. They killed folks there. I’ve seem ’m more ’n
once.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER VII.


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

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

But more especially did I dwell upon the experiments of Colonel de
Rochas. By means of suitable hypnotic subjects he claimed that he had
penetrated backwards through time to the ancestors of his subjects.
Thus, the case of Josephine which he describes. She was eighteen years
old and she lived at Voiron, in the department of the Isère. 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 Besançon, 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 Philomène 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 eat up hours for you. Mebbe you’ll feel yourself gettin’ woozy.
Well, get woozy. You can’t beat that for killin’ time. An’ when the
girls won’t hold you, get to thinkin’ of the fellows you got it in for,
an’ what you’d do to ’em if you got a chance, an’ what you’re goin’ to
do to ’em when you get that same chance.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Shut up, you, Red,” the sergeant snarled at him.

“Forget it,” was the retort.

“I’ll get you yet, Red,” the sergeant threatened.

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER VIII.


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

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

“Then I guess it is curtains,” I answered, “because I don’t know of any
dynamite.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s right,” Oppenheimer praised. “He’s the stuff, ain’t he, Ed?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER IX.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Go on and tell me,” I rapped to Morrell.

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

“Well, what is it?” I rapped eagerly.

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

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

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

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

“And then what happens?” I queried.

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

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

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

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

“I tell you I’ve been dead three times,” Morrell argued.

“And lived to tell us about it,” Oppenheimer jeered.

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

“You try it. I am giving you the straight steer.”

“And if he don’t come back?” Oppenheimer, asked.

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER X.


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

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

“Examine him,” he ordered Doctor Jackson.

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

“Will he stand it?” the Warden demanded.

“Yes,” Doctor Jackson answered.

“How’s the heart?”

“Splendid.”

“You think he’ll stand ten days of it, Doc.?”

“Sure.”

“I don’t believe it,” the Warden announced savagely. “But we’ll try it
just the same.—Lie down, Standing.”

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

“Roll over,” he commanded.

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

“Putting it on,” was Jackson’s comment.

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

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

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

He paused and shrugged his shoulders significantly.

“Well, if you don’t, you start in the ten days right now.”

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

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

“Ain’t they the crazy ginks, these college guys,” Captain Jamie
snorted.

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

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

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

“You are mighty sure of yourself,” he retorted.

“That’s why I made the proposition,” I replied.

“Getting religion, eh?” he sneered.

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

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

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

“For two cents I’d kick the face off of you right now,” he snarled.

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

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

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

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

“We’ll make Standing squeal,” said the Warden.

“Since you are so sure of it, why don’t you accept my proposition?” I
challenged.

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s pretty tight,” Captain Jamie urged reluctantly.

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

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

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

They rolled me over on my back. I stared up 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 formulæ 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
formulæ 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, æons 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 strait-jacket hell. Thus my æons of star-wandering were
æons 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 minutiæ 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 fête 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 together, 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 anæsthetic.

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 bedridden 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, Philomène 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 Standing, 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 sent 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
breastwork 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 campfires 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 anæsthesia of pain, engendered
by pain too exquisite to be borne. And I have known that anæsthesia.

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 programme, 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 séance.

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 cells 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
identify 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 _ſ_.

_The wind being favourable, gave us an opportunity of examining and
drying some of our proviſion, particularly, ſome Chineſe hams and dry
fiſh, which conſtituted part of our victualling. Divine service alſo
was performed on deck. In the afternoon the wind was ſoutherly, with
freſh gales, but dry, ſo that we were able the following morning to
clean between decks, and alſo to fumigate the ſhip 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 recking 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 reck? 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 sheer
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 best 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 verily 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 so many dancing bears 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 minutiæ 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 passed 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 Songdo 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 carcasses
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 overturned,
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 anæsthetic, 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 backbone 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 naïve, 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, 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 of
it.”

“There’s no patenting this,” I replied. “Doubtlessly the Asiatics have
been playing it for thousands of years. Won’t you believe me when I
tell you I didn’t invent it?”

“Then you must have read about it, or seen the Chinks playing it in
some of those hop-joints you was always hanging around,” was his last
word.

But I have a last word. There is a Japanese murderer here in Folsom—or
was, for he was executed last week. I talked the matter over with him;
and the game Adam Strang played, and which I taught Oppenheimer, proved
quite similar to the Japanese game. They are far more alike than is
either of them like the Western game.




CHAPTER XVII.


You, my reader, will remember, far back at the beginning of this
narrative, how, when a little lad on the Minnesota farm, I looked at
the photographs of the Holy Land and recognized places and pointed out
changes in places. Also you will remember, as I described the scene I
had witnessed of the healing of the lepers, I told the missionary that
I was a big man with a big sword, astride a horse and looking on.

That childhood incident was merely a trailing cloud of glory, as
Wordsworth puts it. Not in entire forgetfulness had I, little Darrell
Standing, come into the world. But those memories of other times and
places that glimmered up to the surface of my child consciousness soon
failed and faded. In truth, as is the way with all children, the shades
of the prison-house closed about me, and I remembered my mighty past no
more. Every man born of woman has a past mighty as mine. Very few men
born of women have been fortunate enough to suffer years of solitary
and strait-jacketing. That was my good fortune. I was enabled to
remember once again, and to remember, among other things, the time when
I sat astride a horse and beheld the lepers healed.

My name was Ragnar Lodbrog. I was in truth a large man. I stood half a
head above the Romans of my legion. But that was later, after the time
of my journey from Alexandria to Jerusalem, that I came to command a
legion. It was a crowded life, that. Books and books, and years of
writing could not record it all. So I shall briefen and no more than
hint at the beginnings of it.

Now all is clear and sharp save the very beginning. I never knew my
mother. I was told that I was tempest-born, on a beaked ship in the
Northern Sea, of a captured woman, after a sea fight and a sack of a
coastal stronghold. I never heard the name of my mother. She died at
the height of the tempest. She was of the North Danes, so old Lingaard
told me. He told me much that I was too young to remember, yet little
could he tell. A sea fight and a sack, battle and plunder and torch, a
flight seaward in the long ships to escape destruction upon the rocks,
and a killing strain and struggle against the frosty, foundering
seas—who, then, should know aught or mark a stranger woman in her hour
with her feet fast set on the way of death? Many died. Men marked the
living women, not the dead.

Sharp-bitten into my child imagination are the incidents immediately
after my birth, as told me by old Lingaard. Lingaard, too old to labour
at the sweeps, had been surgeon, undertaker, and midwife of the huddled
captives in the open midships. So I was delivered in storm, with the
spume of the cresting seas salt upon me.

Not many hours old was I when Tostig Lodbrog first laid eyes on me. His
was the lean ship, and his the seven other lean ships that had made the
foray, fled the rapine, and won through the storm. Tostig Lodbrog was
also called Muspell, meaning “The Burning”; for he was ever aflame with
wrath. Brave he was, and cruel he was, with no heart of mercy in that
great chest of his. Ere the sweat of battle had dried on him, leaning
on his axe, he ate the heart of Ngrun after the fight at Hasfarth.
Because of mad anger he sold his son, Garulf, into slavery to the Juts.
I remember, under the smoky rafters of Brunanbuhr, how he used to call
for the skull of Guthlaf for a drinking beaker. Spiced wine he would
have from no other cup than the skull of Guthlaf.

And to him, on the reeling deck after the storm was past, old Lingaard
brought me. I was only hours old, wrapped naked in a salt-crusted
wolfskin. Now it happens, being prematurely born, that I was very
small.

“Ho! ho!—a dwarf!” cried Tostig, lowering a pot of mead half-drained
from his lips to stare at me.

The day was bitter, but they say he swept me naked from the wolfskin,
and by my foot, between thumb and forefinger, dangled me to the bite of
the wind.

“A roach!” he ho-ho’d. “A shrimp! A sea-louse!” And he made to squash
me between huge forefinger and thumb, either of which, Lingaard avers,
was thicker than my leg or thigh.

But another whim was upon him.

“The youngling is a-thirst. Let him drink.”

And therewith, head-downward, into the half-pot of mead he thrust me.
And might well have drowned in this drink of men—I who had never known
a mother’s breast in the briefness of time I had lived—had it not been
for Lingaard. But when he plucked me forth from the brew, Tostig
Lodbrog struck him down in a rage. We rolled on the deck, and the great
bear hounds, captured in the fight with the North Danes just past,
sprang upon us.

“Ho! ho!” roared Tostig Lodbrog, as the old man and I and the wolfskin
were mauled and worried by the dogs.

But Lingaard gained his feet, saving me but losing the wolfskin to the
hounds.

Tostig Lodbrog finished the mead and regarded me, while Lingaard knew
better than to beg for mercy where was no mercy.

“Hop o’ my thumb,” quoth Tostig. “By Odin, the women of the North Danes
are a scurvy breed. They birth dwarfs, not men. Of what use is this
thing? He will never make a man. Listen you, Lingaard, grow him to be a
drink-boy at Brunanbuhr. And have an eye on the dogs lest they slobber
him down by mistake as a meat-crumb from the table.”

I knew no woman. Old Lingaard was midwife and nurse, and for nursery
were reeling decks and the stamp and trample of men in battle or storm.
How I survived puling infancy, God knows. I must have been born iron in
a day of iron, for survive I did, to give the lie to Tostig’s promise
of dwarf-hood. I outgrew all beakers and tankards, and not for long
could he half-drown me in his mead pot. This last was a favourite feat
of his. It was his raw humour, a sally esteemed by him delicious wit.

My first memories are of Tostig Lodbrog’s beaked ships and fighting
men, and of the feast hall at Brunanbuhr when our boats lay beached
beside the frozen fjord. For I was made drink-boy, and amongst my
earliest recollections are toddling with the wine-filled skull of
Guthlaf to the head of the table where Tostig bellowed to the rafters.
They were madmen, all of madness, but it seemed the common way of life
to me who knew naught else. They were men of quick rages and quick
battling. Their thoughts were ferocious; so was their eating ferocious,
and their drinking. And I grew like them. How else could I grow, when I
served the drink to the bellowings of drunkards and to the skalds
singing of Hialli, and the bold Hogni, and of the Niflung’s gold, and
of Gudrun’s revenge on Atli when she gave him the hearts of his
children and hers to eat while battle swept the benches, tore down the
hangings raped from southern coasts, and littered the feasting board
with swift corpses.

Oh, I, too, had a rage, well tutored in such school. I was but eight
when I showed my teeth at a drinking between the men of Brunanbuhr and
the Juts who came as friends with the jarl Agard in his three long
ships. I stood at Tostig Lodbrog’s shoulder, holding the skull of
Guthlaf that steamed and stank with the hot, spiced wine. And I waited
while Tostig should complete his ravings against the North Dane men.
But still he raved and still I waited, till he caught breath of fury to
assail the North Dane woman. Whereat I remembered my North Dane mother,
and saw my rage red in my eyes, and smote him with the skull of
Guthlaf, so that he was wine-drenched, and wine-blinded, and
fire-burnt. And as he reeled unseeing, smashing his great groping
clutches through the air at me, I was in and short-dirked him thrice in
belly, thigh and buttock, than which I could reach no higher up the
mighty frame of him.

And the jarl Agard’s steel was out, and his Juts joining him as he
shouted:

“A bear cub! A bear cub! By Odin, let the cub fight!”

And there, under that roaring roof of Brunanbuhr, the babbling
drink-boy of the North Danes fought with mighty Lodbrog. And when, with
one stroke, I was flung, dazed and breathless, half the length of that
great board, my flying body mowing down pots and tankards, Lodbrog
cried out command:

“Out with him! Fling him to the hounds!”

But the jarl would have it no, and clapped Lodbrog on the shoulder, and
asked me as a gift of friendship.

And south I went, when the ice passed out of the fjord, in Jarl Agard’s
ships. I was made drink-boy and sword-bearer to him, and in lieu of
other name was called Ragnar Lodbrog. Agard’s country was neighbour to
the Frisians, and a sad, flat country of fog and fen it was. I was with
him for three years, to his death, always at his back, whether hunting
swamp wolves or drinking in the great hall where Elgiva, his young
wife, often sat among her women. I was with Agard in south foray with
his ships along what would be now the coast of France, and there I
learned that still south were warmer seasons and softer climes and
women.

But we brought back Agard wounded to death and slow-dying. And we
burned his body on a great pyre, with Elgiva, in her golden corselet,
beside him singing. And there were household slaves in golden collars
that burned of a plenty there with her, and nine female thralls, and
eight male slaves of the Angles that were of gentle birth and
battle-captured. And there were live hawks so burned, and the two
hawk-boys with their birds.

But I, the drink-boy, Ragnar Lodbrog, did not burn. I was eleven, and
unafraid, and had never worn woven cloth on my body. And as the flames
sprang up, and Elgiva sang her death-song, and the thralls and slaves
screeched their unwillingness to die, I tore away my fastenings,
leaped, and gained the fens, the gold collar of my slavehood still on
my neck, footing it with the hounds loosed to tear me down.

In the fens were wild men, masterless men, fled slaves, and outlaws,
who were hunted in sport as the wolves were hunted.

For three years I knew never roof nor fire, and I grew hard as the
frost, and would have stolen a woman from the Juts but that the
Frisians by mischance, in a two days’ hunt, ran me down. By them I was
looted of my gold collar and traded for two wolf-hounds to Edwy, of the
Saxons, who put an iron collar on me, and later made of me and five
other slaves a present to Athel of the East Angles. I was thrall and
fighting man, until, lost in an unlucky raid far to the east beyond our
marches, I was sold among the Huns, and was a swineherd until I escaped
south into the great forests and was taken in as a freeman by the
Teutons, who were many, but who lived in small tribes and drifted
southward before the Hun advance.

And up from the south into the great forests came the Romans, fighting
men all, who pressed us back upon the Huns. It was a crushage of the
peoples for lack of room; and we taught the Romans what fighting was,
although in truth we were no less well taught by them.

But always I remembered the sun of the south-land that I had glimpsed
in the ships of Agard, and it was my fate, caught in this south drift
of the Teutons, to be captured by the Romans and be brought back to the
sea which I had not seen since I was lost away from the East Angles. I
was made a sweep-slave in the galleys, and it was as a sweep-slave that
at last I came to Rome.

All the story is too long of how I became a freeman, a citizen, and a
soldier, and of how, when I was thirty, I journeyed to Alexandria, and
from Alexandria to Jerusalem. Yet what I have told from the time when I
was baptized in the mead-pot of Tostig Lodbrog I have been compelled to
tell in order that you may understand what manner of man rode in
through the Jaffa Gate and drew all eyes upon him.

Well might they look. They were small breeds, lighter-boned and
lighter-thewed, these Romans and Jews, and a blonde like me they had
never gazed upon. All along the narrow streets they gave before me but
stood to stare wide-eyed at this yellow man from the north, or from God
knew where so far as they knew aught of the matter.

Practically all Pilate’s troops were auxiliaries, save for a handful of
Romans about the palace and the twenty Romans who rode with me. Often
enough have I found the auxiliaries good soldiers, but never so
steadily dependable as the Romans. In truth they were better fighting
men the year round than were we men of the North, who fought in great
moods and sulked in great moods. The Roman was invariably steady and
dependable.

There was a woman from the court of Antipas, who was a friend of
Pilate’s wife and whom I met at Pilate’s the night of my arrival. I
shall call her Miriam, for Miriam was the name I loved her by. If it
were merely difficult to describe the charm of women, I would describe
Miriam. But how describe emotion in words? The charm of woman is
wordless. It is different from perception that culminates in reason,
for it arises in sensation and culminates in emotion, which, be it
admitted, is nothing else than super-sensation.

In general, any woman has fundamental charm for any man. When this
charm becomes particular, then we call it love. Miriam had this
particular charm for me. Verily I was co-partner in her charm. Half of
it was my own man’s life in me that leapt and met her wide-armed and
made in me all that she was desirable plus all my desire of her.

Miriam was a grand woman. I use the term advisedly. She was
fine-bodied, commanding, over and above the average Jewish woman in
stature and in line. She was an aristocrat in social caste; she was an
aristocrat by nature. All her ways were large ways, generous ways. She
had brain, she had wit, and, above all, she had womanliness. As you
shall see, it was her womanliness that betrayed her and me in the end.
Brunette, olive-skinned, oval-faced, her hair was blue-black with its
blackness and her eyes were twin wells of black. Never were more
pronounced types of blonde and brunette in man and woman met than in
us.

And we met on the instant. There was no self-discussion, no waiting,
wavering, to make certain. She was mine the moment I looked upon her.
And by the same token she knew that I belonged to her above all men. I
strode to her. She half-lifted from her couch as if drawn upward to me.
And then we looked with all our eyes, blue eyes and black, until
Pilate’s wife, a thin, tense, overwrought woman, laughed nervously. And
while I bowed to the wife and gave greeting, I thought I saw Pilate
give Miriam a significant glance, as if to say, “Is he not all I
promised?” For he had had word of my coming from Sulpicius Quirinius,
the legate of Syria. As well had Pilate and I been known to each other
before ever he journeyed out to be procurator over the Semitic volcano
of Jerusalem.

Much talk we had that night, especially Pilate, who spoke in detail of
the local situation, and who seemed lonely and desirous to share his
anxieties with some one and even to bid for counsel. Pilate was of the
solid type of Roman, with sufficient imagination intelligently to
enforce the iron policy of Rome, and not unduly excitable under stress.

But on this night it was plain that he was worried. The Jews had got on
his nerves. They were too volcanic, spasmodic, eruptive. And further,
they were subtle. The Romans had a straight, forthright way of going
about anything. The Jews never approached anything directly, save
backwards, when they were driven by compulsion. Left to themselves,
they always approached by indirection. Pilate’s irritation was due, as
he explained, to the fact that the Jews were ever intriguing to make
him, and through him Rome, the catspaw in the matter of their religious
dissensions. As was well known to me, Rome did not interfere with the
religious notions of its conquered peoples; but the Jews were for ever
confusing the issues and giving a political cast to purely unpolitical
events.

Pilate waxed eloquent over the diverse sects and the fanatic uprisings
and riotings that were continually occurring.

“Lodbrog,” he said, “one can never tell what little summer cloud of
their hatching may turn into a thunderstorm roaring and rattling about
one’s ears. I am here to keep order and quiet. Despite me they make the
place a hornets’ nest. Far rather would I govern Scythians or savage
Britons than these people who are never at peace about God. Right now
there is a man up to the north, a fisherman turned preacher, and
miracle-worker, who as well as not may soon have all the country by the
ears and my recall on its way from Rome.”

This was the first I had heard of the man called Jesus, and I little
remarked it at the time. Not until afterward did I remember him, when
the little summer cloud had become a full-fledged thunderstorm.

“I have had report of him,” Pilate went on. “He is not political. There
is no doubt of that. But trust Caiaphas, and Hanan behind Caiaphas, to
make of this fisherman a political thorn with which to prick Rome and
ruin me.”

“This Caiaphas, I have heard of him as high priest, then who is this
Hanan?” I asked.

“The real high priest, a cunning fox,” Pilate explained. “Caiaphas was
appointed by Gratus, but Caiaphas is the shadow and the mouthpiece of
Hanan.”

“They have never forgiven you that little matter of the votive
shields,” Miriam teased.

Whereupon, as a man will when his sore place is touched, Pilate
launched upon the episode, which had been an episode, no more, at the
beginning, but which had nearly destroyed him. In all innocence before
his palace he had affixed two shields with votive inscriptions. Ere the
consequent storm that burst on his head had passed the Jews had written
their complaints to Tiberius, who approved them and reprimanded Pilate.

I was glad, a little later, when I could have talk with Miriam.
Pilate’s wife had found opportunity to tell me about her. She was of
old royal stock. Her sister was wife of Philip, tetrarch of Gaulonitis
and Batanæa. Now this Philip was brother to Antipas, tetrarch of
Galilee and Peræa, and both were sons of Herod, called by the Jews the
“Great.” Miriam, as I understood, was at home in the courts of both
tetrarchs, being herself of the blood. Also, when a girl, she had been
betrothed to Archelaus at the time he was ethnarch of Jerusalem. She
had a goodly fortune in her own right, so that marriage had not been
compulsory. To boot, she had a will of her own, and was doubtless hard
to please in so important a matter as husbands.

It must have been in the very air we breathed, for in no time Miriam
and I were at it on the subject of religion. Truly, the Jews of that
day battened on religion as did we on fighting and feasting. For all my
stay in that country there was never a moment when my wits were not
buzzing with the endless discussions of life and death, law, and God.
Now Pilate believed neither in gods, nor devils, nor anything. Death,
to him, was the blackness of unbroken sleep; and yet, during his years
in Jerusalem, he was ever vexed with the inescapable fuss and fury of
things religious. Why, I had a horse-boy on my trip into Idumæa, a
wretched creature that could never learn to saddle and who yet could
talk, and most learnedly, without breath, from nightfall to sunrise, on
the hair-splitting differences in the teachings of all the rabbis from
Shemaiah to Gamaliel.

But to return to Miriam.

“You believe you are immortal,” she was soon challenging me. “Then why
do you fear to talk about it?”

“Why burden my mind with thoughts about certainties?” I countered.

“But are you certain?” she insisted. “Tell me about it. What is it
like—your immortality?”

And when I had told her of Niflheim and Muspell, of the birth of the
giant Ymir from the snowflakes, of the cow Andhumbla, and of Fenrir and
Loki and the frozen Jötuns—as I say, when I had told her of all this,
and of Thor and Odin and our own Valhalla, she clapped her hands and
cried out, with sparkling eyes:

“Oh, you barbarian! You great child! You yellow giant-thing of the
frost! You believer of old nurse tales and stomach satisfactions! But
the spirit of you, that which cannot die, where will it go when your
body is dead?”

“As I have said, Valhalla,” I answered. “And my body shall be there,
too.”

“Eating?—drinking?—fighting?”

“And loving,” I added. “We must have our women in heaven, else what is
heaven for?”

“I do not like your heaven,” she said. “It is a mad place, a beast
place, a place of frost and storm and fury.”

“And your heaven?” I questioned.

“Is always unending summer, with the year at the ripe for the fruits
and flowers and growing things.”

I shook my head and growled:

“I do not like your heaven. It is a sad place, a soft place, a place
for weaklings and eunuchs and fat, sobbing shadows of men.”

My remarks must have glamoured her mind, for her eyes continued to
sparkle, and mine was half a guess that she was leading me on.

“My heaven,” she said, “is the abode of the blest.”

“Valhalla is the abode of the blest,” I asserted. “For look you, who
cares for flowers where flowers always are? In my country, after the
iron winter breaks and the sun drives away the long night, the first
blossoms twinkling on the melting ice-edge are things of joy, and we
look, and look again.

“And fire!” I cried out. “Great glorious fire! A fine heaven yours
where a man cannot properly esteem a roaring fire under a tight roof
with wind and snow a-drive outside.”

“A simple folk, you,” she was back at me. “You build a roof and a fire
in a snowbank and call it heaven. In my heaven we do not have to escape
the wind and snow.”

“No,” I objected. “We build roof and fire to go forth from into the
frost and storm and to return to from the frost and storm. Man’s life
is fashioned for battle with frost and storm. His very fire and roof he
makes by his battling. I know. For three years, once, I knew never roof
nor fire. I was sixteen, and a man, ere ever I wore woven cloth on my
body. I was birthed in storm, after battle, and my swaddling cloth was
a wolfskin. Look at me and see what manner of man lives in Valhalla.”

And look she did, all a-glamour, and cried out:

“You great, yellow giant-thing of a man!” Then she added pensively,
“Almost it saddens me that there may not be such men in my heaven.”

“It is a good world,” I consoled her. “Good is the plan and wide. There
is room for many heavens. It would seem that to each is given the
heaven that is his heart’s desire. A good country, truly, there beyond
the grave. I doubt not I shall leave our feast halls and raid your
coasts of sun and flowers, and steal you away. My mother was so
stolen.”

And in the pause I looked at her, and she looked at me, and dared to
look. And my blood ran fire. By Odin, this was a woman!

What might have happened I know not, for Pilate, who had ceased from
his talk with Ambivius and for some time had sat grinning, broke the
pause.

“A rabbi, a Teutoberg rabbi!” he gibed. “A new preacher and a new
doctrine come to Jerusalem. Now will there be more dissensions, and
riotings, and stonings of prophets. The gods save us, it is a
mad-house. Lodbrog, I little thought it of you. Yet here you are,
spouting and fuming as wildly as any madman from the desert about what
shall happen to you when you are dead. One life at a time, Lodbrog. It
saves trouble. It saves trouble.”

“Go on, Miriam, go on,” his wife cried.

She had sat entranced during the discussion, with hands tightly
clasped, and the thought flickered up in my mind that she had already
been corrupted by the religious folly of Jerusalem. At any rate, as I
was to learn in the days that followed, she was unduly bent upon such
matters. She was a thin woman, as if wasted by fever. Her skin was
tight-stretched. Almost it seemed I could look through her hands did
she hold them between me and the light. She was a good woman, but
highly nervous, and, at times, fancy-flighted about shades and signs
and omens. Nor was she above seeing visions and hearing voices. As for
me, I had no patience with such weaknesses. Yet was she a good woman
with no heart of evil.

I was on a mission for Tiberius, and it was my ill luck to see little
of Miriam. On my return from the court of Antipas she had gone into
Batanæa to Philip’s court, where was her sister. Once again I was back
in Jerusalem, and, though it was no necessity of my business to see
Philip, who, though weak, was faithful to Roman will, I journeyed into
Batanæa in the hope of meeting with Miriam.

Then there was my trip into Idumæa. Also, I travelled into Syria in
obedience to the command of Sulpicius Quirinius, who, as imperial
legate, was curious of my first-hand report of affairs in Jerusalem.
Thus, travelling wide and much, I had opportunity to observe the
strangeness of the Jews who were so madly interested in God. It was
their peculiarity. Not content with leaving such matters to their
priests, they were themselves for ever turning priests and preaching
wherever they could find a listener. And listeners they found a-plenty.

They gave up their occupations to wander about the country like
beggars, disputing and bickering with the rabbis and Talmudists in the
synagogues and temple porches. It was in Galilee, a district of little
repute, the inhabitants of which were looked upon as witless, that I
crossed the track of the man Jesus. It seems that he had been a
carpenter, and after that a fisherman, and that his fellow-fishermen
had ceased dragging their nets and followed him in his wandering life.
Some few looked upon him as a prophet, but the most contended that he
was a madman. My wretched horse-boy, himself claiming Talmudic
knowledge second to none, sneered at Jesus, calling him the king of the
beggars, calling his doctrine Ebionism, which, as he explained to me,
was to the effect that only the poor should win to heaven, while the
rich and powerful were to burn for ever in some lake of fire.

It was my observation that it was the custom of the country for every
man to call every other man a madman. In truth, in my judgment, they
were all mad. There was a plague of them. They cast out devils by magic
charms, cured diseases by the laying on of hands, drank deadly poisons
unharmed, and unharmed played with deadly snakes—or so they claimed.
They ran away to starve in the deserts. They emerged howling new
doctrine, gathering crowds about them, forming new sects that split on
doctrine and formed more sects.

“By Odin,” I told Pilate, “a trifle of our northern frost and snow
would cool their wits. This climate is too soft. In place of building
roofs and hunting meat, they are ever building doctrine.”

“And altering the nature of God,” Pilate corroborated sourly. “A curse
on doctrine.”

“So say I,” I agreed. “If ever I get away with unaddled wits from this
mad land, I’ll cleave through whatever man dares mention to me what may
happen after I am dead.”

Never were such trouble makers. Everything under the sun was pious or
impious to them. They, who were so clever in hair-splitting argument,
seemed incapable of grasping the Roman idea of the State. Everything
political was religious; everything religious was political. Thus every
procurator’s hands were full. The Roman eagles, the Roman statues, even
the votive shields of Pilate, were deliberate insults to their
religion.

The Roman taking of the census was an abomination. Yet it had to be
done, for it was the basis of taxation. But there it was again.
Taxation by the State was a crime against their law and God. Oh, that
Law! It was not the Roman law. It was their law, what they called God’s
law. There were the zealots, who murdered anybody who broke this law.
And for a procurator to punish a zealot caught red-handed was to raise
a riot or an insurrection.

Everything, with these strange people, was done in the name of God.
There were what we Romans called the _thaumaturgi_. They worked
miracles to prove doctrine. Ever has it seemed to me a witless thing to
prove the multiplication table by turning a staff into a serpent, or
even into two serpents. Yet these things the _thaumaturgi_ did, and
always to the excitement of the common people.

Heavens, what sects and sects! Pharisees, Essenes, Sadducees—a legion
of them! No sooner did they start with a new quirk when it turned
political. Coponius, procurator fourth before Pilate, had a pretty time
crushing the Gaulonite sedition which arose in this fashion and spread
down from Gamala.

In Jerusalem, that last time I rode in, it was easy to note the
increasing excitement of the Jews. They ran about in crowds, chattering
and spouting. Some were proclaiming the end of the world. Others
satisfied themselves with the imminent destruction of the Temple. And
there were rank revolutionists who announced that Roman rule was over
and the new Jewish kingdom about to begin.

Pilate, too, I noted, showed heavy anxiety. That they were giving him a
hard time of it was patent. But I will say, as you shall see, that he
matched their subtlety with equal subtlety; and from what I saw of him
I have little doubt but what he would have confounded many a disputant
in the synagogues.

“But half a legion of Romans,” he regretted to me, “and I would take
Jerusalem by the throat . . . and then be recalled for my pains, I
suppose.”

Like me, he had not too much faith in the auxiliaries; and of Roman
soldiers we had but a scant handful.

Back again, I lodged in the palace, and to my great joy found Miriam
there. But little satisfaction was mine, for the talk ran long on the
situation. There was reason for this, for the city buzzed like the
angry hornets’ nest it was. The fast called the Passover—a religious
affair, of course—was near, and thousands were pouring in from the
country, according to custom, to celebrate the feast in Jerusalem.
These newcomers, naturally, were all excitable folk, else they would
not be bent on such pilgrimage. The city was packed with them, so that
many camped outside the walls. As for me, I could not distinguish how
much of the ferment was due to the teachings of the wandering
fisherman, and how much of it was due to Jewish hatred for Rome.

“A tithe, no more, and maybe not so much, is due to this Jesus,” Pilate
answered my query. “Look to Caiaphas and Hanan for the main cause of
the excitement. They know what they are about. They are stirring it up,
to what end who can tell, except to cause me trouble.”

“Yes, it is certain that Caiaphas and Hanan are responsible,” Miriam
said, “but you, Pontius Pilate, are only a Roman and do not understand.
Were you a Jew, you would realize that there is a greater seriousness
at the bottom of it than mere dissension of the sectaries or
trouble-making for you and Rome. The high priests and Pharisees, every
Jew of place or wealth, Philip, Antipas, myself—we are all fighting for
very life.

“This fisherman may be a madman. If so, there is a cunning in his
madness. He preaches the doctrine of the poor. He threatens our law,
and our law is our life, as you have learned ere this. We are jealous
of our law, as you would be jealous of the air denied your body by a
throttling hand on your throat. It is Caiaphas and Hanan and all they
stand for, or it is the fisherman. They must destroy him, else he will
destroy them.”

“Is it not strange, so simple a man, a fisherman?” Pilate’s wife
breathed forth. “What manner of man can he be to possess such power? I
would that I could see him. I would that with my own eyes I could see
so remarkable a man.”

Pilate’s brows corrugated at her words, and it was clear that to the
burden on his nerves was added the overwrought state of his wife’s
nerves.

“If you would see him, beat up the dens of the town,” Miriam laughed
spitefully. “You will find him wine-bibbing or in the company of
nameless women. Never so strange a prophet came up to Jerusalem.”

“And what harm in that?” I demanded, driven against my will to take the
part of the fisherman. “Have I not wine-guzzled a-plenty and passed
strange nights in all the provinces? The man is a man, and his ways are
men’s ways, else am I a madman, which I here deny.”

Miriam shook her head as she spoke.

“He is not mad. Worse, he is dangerous. All Ebionism is dangerous. He
would destroy all things that are fixed. He is a revolutionist. He
would destroy what little is left to us of the Jewish state and
Temple.”

Here Pilate shook his head.

“He is not political. I have had report of him. He is a visionary.
There is no sedition in him. He affirms the Roman tax even.”

“Still you do not understand,” Miriam persisted. “It is not what he
plans; it is the effect, if his plans are achieved, that makes him a
revolutionist. I doubt that he foresees the effect. Yet is the man a
plague, and, like any plague, should be stamped out.”

“From all that I have heard, he is a good-hearted, simple man with no
evil in him,” I stated.

And thereat I told of the healing of the ten lepers I had witnessed in
Samaria on my way through Jericho.

Pilate’s wife sat entranced at what I told. Came to our ears distant
shoutings and cries of some street crowd, and we knew the soldiers were
keeping the streets cleared.

“And you believe this wonder, Lodbrog?” Pilate demanded. “You believe
that in the flash of an eye the festering sores departed from the
lepers?”

“I saw them healed,” I replied. “I followed them to make certain. There
was no leprosy in them.”

“But did you see them sore?—before the healing?” Pilate insisted.

I shook my head.

“I was only told so,” I admitted. “When I saw them afterward, they had
all the seeming of men who had once been lepers. They were in a daze.
There was one who sat in the sun and ever searched his body and stared
and stared at the smooth flesh as if unable to believe his eyes. He
would not speak, nor look at aught else than his flesh, when I
questioned him. He was in a maze. He sat there in the sun and stared
and stared.”

Pilate smiled contemptuously, and I noted the quiet smile on Miriam’s
face was equally contemptuous. And Pilate’s wife sat as if a corpse,
scarce breathing, her eyes wide and unseeing.

Spoke Ambivius: “Caiaphas holds—he told me but yesterday—that the
fisherman claims that he will bring God down on earth and make here a
new kingdom over which God will rule—”

“Which would mean the end of Roman rule,” I broke in.

“That is where Caiaphas and Hanan plot to embroil Rome,” Miriam
explained. “It is not true. It is a lie they have made.”

Pilate nodded and asked:

“Is there not somewhere in your ancient books a prophecy that the
priests here twist into the intent of this fisherman’s mind?”

To this she agreed, and gave him the citation. I relate the incident to
evidence the depth of Pilate’s study of this people he strove so hard
to keep in order.

“What I have heard,” Miriam continued, “is that this Jesus preaches the
end of the world and the beginning of God’s kingdom, not here, but in
heaven.”

“I have had report of that,” Pilate said. “It is true. This Jesus holds
the justness of the Roman tax. He holds that Rome shall rule until all
rule passes away with the passing of the world. I see more clearly the
trick Hanan is playing me.”

“It is even claimed by some of his followers,” Ambivius volunteered,
“that he is God Himself.”

“I have no report that he has so said,” Pilate replied.

“Why not?” his wife breathed. “Why not? Gods have descended to earth
before.”

“Look you,” Pilate said. “I have it by creditable report, that after
this Jesus had worked some wonder whereby a multitude was fed on
several loaves and fishes, the foolish Galileans were for making him a
king. Against his will they would make him a king. To escape them he
fled into the mountains. No madness there. He was too wise to accept
the fate they would have forced upon him.”

“Yet that is the very trick Hanan would force upon you,” Miriam
reiterated. “They claim for him that he would be king of the Jews—an
offence against Roman law, wherefore Rome must deal with him.”

Pilate shrugged his shoulders.

“A king of the beggars, rather; or a king of the dreamers. He is no
fool. He is visionary, but not visionary of this world’s power. All
luck go with him in the next world, for that is beyond Rome’s
jurisdiction.”

“He holds that property is sin—that is what hits the Pharisees,”
Ambivius spoke up.

Pilate laughed heartily.

“This king of the beggars and his fellow-beggars still do respect
property,” he explained. “For, look you, not long ago they had even a
treasurer for their wealth. Judas his name was, and there were words in
that he stole from their common purse which he carried.”

“Jesus did not steal?” Pilate’s wife asked.

“No,” Pilate answered; “it was Judas, the treasurer.”

“Who was this John?” I questioned. “He was in trouble up Tiberias way
and Antipas executed him.”

“Another one,” Miriam answered. “He was born near Hebron. He was an
enthusiast and a desert-dweller. Either he or his followers claimed
that he was Elijah raised from the dead. Elijah, you see, was one of
our old prophets.”

“Was he seditious?” I asked.

Pilate grinned and shook his head, then said:

“He fell out with Antipas over the matter of Herodias. John was a
moralist. It is too long a story, but he paid for it with his head. No,
there was nothing political in that affair.”

“It is also claimed by some that Jesus is the Son of David,” Miriam
said. “But it is absurd. Nobody at Nazareth believes it. You see, his
whole family, including his married sisters, lives there and is known
to all of them. They are a simple folk, mere common people.”

“I wish it were as simple, the report of all this complexity that I
must send to Tiberius,” Pilate grumbled. “And now this fisherman is
come to Jerusalem, the place is packed with pilgrims ripe for any
trouble, and Hanan stirs and stirs the broth.”

“And before he is done he will have his way,” Miriam forecast. “He has
laid the task for you, and you will perform it.”

“Which is?” Pilate queried.

“The execution of this fisherman.”

Pilate shook his head stubbornly, but his wife cried out:

“No! No! It would be a shameful wrong. The man has done no evil. He has
not offended against Rome.”

She looked beseechingly to Pilate, who continued to shake his head.

“Let them do their own beheading, as Antipas did,” he growled. “The
fisherman counts for nothing; but I shall be no catspaw to their
schemes. If they must destroy him, they must destroy him. That is their
affair.”

“But you will not permit it,” cried Pilate’s wife.

“A pretty time would I have explaining to Tiberius if I interfered,”
was his reply.

“No matter what happens,” said Miriam, “I can see you writing
explanations, and soon; for Jesus is already come up to Jerusalem and a
number of his fishermen with him.”

Pilate showed the irritation this information caused him.

“I have no interest in his movements,” he pronounced. “I hope never to
see him.”

“Trust Hanan to find him for you,” Miriam replied, “and to bring him to
your gate.”

Pilate shrugged his shoulders, and there the talk ended. Pilate’s wife,
nervous and overwrought, must claim Miriam to her apartments, so that
nothing remained for me but to go to bed and doze off to the buzz and
murmur of the city of madmen.

Events moved rapidly. Over night the white heat of the city had
scorched upon itself. By midday, when I rode forth with half a dozen of
my men, the streets were packed, and more reluctant than ever were the
folk to give way before me. If looks could kill I should have been a
dead man that day. Openly they spat at sight of me, and, everywhere
arose snarls and cries.

Less was I a thing of wonder, and more was I the thing hated in that I
wore the hated harness of Rome. Had it been any other city, I should
have given command to my men to lay the flats of their swords on those
snarling fanatics. But this was Jerusalem, at fever heat, and these
were a people unable in thought to divorce the idea of State from the
idea of God.

Hanan the Sadducee had done his work well. No matter what he and the
Sanhedrim believed of the true inwardness of the situation, it was
clear this rabble had been well tutored to believe that Rome was at the
bottom of it.

I encountered Miriam in the press. She was on foot, attended only by a
woman. It was no time in such turbulence for her to be abroad garbed as
became her station. Through her sister she was indeed sister-in-law to
Antipas for whom few bore love. So she was dressed discreetly, her face
covered, so that she might pass as any Jewish woman of the lower
orders. But not to my eye could she hide that fine stature of her, that
carriage and walk, so different from other women’s, of which I had
already dreamed more than once.

Few and quick were the words we were able to exchange, for the way
jammed on the moment, and soon my men and horses were being pressed and
jostled. Miriam was sheltered in an angle of house-wall.

“Have they got the fisherman yet?” I asked.

“No; but he is just outside the wall. He has ridden up to Jerusalem on
an ass, with a multitude before and behind; and some, poor dupes, have
hailed him as he passed as King of Israel. That finally is the pretext
with which Hanan will compel Pilate. Truly, though not yet taken, the
sentence is already written. This fisherman is a dead man.”

“But Pilate will not arrest him,” I defended. Miriam shook her head.

“Hanan will attend to that. They will bring him before the Sanhedrim.
The sentence will be death. They may stone him.”

“But the Sanhedrim has not the right to execute,” I contended.

“Jesus is not a Roman,” she replied. “He is a Jew. By the law of the
Talmud he is guilty of death, for he has blasphemed against the law.”

Still I shook my head.

“The Sanhedrim has not the right.”

“Pilate is willing that it should take that right.”

“But it is a fine question of legality,” I insisted. “You know what the
Romans are in such matters.”

“Then will Hanan avoid the question,” she smiled, “by compelling Pilate
to crucify him. In either event it will be well.”

A surging of the mob was sweeping our horses along and grinding our
knees together. Some fanatic had fallen, and I could feel my horse
recoil and half rear as it tramped on him, and I could hear the man
screaming and the snarling menace from all about rising to a roar. But
my head was over my shoulder as I called back to Miriam:

“You are hard on a man you have said yourself is without evil.”

“I am hard upon the evil that will come of him if he lives,” she
replied.

Scarcely did I catch her words, for a man sprang in, seizing my
bridle-rein and leg and struggling to unhorse me. With my open palm,
leaning forward, I smote him full upon cheek and jaw. My hand covered
the face of him, and a hearty will of weight was in the blow. The
dwellers in Jerusalem are not used to man’s buffets. I have often
wondered since if I broke the fellow’s neck.

Next I saw Miriam was the following day. I met her in the court of
Pilate’s palace. She seemed in a dream. Scarce her eyes saw me. Scarce
her wits embraced my identity. So strange was she, so in daze and amaze
and far-seeing were her eyes, that I was reminded of the lepers I had
seen healed in Samaria.

She became herself by an effort, but only her outward self. In her eyes
was a message unreadable. Never before had I seen woman’s eyes so.

She would have passed me ungreeted had I not confronted her way. She
paused and murmured words mechanically, but all the while her eyes
dreamed through me and beyond me with the largeness of the vision that
filled them.

“I have seen Him, Lodbrog,” she whispered. “I have seen Him.”

“The gods grant that he is not so ill-affected by the sight of you,
whoever he may be,” I laughed.

She took no notice of my poor-timed jest, and her eyes remained full
with vision, and she would have passed on had I not again blocked her
way.

“Who is this he?” I demanded. “Some man raised from the dead to put
such strange light in your eyes?”

“One who has raised others from the dead,” she replied. “Truly I
believe that He, this Jesus, has raised the dead. He is the Prince of
Light, the Son of God. I have seen Him. Truly I believe that He is the
Son of God.”

Little could I glean from her words, save that she had met this
wandering fisherman and been swept away by his folly. For surely this
Miriam was not the Miriam who had branded him a plague and demanded
that he be stamped out as any plague.

“He has charmed you,” I cried angrily.

Her eyes seemed to moisten and grow deeper as she gave confirmation.

“Oh, Lodbrog, His is charm beyond all thinking, beyond all describing.
But to look upon Him is to know that here is the all-soul of goodness
and of compassion. I have seen Him. I have heard Him. I shall give all
I have to the poor, and I shall follow Him.”

Such was her certitude that I accepted it fully, as I had accepted the
amazement of the lepers of Samaria staring at their smooth flesh; and I
was bitter that so great a woman should be so easily wit-addled by a
vagrant wonder-worker.

“Follow him,” I sneered. “Doubtless you will wear a crown when he wins
to his kingdom.”

She nodded affirmation, and I could have struck her in the face for her
folly. I drew aside, and as she moved slowly on she murmured:

“His kingdom is not here. He is the Son of David. He is the Son of God.
He is whatever He has said, or whatever has been said of Him that is
good and great.”

“A wise man of the East,” I found Pilate chuckling. “He is a thinker,
this unlettered fisherman. I have sought more deeply into him. I have
fresh report. He has no need of wonder-workings. He out-sophisticates
the most sophistical of them. They have laid traps, and He has laughed
at their traps. Look you. Listen to this.”

Whereupon he told me how Jesus had confounded his confounders when they
brought to him for judgment a woman taken in adultery.

“And the tax,” Pilate exulted on. “‘To Cæsar what is Cæsar’s, to God
what is God’s,’ was his answer to them. That was Hanan’s trick, and
Hanan is confounded. At last has there appeared one Jew who understands
our Roman conception of the State.”

Next I saw Pilate’s wife. Looking into her eyes I knew, on the instant,
after having seen Miriam’s eyes, that this tense, distraught woman had
likewise seen the fisherman.

“The Divine is within Him,” she murmured to me. “There is within Him a
personal awareness of the indwelling of God.”

“Is he God?” I queried, gently, for say something I must.

She shook her head.

“I do not know. He has not said. But this I know: of such stuff gods
are made.”

“A charmer of women,” was my privy judgment, as I left Pilate’s wife
walking in dreams and visions.

The last days are known to all of you who read these lines, and it was
in those last days that I learned that this Jesus was equally a charmer
of men. He charmed Pilate. He charmed me.

After Hanan had sent Jesus to Caiaphas, and the Sanhedrim, assembled in
Caiaphas’s house, had condemned Jesus to death, Jesus, escorted by a
howling mob, was sent to Pilate for execution.

Now, for his own sake and for Rome’s sake, Pilate did not want to
execute him. Pilate was little interested in the fisherman and greatly
interested in peace and order. What cared Pilate for a man’s life?—for
many men’s lives? The school of Rome was iron, and the governors sent
out by Rome to rule conquered peoples were likewise iron. Pilate
thought and acted in governmental abstractions. Yet, look: when Pilate
went out scowling to meet the mob that had fetched the fisherman, he
fell immediately under the charm of the man.

I was present. I know. It was the first time Pilate had ever seen him.
Pilate went out angry. Our soldiers were in readiness to clear the
court of its noisy vermin. And immediately Pilate laid eyes on the
fisherman Pilate was subdued—nay, was solicitous. He disclaimed
jurisdiction, demanded that they should judge the fisherman by their
law and deal with him by their law, since the fisherman was a Jew and
not a Roman. Never were there Jews so obedient to Roman rule. They
cried out that it was unlawful, under Rome, for them to put any man to
death. Yet Antipas had beheaded John and come to no grief of it.

And Pilate left them in the court, open under the sky, and took Jesus
alone into the judgment hall. What happened therein I know not, save
that when Pilate emerged he was changed. Whereas before he had been
disinclined to execute because he would not be made a catspaw to Hanan,
he was now disinclined to execute because of regard for the fisherman.
His effort now was to save the fisherman. And all the while the mob
cried: “Crucify him! Crucify him!”

You, my reader, know the sincerity of Pilate’s effort. You know how he
tried to befool the mob, first by mocking Jesus as a harmless fool; and
second by offering to release him according to the custom of releasing
one prisoner at time of the Passover. And you know how the priests’
quick whisperings led the mob to cry out for the release of the
murderer Bar-Abba.

In vain Pilate struggled against the fate being thrust upon him by the
priests. By sneer and jibe he hoped to make a farce of the transaction.
He laughingly called Jesus the King of the Jews and ordered him to be
scourged. His hope was that all would end in laughter and in laughter
be forgotten.

I am glad to say that no Roman soldiers took part in what followed. It
was the soldiers of the auxiliaries who crowned and cloaked Jesus, put
the reed of sovereignty in his hand, and, kneeling, hailed him King of
the Jews. Although it failed, it was a play to placate. And I, looking
on, learned the charm of Jesus. Despite the cruel mockery of his
situation, he was regal. And I was quiet as I gazed. It was his own
quiet that went into me. I was soothed and satisfied, and was without
bewilderment. This thing had to be. All was well. The serenity of Jesus
in the heart of the tumult and pain became my serenity. I was scarce
moved by any thought to save him.

On the other hand, I had gazed on too many wonders of the human in my
wild and varied years to be affected to foolish acts by this particular
wonder. I was all serenity. I had no word to say. I had no judgment to
pass. I knew that things were occurring beyond my comprehension, and
that they must occur.

Still Pilate struggled. The tumult increased. The cry for blood rang
through the court, and all were clamouring for crucifixion. Again
Pilate went back into the judgment hall. His effort at a farce having
failed, he attempted to disclaim jurisdiction. Jesus was not of
Jerusalem. He was a born subject of Antipas, and to Antipas Pilate was
for sending Jesus.

But the uproar was by now communicating itself to the city. Our troops
outside the palace were being swept away in the vast street mob.
Rioting had begun that in the flash of an eye could turn into civil war
and revolution. My own twenty legionaries were close to hand and in
readiness. They loved the fanatic Jews no more than did I, and would
have welcomed my command to clear the court with naked steel.

When Pilate came out again his words for Antipas’ jurisdiction could
not be heard, for all the mob was shouting that Pilate was a traitor,
that if he let the fisherman go he was no friend of Tiberius. Close
before me, as I leaned against the wall, a mangy, bearded, long-haired
fanatic sprang up and down unceasingly, and unceasingly chanted:
“Tiberius is emperor; there is no king! Tiberius is emperor; there is
no king!” I lost patience. The man’s near noise was an offence.
Lurching sidewise, as if by accident, I ground my foot on his to a
terrible crushing. The fool seemed not to notice. He was too mad to be
aware of the pain, and he continued to chant: “Tiberius is emperor;
there is no king!”

I saw Pilate hesitate. Pilate, the Roman governor, for the moment was
Pilate the man, with a man’s anger against the miserable creatures
clamouring for the blood of so sweet and simple, brave and good a
spirit as this Jesus.

I saw Pilate hesitate. His gaze roved to me, as if he were about to
signal to me to let loose; and I half-started forward, releasing the
mangled foot under my foot. I was for leaping to complete that
half-formed wish of Pilate and to sweep away in blood and cleanse the
court of the wretched scum that howled in it.

It was not Pilate’s indecision that decided me. It was this Jesus that
decided Pilate and me. This Jesus looked at me. He commanded me. I tell
you this vagrant fisherman, this wandering preacher, this piece of
driftage from Galilee, commanded me. No word he uttered. Yet his
command was there, unmistakable as a trumpet call. And I stayed my
foot, and held my hand, for who was I to thwart the will and way of so
greatly serene and sweetly sure a man as this? And as I stayed I knew
all the charm of him—all that in him had charmed Miriam and Pilate’s
wife, that had charmed Pilate himself.

You know the rest. Pilate washed his hands of Jesus’ blood, and the
rioters took his blood upon their own heads. Pilate gave orders for the
crucifixion. The mob was content, and content, behind the mob, were
Caiaphas, Hanan, and the Sanhedrim. Not Pilate, not Tiberius, not Roman
soldiers crucified Jesus. It was the priestly rulers and priestly
politicians of Jerusalem. I saw. I know. And against his own best
interests Pilate would have saved Jesus, as I would have, had it not
been that no other than Jesus himself willed that he was not to be
saved.

Yes, and Pilate had his last sneer at this people he detested. In
Hebrew, Greek, and Latin he had a writing affixed to Jesus’ cross which
read, “The King of the Jews.” In vain the priests complained. It was on
this very pretext that they had forced Pilate’s hand; and by this
pretext, a scorn and insult to the Jewish race, Pilate abided. Pilate
executed an abstraction that had never existed in the real. The
abstraction was a cheat and a lie manufactured in the priestly mind.
Neither the priests nor Pilate believed it. Jesus denied it. That
abstraction was “The King of the Jews.”

The storm was over in the courtyard. The excitement had simmered down.
Revolution had been averted. The priests were content, the mob was
satisfied, and Pilate and I were well disgusted and weary with the
whole affair. And yet for him and me was more and most immediate storm.
Before Jesus was taken away one of Miriam’s women called me to her. And
I saw Pilate, summoned by one of his wife’s women, likewise obey.

“Oh, Lodbrog, I have heard,” Miriam met me. We were alone, and she was
close to me, seeking shelter and strength within my arms. “Pilate has
weakened. He is going to crucify Him. But there is time. Your own men
are ready. Ride with them. Only a centurion and a handful of soldiers
are with Him. They have not yet started. As soon as they do start,
follow. They must not reach Golgotha. But wait until they are outside
the city wall. Then countermand the order. Take an extra horse for Him
to ride. The rest is easy. Ride away into Syria with Him, or into
Idumæa, or anywhere so long as He be saved.”

She concluded with her arms around my neck, her face upturned to mine
and temptingly close, her eyes greatly solemn and greatly promising.

Small wonder I was slow of speech. For the moment there was but one
thought in my brain. After all the strange play I had seen played out,
to have this come upon me! I did not misunderstand. The thing was
clear. A great woman was mine if . . . if I betrayed Rome. For Pilate
was governor, his order had gone forth; and his voice was the voice of
Rome.

As I have said, it was the woman of her, her sheer womanliness, that
betrayed Miriam and me in the end. Always she had been so clear, so
reasonable, so certain of herself and me, so that I had forgotten, or,
rather, I there learned once again the eternal lesson learned in all
lives, that woman is ever woman . . . that in great decisive moments
woman does not reason but feels; that the last sanctuary and innermost
pulse to conduct is in woman’s heart and not in woman’s head.

Miriam misunderstood my silence, for her body moved softly within my
arms as she added, as if in afterthought:

“Take two spare horses, Lodbrog. I shall ride the other . . . with you
. . . with you, away over the world, wherever you may ride.”

It was a bribe of kings; it was an act, paltry and contemptible, that
was demanded of me in return. Still I did not speak. It was not that I
was in confusion or in any doubt. I was merely sad—greatly and suddenly
sad, in that I knew I held in my arms what I would never hold again.

“There is but one man in Jerusalem this day who can save Him,” she
urged, “and that man is you, Lodbrog.”

Because I did not immediately reply she shook me, as if in impulse to
clarify wits she considered addled. She shook me till my harness
rattled.

“Speak, Lodbrog, speak!” she commanded. “You are strong and unafraid.
You are all man. I know you despise the vermin who would destroy Him.
You, you alone can save Him. You have but to say the word and the thing
is done; and I will well love you and always love you for the thing you
have done.”

“I am a Roman,” I said slowly, knowing full well that with the words I
gave up all hope of her.

“You are a man-slave of Tiberius, a hound of Rome,” she flamed, “but
you owe Rome nothing, for you are not a Roman. You yellow giants of the
north are not Romans.”

“The Romans are the elder brothers of us younglings of the north,” I
answered. “Also, I wear the harness and I eat the bread of Rome.”
Gently I added: “But why all this fuss and fury for a mere man’s life?
All men must die. Simple and easy it is to die. To-day, or a hundred
years, it little matters. Sure we are, all of us, of the same event in
the end.”

Quick she was, and alive with passion to save as she thrilled within my
arms.

“You do not understand, Lodbrog. This is no mere man. I tell you this
is a man beyond men—a living God, not of men, but over men.”

I held her closely and knew that I was renouncing all the sweet woman
of her as I said:

“We are man and woman, you and I. Our life is of this world. Of these
other worlds is all a madness. Let these mad dreamers go the way of
their dreaming. Deny them not what they desire above all things, above
meat and wine, above song and battle, even above love of woman. Deny
them not their hearts’ desires that draw them across the dark of the
grave to their dreams of lives beyond this world. Let them pass. But
you and I abide here in all the sweet we have discovered of each other.
Quickly enough will come the dark, and you depart for your coasts of
sun and flowers, and I for the roaring table of Valhalla.”

“No! no!” she cried, half-tearing herself away. “You do not understand.
All of greatness, all of goodness, all of God are in this man who is
more than man; and it is a shameful death to die. Only slaves and
thieves so die. He is neither slave nor thief. He is an immortal. He is
God. Truly I tell you He is God.”

“He is immortal you say,” I contended. “Then to die to-day on Golgotha
will not shorten his immortality by a hair’s breadth in the span of
time. He is a god you say. Gods cannot die. From all I have been told
of them, it is certain that gods cannot die.”

“Oh!” she cried. “You will not understand. You are only a great giant
thing of flesh.”

“Is it not said that this event was prophesied of old time?” I queried,
for I had been learning from the Jews what I deemed their subtleties of
thinking.

“Yes, yes,” she agreed, “the Messianic prophecies. This is the
Messiah.”

“Then who am I,” I asked, “to make liars of the prophets? to make of
the Messiah a false Messiah? Is the prophecy of your people so feeble a
thing that I, a stupid stranger, a yellow northling in the Roman
harness, can give the lie to prophecy and compel to be unfulfilled—the
very thing willed by the gods and foretold by the wise men?”

“You do not understand,” she repeated.

“I understand too well,” I replied. “Am I greater than the gods that I
may thwart the will of the gods? Then are gods vain things and the
playthings of men. I am a man. I, too, bow to the gods, to all gods,
for I do believe in all gods, else how came all gods to be?”

She flung herself so that my hungry arms were empty of her, and we
stood apart and listened to the uproar of the street as Jesus and the
soldiers emerged and started on their way. And my heart was sore in
that so great a woman could be so foolish. She would save God. She
would make herself greater than God.

“You do not love me,” she said slowly, and slowly grew in her eyes a
promise of herself too deep and wide for any words.

“I love you beyond your understanding, it seems,” was my reply. “I am
proud to love you, for I know I am worthy to love you and am worth all
love you may give me. But Rome is my foster-mother, and were I untrue
to her, of little pride, of little worth would be my love for you.”

The uproar that followed about Jesus and the soldiers died away along
the street. And when there was no further sound of it Miriam turned to
go, with neither word nor look for me.

I knew one last rush of mad hunger for her. I sprang and seized her. I
would horse her and ride away with her and my men into Syria away from
this cursed city of folly. She struggled. I crushed her. She struck me
on the face, and I continued to hold and crush her, for the blows were
sweet. And there she ceased to struggle. She became cold and
motionless, so that I knew there was no woman’s love that my arms
girdled. For me she was dead. Slowly I let go of her. Slowly she
stepped back. As if she did not see me she turned and went away across
the quiet room, and without looking back passed through the hangings
and was gone.

I, Ragnar Lodbrog, never came to read nor write. But in my days I have
listened to great talk. As I see it now, I never learned great talk,
such as that of the Jews, learned in their law, nor such as that of the
Romans, learned in their philosophy and in the philosophy of the
Greeks. Yet have I talked in simplicity and straightness, as a man may
well talk who has lived life from the ships of Tostig Lodbrog and the
roof of Brunanbuhr across the world to Jerusalem and back again. And
straight talk and simple I gave Sulpicius Quirinius, when I went away
into Syria to report to him of the various matters that had been at
issue in Jerusalem.




CHAPTER XVIII.


Suspended animation is nothing new, not alone in the vegetable world
and in the lower forms of animal life, but in the highly evolved,
complex organism of man himself. A cataleptic trance is a cataleptic
trance, no matter how induced. From time immemorial the fakir of India
has been able voluntarily to induce such states in himself. It is an
old trick of the fakirs to have themselves buried alive. Other men, in
similar trances, have misled the physicians, who pronounced them dead
and gave the orders that put them alive under the ground.

As my jacket experiences in San Quentin continued I dwelt not a little
on this problem of suspended animation. I remembered having read that
the far northern Siberian peasants made a practice of hibernating
through the long winters just as bears and other wild animals do. Some
scientist studied these peasants and found that during these periods of
the “long sleep” respiration and digestion practically ceased, and that
the heart was at so low tension as to defy detection by ordinary
layman’s examination.

In such a trance the bodily processes are so near to absolute
suspension that the air and food consumed are practically negligible.
On this reasoning, partly, was based my defiance of Warden Atherton and
Doctor Jackson. It was thus that I dared challenge them to give me a
hundred days in the jacket. And they did not dare accept my challenge.

Nevertheless I did manage to do without water, as well as food, during
my ten-days’ bouts. I found it an intolerable nuisance, in the deeps of
dream across space and time, to be haled back to the sordid present by
a despicable prison doctor pressing water to my lips. So I warned
Doctor Jackson, first, that I intended doing without water while in the
jacket; and next, that I would resist any efforts to compel me to
drink.

Of course we had our little struggle; but after several attempts Doctor
Jackson gave it up. Thereafter the space occupied in Darrell Standing’s
life by a jacket-bout was scarcely more than a few ticks of the clock.
Immediately I was laced I devoted myself to inducing the little death.
From practice it became simple and easy. I suspended animation and
consciousness so quickly that I escaped the really terrible suffering
consequent upon suspending circulation. Most quickly came the dark. And
the next I, Darrell Standing, knew was the light again, the faces
bending over me as I was unlaced, and the knowledge that ten days had
passed in the twinkling of an eye.

But oh, the wonder and the glory of those ten days spent by me
elsewhere! The journeys through the long chain of existences! The long
darks, the growings of nebulous lights, and the fluttering apparitional
selves that dawned through the growing light!

Much have I pondered upon the relation of these other selves to me, and
of the relation of the total experience to the modern doctrine of
evolution. I can truly say that my experience is in complete accord
with our conclusions of evolution.

I, like any man, am a growth. I did not begin when I was born nor when
I was conceived. I have been growing, developing, through incalculable
myriads of millenniums. All these experiences of all these lives, and
of countless other lives, have gone to the making of the soul-stuff or
the spirit-stuff that is I. Don’t you see? They are the stuff of me.
Matter does not remember, for spirit is memory. I am this spirit
compounded of the memories of my endless incarnations.

Whence came in me, Darrell Standing, the red pulse of wrath that has
wrecked my life and put me in the condemned cells? Surely it did not
come into being, was not created, when the babe that was to be Darrell
Standing was conceived. That old red wrath is far older than my mother,
far older than the oldest and first mother of men. My mother, at my
inception, did not create that passionate lack of fear that is mine.
Not all the mothers of the whole evolution of men manufactured fear or
fearlessness in men. Far back beyond the first men were fear and
fearlessness, love, hatred, anger, all the emotions, growing,
developing, becoming the stuff that was to become men.

I am all of my past, as every protagonist of the Mendelian law must
agree. All my previous selves have their voices, echoes, promptings in
me. My every mode of action, heat of passion, flicker of thought is
shaded, toned, infinitesimally shaded and toned, by that vast array of
other selves that preceded me and went into the making of me.

The stuff of life is plastic. At the same time this stuff never
forgets. Mould it as you will, the old memories persist. All manner of
horses, from ton Shires to dwarf Shetlands, have been bred up and down
from those first wild ponies domesticated by primitive man. Yet to this
day man has not bred out the kick of the horse. And I, who am composed
of those first horse-tamers, have not had their red anger bred out of
me.

I am man born of woman. My days are few, but the stuff of me is
indestructible. I have been woman born of woman. I have been a woman
and borne my children. And I shall be born again. Oh, incalculable
times again shall I be born; and yet the stupid dolts about me think
that by stretching my neck with a rope they will make me cease.

Yes, I shall be hanged . . . soon. This is the end of June. In a little
while they will try to befool me. They will take me from this cell to
the bath, according to the prison custom of the weekly bath. But I
shall not be brought back to this cell. I shall be dressed outright in
fresh clothes and be taken to the death-cell. There they will place the
death-watch on me. Night or day, waking or sleeping, I shall be
watched. I shall not be permitted to put my head under the blankets for
fear I may anticipate the State by choking myself.

Always bright light will blaze upon me. And then, when they have well
wearied me, they will lead me out one morning in a shirt without a
collar and drop me through the trap. Oh, I know. The rope they will do
it with is well-stretched. For many a month now the hangman of Folsom
has been stretching it with heavy weights so as to take the spring out
of it.

Yes, I shall drop far. They have cunning tables of calculations, like
interest tables, that show the distance of the drop in relation to the
victim’s weight. I am so emaciated that they will have to drop me far
in order to break my neck. And then the onlookers will take their hats
off, and as I swing the doctors will press their ears to my chest to
count my fading heart-beats, and at last they will say that I am dead.

It is grotesque. It is the ridiculous effrontery of men-maggots who
think they can kill me. I cannot die. I am immortal, as they are
immortal; the difference is that I know it and they do not know it.

Pah! I was once a hangman, or an executioner, rather. Well I remember
it! I used the sword, not the rope. The sword is the braver way,
although all ways are equally inefficacious. Forsooth, as if spirit
could be thrust through with steel or throttled by a rope!




CHAPTER XIX.


Next to Oppenheimer and Morrell, who rotted with me through the years
of darkness, I was considered the most dangerous prisoner in San
Quentin. On the other hand I was considered the toughest—tougher even
than Oppenheimer and Morrell. Of course by toughness I mean
enduringness. Terrible as were the attempts to break them in body and
in spirit, more terrible were the attempts to break me. And I endured.
Dynamite or curtains had been Warden Atherton’s ultimatum. And in the
end it was neither. I could not produce the dynamite, and Warden
Atherton could not induce the curtains.

It was not because my body was enduring, but because my spirit was
enduring. And it was because, in earlier existences, my spirit had been
wrought to steel-hardness by steel-hard experiences. There was one
experience that for long was a sort of nightmare to me. It had neither
beginning nor end. Always I found myself on a rocky, surge-battered
islet so low that in storms the salt spray swept over its highest
point. It rained much. I lived in a lair and suffered greatly, for I
was without fire and lived on uncooked meat.

Always I suffered. It was the middle of some experience to which I
could get no clue. And since, when I went into the little death I had
no power of directing my journeys, I often found myself reliving this
particularly detestable experience. My only happy moments were when the
sun shone, at which times I basked on the rocks and thawed out the
almost perpetual chill I suffered.

My one diversion was an oar and a jackknife. Upon this oar I spent much
time, carving minute letters and cutting a notch for each week that
passed. There were many notches. I sharpened the knife on a flat piece
of rock, and no barber was ever more careful of his favourite razor
than was I of that knife. Nor did ever a miser prize his treasure as
did I prize the knife. It was as precious as my life. In truth, it was
my life.

By many repetitions, I managed to bring back out of the jacket the
legend that was carved on the oar. At first I could bring but little.
Later, it grew easier, a matter of piecing portions together. And at
last I had the thing complete. Here it is:

This is to acquaint the person into whose hands this Oar may fall, that
Daniel Foss, a native of Elkton, in Maryland, one of the United States
of America, and who sailed from the port of Philadelphia, in 1809, on
board the brig Negociator, bound to the Friendly Islands, was cast upon
this desolate island the February following, where he erected a hut and
lived a number of years, subsisting on seals—he being the last who
survived of the crew of said brig, which ran foul of an island of ice,
and foundered on the 25th Nov. 1809.

There it was, quite clear. By this means I learned a lot about myself.
One vexed point, however, I never did succeed in clearing up. Was this
island situated in the far South Pacific or the far South Atlantic? I
do not know enough of sailing-ship tracks to be certain whether the
brig _Negociator_ would sail for the Friendly Islands via Cape Horn or
via the Cape of Good Hope. To confess my own ignorance, not until after
I was transferred to Folsom did I learn in which ocean were the
Friendly Islands. The Japanese murderer, whom I have mentioned before,
had been a sailmaker on board the Arthur Sewall ships, and he told me
that the probable sailing course would be by way of the Cape of Good
Hope. If this were so, then the dates of sailing from Philadelphia and
of being wrecked would easily determine which ocean. Unfortunately, the
sailing date is merely 1809. The wreck might as likely have occurred in
one ocean as the other.

Only once did I, in my trances, get a hint of the period preceding the
time spent on the island. This begins at the moment of the brig’s
collision with the iceberg, and I shall narrate it, if for no other
reason, at least to give an account of my curiously cool and deliberate
conduct. This conduct at this time, as you shall see, was what enabled
me in the end to survive alone of all the ship’s company.

I was awakened, in my bunk in the forecastle, by a terrific crash. In
fact, as was true of the other six sleeping men of the watch below,
awaking and leaping from bunk to floor were simultaneous. We knew what
had happened. The others waited for nothing, rushing only partly clad
upon deck. But I knew what to expect, and I did wait. I knew that if we
escaped at all, it would be by the longboat. No man could swim in so
freezing a sea. And no man, thinly clad, could live long in the open
boat. Also, I knew just about how long it would take to launch the
boat.

So, by the light of the wildly swinging slush-lamp, to the tumult on
deck and to cries of “She’s sinking!” I proceeded to ransack my
sea-chest for suitable garments. Also, since they would never use them
again, I ransacked the sea chests of my shipmates. Working quickly but
collectedly, I took nothing but the warmest and stoutest of clothes. I
put on the four best woollen shirts the forecastle boasted, three pairs
of pants, and three pairs of thick woollen socks. So large were my feet
thus incased that I could not put on my own good boots. Instead, I
thrust on Nicholas Wilton’s new boots, which were larger and even
stouter than mine. Also, I put on Jeremy Nalor’s pea jacket over my
own, and, outside of both, put on Seth Richard’s thick canvas coat
which I remembered he had fresh-oiled only a short while previous.

Two pairs of heavy mittens, John Robert’s muffler which his mother had
knitted for him, and Joseph Dawes’ beaver cap atop my own, both bearing
ear-and neck-flaps, completed my outfitting. The shouts that the brig
was sinking redoubled, but I took a minute longer to fill my pockets
with all the plug tobacco I could lay hands on. Then I climbed out on
deck, and not a moment too soon.

The moon, bursting through a crack of cloud, showed a bleak and savage
picture. Everywhere was wrecked gear, and everywhere was ice. The
sails, ropes, and spars of the mainmast, which was still standing, were
fringed with icicles; and there came over me a feeling almost of relief
in that never again should I have to pull and haul on the stiff tackles
and hammer ice so that the frozen ropes could run through the frozen
shivs. The wind, blowing half a gale, cut with the sharpness that is a
sign of the proximity of icebergs; and the big seas were bitter cold to
look upon in the moonlight.

The longboat was lowering away to larboard, and I saw men, struggling
on the ice-sheeted deck with barrels of provisions, abandon the food in
their haste to get away. In vain Captain Nicholl strove with them. A
sea, breaching across from windward, settled the matter and sent them
leaping over the rail in heaps. I gained the captain’s shoulder, and,
holding on to him, I shouted in his ear that if he would board the boat
and prevent the men from casting off, I would attend to the
provisioning.

Little time was given me, however. Scarcely had I managed, helped by
the second mate, Aaron Northrup, to lower away half-a-dozen barrels and
kegs, when all cried from the boat that they were casting off. Good
reason they had. Down upon us from windward was drifting a towering
ice-mountain, while to leeward, close aboard, was another ice-mountain
upon which we were driving.

Quicker in his leap was Aaron Northrup. I delayed a moment, even as the
boat was shoving away, in order to select a spot amidships where the
men were thickest, so that their bodies might break my fall. I was not
minded to embark with a broken member on so hazardous a voyage in the
longboat. That the men might have room at the oars, I worked my way
quickly aft into the sternsheets. Certainly, I had other and sufficient
reasons. It would be more comfortable in the sternsheets than in the
narrow bow. And further, it would be well to be near the afterguard in
whatever troubles that were sure to arise under such circumstances in
the days to come.

In the sternsheets were the mate, Walter Drake, the surgeon, Arnold
Bentham, Aaron Northrup, and Captain Nicholl, who was steering. The
surgeon was bending over Northrup, who lay in the bottom groaning. Not
so fortunate had he been in his ill-considered leap, for he had broken
his right leg at the hip joint.

There was little time for him then, however, for we were labouring in a
heavy sea directly between the two ice islands that were rushing
together. Nicholas Wilton, at the stroke oar, was cramped for room; so
I better stowed the barrels, and, kneeling and facing him, was able to
add my weight to the oar. For’ard, I could see John Roberts straining
at the bow oar. Pulling on his shoulders from behind, Arthur Haskins
and the boy, Benny Hardwater, added their weight to his. In fact, so
eager were all hands to help that more than one was thus in the way and
cluttered the movements of the rowers.

It was close work, but we went clear by a matter of a hundred yards, so
that I was able to turn my head and see the untimely end of the
_Negociator_. She was caught squarely in the pinch and she was squeezed
between the ice as a sugar plum might be squeezed between thumb and
forefinger of a boy. In the shouting of the wind and the roar of water
we heard nothing, although the crack of the brig’s stout ribs and
deckbeams must have been enough to waken a hamlet on a peaceful night.

Silently, easily, the brig’s sides squeezed together, the deck bulged
up, and the crushed remnant dropped down and was gone, while where she
had been was occupied by the grinding conflict of the ice-islands. I
felt regret at the destruction of this haven against the elements, but
at the same time was well pleased at thought of my snugness inside my
four shirts and three coats.

Yet it proved a bitter night, even for me. I was the warmest clad in
the boat. What the others must have suffered I did not care to dwell
upon over much. For fear that we might meet up with more ice in the
darkness, we bailed and held the boat bow-on to the seas. And
continually, now with one mitten, now with the other, I rubbed my nose
that it might not freeze. Also, with memories lively in me of the home
circle in Elkton, I prayed to God.

In the morning we took stock. To commence with, all but two or three
had suffered frost-bite. Aaron Northrup, unable to move because of his
broken hip, was very bad. It was the surgeon’s opinion that both of
Northrup’s feet were hopelessly frozen.

The longboat was deep and heavy in the water, for it was burdened by
the entire ship’s company of twenty-one. Two of these were boys. Benny
Hardwater was a bare thirteen, and Lish Dickery, whose family was near
neighbour to mine in Elkton, was just turned sixteen. Our provisions
consisted of three hundred-weight of beef and two hundred-weight of
pork. The half-dozen loaves of brine-pulped bread, which the cook had
brought, did not count. Then there were three small barrels of water
and one small keg of beer.

Captain Nicholl frankly admitted that in this uncharted ocean he had no
knowledge of any near land. The one thing to do was to run for more
clement climate, which we accordingly did, setting our small sail and
steering quartering before the fresh wind to the north-east.

The food problem was simple arithmetic. We did not count Aaron
Northrup, for we knew he would soon be gone. At a pound per day, our
five hundred pounds would last us twenty-five days; at half a pound, it
would last fifty. So half a pound had it. I divided and issued the meat
under the captain’s eyes, and managed it fairly enough, God knows,
although some of the men grumbled from the first. Also, from time to
time I made fair division among the men of the plug tobacco I had
stowed in my many pockets—a thing which I could not but regret,
especially when I knew it was being wasted on this man and that who I
was certain could not live a day more, or, at best, two days or three.

For we began to die soon in the open boat. Not to starvation but to the
killing cold and exposure were those earlier deaths due. It was a
matter of the survival of the toughest and the luckiest. I was tough by
constitution, and lucky inasmuch as I was warmly clad and had not
broken my leg like Aaron Northrup. Even so, so strong was he that,
despite being the first to be severely frozen, he was days in passing.
Vance Hathaway was the first. We found him in the gray of dawn crouched
doubled in the bow and frozen stiff. The boy, Lish Dickery, was the
second to go. The other boy, Benny Hardwater, lasted ten or a dozen
days.

So bitter was it in the boat that our water and beer froze solid, and
it was a difficult task justly to apportion the pieces I broke off with
Northrup’s claspknife. These pieces we put in our mouths and sucked
till they melted. Also, on occasion of snow-squalls, we had all the
snow we desired. All of which was not good for us, causing a fever of
inflammation to attack our mouths so that the membranes were
continually dry and burning. And there was no allaying a thirst so
generated. To suck more ice or snow was merely to aggravate the
inflammation. More than anything else, I think it was this that caused
the death of Lish Dickery. He was out of his head and raving for
twenty-four hours before he died. He died babbling for water, and yet
he did not die for need of water. I resisted as much as possible the
temptation to suck ice, contenting myself with a shred of tobacco in my
cheek, and made out with fair comfort.

We stripped all clothing from our dead. Stark they came into the world,
and stark they passed out over the side of the longboat and down into
the dark freezing ocean. Lots were cast for the clothes. This was by
Captain Nicholl’s command, in order to prevent quarrelling.

It was no time for the follies of sentiment. There was not one of us
who did not know secret satisfaction at the occurrence of each death.
Luckiest of all was Israel Stickney in casting lots, so that in the
end, when he passed, he was a veritable treasure trove of clothing. It
gave a new lease of life to the survivors.

We continued to run to the north-east before the fresh westerlies, but
our quest for warmer weather seemed vain. Ever the spray froze in the
bottom of the boat, and I still chipped beer and drinking water with
Northrup’s knife. My own knife I reserved. It was of good steel, with a
keen edge and stoutly fashioned, and I did not care to peril it in such
manner.

By the time half our company was overboard, the boat had a reasonably
high freeboard and was less ticklish to handle in the gusts. Likewise
there was more room for a man to stretch out comfortably.

A source of continual grumbling was the food. The captain, the mate,
the surgeon, and myself, talking it over, resolved not to increase the
daily whack of half a pound of meat. The six sailors, for whom Tobias
Snow made himself spokesman, contended that the death of half of us was
equivalent to a doubling of our provisioning, and that therefore the
ration should be increased to a pound. In reply, we of the afterguard
pointed out that it was our chance for life that was doubled did we but
bear with the half-pound ration.

It is true that eight ounces of salt meat did not go far in enabling us
to live and to resist the severe cold. We were quite weak, and, because
of our weakness, we frosted easily. Noses and cheeks were all black
with frost-bite. It was impossible to be warm, although we now had
double the garments we had started with.

Five weeks after the loss of the _Negociator_ the trouble over the food
came to a head. I was asleep at the time—it was night—when Captain
Nicholl caught Jud Hetchkins stealing from the pork barrel. That he was
abetted by the other five men was proved by their actions. Immediately
Jud Hetchkins was discovered, the whole six threw themselves upon us
with their knives. It was close, sharp work in the dim light of the
stars, and it was a mercy the boat was not overturned. I had reason to
be thankful for my many shirts and coats which served me as an armour.
The knife-thrusts scarcely more than drew blood through the so great
thickness of cloth, although I was scratched to bleeding in a round
dozen of places.

The others were similarly protected, and the fight would have ended in
no more than a mauling all around, had not the mate, Walter Dakon, a
very powerful man, hit upon the idea of ending the matter by tossing
the mutineers overboard. This was joined in by Captain Nicholl, the
surgeon, and myself, and in a trice five of the six were in the water
and clinging to the gunwale. Captain Nicholl and the surgeon were busy
amidships with the sixth, Jeremy Nalor, and were in the act of throwing
him overboard, while the mate was occupied with rapping the fingers
along the gunwale with a boat-stretcher. For the moment I had nothing
to do, and so was able to observe the tragic end of the mate. As he
lifted the stretcher to rap Seth Richards’ fingers, the latter, sinking
down low in the water and then jerking himself up by both hands, sprang
half into the boat, locked his arms about the mate and, falling
backward and outboard, dragged the mate with him. Doubtlessly he never
relaxed his grip, and both drowned together.

Thus left alive of the entire ship’s company were three of us: Captain
Nicholl, Arnold Bentham (the surgeon), and myself. Seven had gone in
the twinkling of an eye, consequent on Jud Hetchkins’ attempt to steal
provisions. And to me it seemed a pity that so much good warm clothing
had been wasted there in the sea. There was not one of us who could not
have managed gratefully with more.

Captain Nicholl and the surgeon were good men and honest. Often enough,
when two of us slept, the one awake and steering could have stolen from
the meat. But this never happened. We trusted one another fully, and we
would have died rather than betray that trust.

We continued to content ourselves with half a pound of meat each per
day, and we took advantage of every favouring breeze to work to the
north’ard. Not until January fourteenth, seven weeks since the wreck,
did we come up with a warmer latitude. Even then it was not really
warm. It was merely not so bitterly cold.

Here the fresh westerlies forsook us and we bobbed and blobbed about in
doldrummy weather for many days. Mostly it was calm, or light contrary
winds, though sometimes a burst of breeze, as like as not from dead
ahead, would last for a few hours. In our weakened condition, with so
large a boat, it was out of the question to row. We could merely hoard
our food and wait for God to show a more kindly face. The three of us
were faithful Christians, and we made a practice of prayer each day
before the apportionment of food. Yes, and each of us prayed privately,
often and long.

By the end of January our food was near its end. The pork was entirely
gone, and we used the barrel for catching and storing rainwater. Not
many pounds of beef remained. And in all the nine weeks in the open
boat we had raised no sail and glimpsed no land. Captain Nicholl
frankly admitted that after sixty-three days of dead reckoning he did
not know where we were.

The twentieth of February saw the last morsel of food eaten. I prefer
to skip the details of much that happened in the next eight days. I
shall touch only on the incidents that serve to show what manner of men
were my companions. We had starved so long, that we had no reserves of
strength on which to draw when the food utterly ceased, and we grew
weaker with great rapidity.

On February twenty-fourth we calmly talked the situation over. We were
three stout-spirited men, full of life and toughness, and we did not
want to die. No one of us would volunteer to sacrifice himself for the
other two. But we agreed on three things: we must have food; we must
decide the matter by casting lots; and we would cast the lots next
morning if there were no wind.

Next morning there was wind, not much of it, but fair, so that we were
able to log a sluggish two knots on our northerly course. The mornings
of the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh found us with a similar breeze.
We were fearfully weak, but we abided by our decision and continued to
sail.

But with the morning of the twenty-eighth we knew the time was come.
The longboat rolled drearily on an empty, windless sea, and the
stagnant, overcast sky gave no promise of any breeze. I cut three
pieces of cloth, all of a size, from my jacket. In the ravel of one of
these pieces was a bit of brown thread. Whoever drew this lost. I then
put the three lots into my hat, covering it with Captain Nicholl’s hat.

All was ready, but we delayed for a time while each prayed silently and
long, for we knew that we were leaving the decision to God. I was not
unaware of my own honesty and worth; but I was equally aware of the
honesty and worth of my companions, so that it perplexed me how God
could decide so fine-balanced and delicate a matter.

The captain, as was his right and due, drew first. After his hand was
in the hat he delayed for some time with closed eyes, his lips moving a
last prayer. And he drew a blank. This was right—a true decision I
could not but admit to myself; for Captain Nicholl’s life was largely
known to me and I knew him to be honest, upright, and God-fearing.

Remained the surgeon and me. It was one or the other, and, according to
ship’s rating, it was his due to draw next. Again we prayed. As I
prayed I strove to quest back in my life and cast a hurried tally-sheet
of my own worth and unworth.

I held the hat on my knees with Captain Nicholl’s hat over it. The
surgeon thrust in his hand and fumbled about for some time, while I
wondered whether the feel of that one brown thread could be detected
from the rest of the ravel.

At last he withdrew his hand. The brown thread was in his piece of
cloth. I was instantly very humble and very grateful for God’s blessing
thus extended to me; and I resolved to keep more faithfully than ever
all of His commandments. The next moment I could not help but feel that
the surgeon and the captain were pledged to each other by closer ties
of position and intercourse than with me, and that they were in a
measure disappointed with the outcome. And close with that thought ran
the conviction that they were such true men that the outcome would not
interfere with the plan arranged.

I was right. The surgeon bared arm and knife and prepared to open a
great vein. First, however, he spoke a few words.

“I am a native of Norfolk in the Virginias,” he said, “where I expect I
have now a wife and three children living. The only favour that I have
to request of you is, that should it please God to deliver either of
you from your perilous situation, and should you be so fortunate as to
reach once more your native country, that you would acquaint my
unfortunate family with my wretched fate.”

Next he requested courteously of us a few minutes in which to arrange
his affairs with God. Neither Captain Nicholl nor I could utter a word,
but with streaming eyes we nodded our consent.

Without doubt Arnold Bentham was the best collected of the three of us.
My own anguish was prodigious, and I am confident that Captain Nicholl
suffered equally. But what was one to do? The thing was fair and proper
and had been decided by God.

But when Arnold Bentham had completed his last arrangements and made
ready to do the act, I could contain myself no longer, and cried out:

“Wait! We who have endured so much surely can endure a little more. It
is now mid-morning. Let us wait until twilight. Then, if no event has
appeared to change our dreadful destiny, do you Arnold Bentham, do as
we have agreed.”

He looked to Captain Nicholl for confirmation of my suggestion, and
Captain Nicholl could only nod. He could utter no word, but in his
moist and frosty blue eyes was a wealth of acknowledgment I could not
misread.

I did not, I could not, deem it a crime, having so determined by fair
drawing of lots, that Captain Nicholl and myself should profit by the
death of Arnold Bentham. I could not believe that the love of life that
actuated us had been implanted in our breasts by aught other than God.
It was God’s will, and we His poor creatures could only obey and fulfil
His will. And yet, God was kind. In His all-kindness He saved us from
so terrible, though so righteous, an act.

Scarce had a quarter of an hour passed, when a fan of air from the
west, with a hint of frost and damp in it, crisped on our cheeks. In
another five minutes we had steerage from the filled sail, and Arnold
Bentham was at the steering sweep.

“Save what little strength you have,” he had said. “Let me consume the
little strength left in me in order that it may increase your chance to
survive.”

And so he steered to a freshening breeze, while Captain Nicholl and I
lay sprawled in the boat’s bottom and in our weakness dreamed dreams
and glimpsed visions of the dear things of life far across the world
from us.

It was an ever-freshening breeze of wind that soon began to puff and
gust. The cloud stuff flying across the sky foretold us of a gale. By
midday Arnold Bentham fainted at the steering, and, ere the boat could
broach in the tidy sea already running, Captain Nicholl and I were at
the steering sweep with all the four of our weak hands upon it. We came
to an agreement, and, just as Captain Nicholl had drawn the first lot
by virtue of his office, so now he took the first spell at steering.
Thereafter the three of us spelled one another every fifteen minutes.
We were very weak and we could not spell longer at a time.

By mid-afternoon a dangerous sea was running. We should have rounded
the boat to, had our situation not been so desperate, and let her drift
bow-on to a sea-anchor extemporized of our mast and sail. Had we
broached in those great, over-topping seas, the boat would have been
rolled over and over.

Time and again, that afternoon, Arnold Bentham, for our sakes, begged
that we come to a sea-anchor. He knew that we continued to run only in
the hope that the decree of the lots might not have to be carried out.
He was a noble man. So was Captain Nicholl noble, whose frosty eyes had
wizened to points of steel. And in such noble company how could I be
less noble? I thanked God repeatedly, through that long afternoon of
peril, for the privilege of having known two such men. God and the
right dwelt in them and no matter what my poor fate might be, I could
but feel well recompensed by such companionship. Like them I did not
want to die, yet was unafraid to die. The quick, early doubt I had had
of these two men was long since dissipated. Hard the school, and hard
the men, but they were noble men, God’s own men.

I saw it first. Arnold Bentham, his own death accepted, and Captain
Nicholl, well nigh accepting death, lay rolling like loose-bodied dead
men in the boat’s bottom, and I was steering when I saw it. The boat,
foaming and surging with the swiftness of wind in its sail, was
uplifted on a crest, when, close before me, I saw the sea-battered
islet of rock. It was not half a mile off. I cried out, so that the
other two, kneeling and reeling and clutching for support, were peering
and staring at what I saw.

“Straight for it, Daniel,” Captain Nicholl mumbled command. “There may
be a cove. There may be a cove. It is our only chance.”

Once again he spoke, when we were atop that dreadful lee shore with no
cove existent.

“Straight for it, Daniel. If we go clear we are too weak ever to win
back against sea and wind.”

He was right. I obeyed. He drew his watch and looked, and I asked the
time. It was five o’clock. He stretched out his hand to Arnold Bentham,
who met and shook it weakly; and both gazed at me, in their eyes
extending that same hand-clasp. It was farewell, I knew; for what
chance had creatures so feeble as we to win alive over those
surf-battered rocks to the higher rocks beyond?

Twenty feet from shore the boat was snatched out of my control. In a
trice it was overturned and I was strangling in the salt. I never saw
my companions again. By good fortune I was buoyed by the steering-oar I
still grasped, and by great good fortune a fling of sea, at the right
instant, at the right spot, threw me far up the gentle slope of the one
shelving rock on all that terrible shore. I was not hurt. I was not
bruised. And with brain reeling from weakness I was able to crawl and
scramble farther up beyond the clutching backwash of the sea.

I stood upright, knowing myself saved, and thanking God, and staggering
as I stood. Already the boat was pounded to a thousand fragments. And
though I saw them not, I could guess how grievously had been pounded
the bodies of Captain Nicholl and Arnold Bentham. I saw an oar on the
edge of the foam, and at certain risk I drew it clear. Then I fell to
my knees, knowing myself fainting. And yet, ere I fainted, with a
sailor’s instinct I dragged my body on and up among the cruel hurting
rocks to faint finally beyond the reach of the sea.

I was near a dead man myself, that night, mostly in stupor, only dimly
aware at times of the extremity of cold and wet that I endured. Morning
brought me astonishment and terror. No plant, not a blade of grass,
grew on that wretched projection of rock from the ocean’s bottom. A
quarter of a mile in width and a half mile in length, it was no more
than a heap of rocks. Naught could I discover to gratify the cravings
of exhausted nature. I was consumed with thirst, yet was there no fresh
water. In vain I tasted to my mouth’s undoing every cavity and
depression in the rocks. The spray of the gale so completely had
enveloped every portion of the island that every depression was filled
with water salt as the sea.

Of the boat remained nothing—not even a splinter to show that a boat
had been. I stood possessed of my garments, a stout knife, and the one
oar I had saved. The gale had abated, and all that day, staggering and
falling, crawling till hands and knees bled, I vainly sought water.

That night, nearer death than ever, I sheltered behind a rock from the
wind. A heavy shower of rain made me miserable. I removed my various
coats and spread them to soak up the rain; but, when I came to wring
the moisture from them into my mouth, I was disappointed, because the
cloth had been thoroughly impregnated with the salt of the ocean in
which I had been immersed. I lay on my back, my mouth open to catch the
few rain-drops that fell directly into it. It was tantalizing, but it
kept my membranes moist and me from madness.

The second day I was a very sick man. I, who had not eaten for so long,
began to swell to a monstrous fatness—my legs, my arms, my whole body.
With the slightest of pressures my fingers would sink in a full inch
into my skin, and the depressions so made were long in going away. Yet
did I labour sore in order to fulfil God’s will that I should live.
Carefully, with my hands, I cleaned out the salt water from every
slight hole, in the hope that succeeding showers of rain might fill
them with water that I could drink.

My sad lot and the memories of the loved ones at Elkton threw me into a
melancholy, so that I often lost my recollection for hours at a time.
This was a mercy, for it veiled me from my sufferings that else would
have killed me.

In the night I was roused by the beat of rain, and I crawled from hole
to hole, lapping up the rain or licking it from the rocks. Brackish it
was, but drinkable. It was what saved me, for, toward morning, I awoke
to find myself in a profuse perspiration and quite free of all
delirium.

Then came the sun, the first time since my stay on the island, and I
spread most of my garments to dry. Of water I drank my careful fill,
and I calculated there was ten days’ supply if carefully husbanded. It
was amazing how rich I felt with this vast wealth of brackish water.
And no great merchant, with all his ships returned from prosperous
voyages, his warehouses filled to the rafters, his strong-boxes
overflowing, could have felt as wealthy as did I when I discovered,
cast up on the rocks, the body of a seal that had been dead for many
days. Nor did I fail, first, to thank God on my knees for this
manifestation of His ever-unfailing kindness. The thing was clear to
me: God had not intended I should die. From the very first He had not
so intended.

I knew the debilitated state of my stomach, and I ate sparingly in the
knowledge that my natural voracity would surely kill me did I yield
myself to it. Never had sweeter morsels passed my lips, and I make free
to confess that I shed tears of joy, again and again, at contemplation
of that putrefied carcass.

My heart of hope beat strong in me once more. Carefully I preserved the
portions of the carcass remaining. Carefully I covered my rock cisterns
with flat stones so that the sun’s rays might not evaporate the
precious fluid and in precaution against some upspringing of wind in
the night and the sudden flying of spray. Also I gathered me tiny
fragments of seaweed and dried them in the sun for an easement between
my poor body and the rough rocks whereon I made my lodging. And my
garments were dry—the first time in days; so that I slept the heavy
sleep of exhaustion and of returning health.

When I awoke to a new day I was another man. The absence of the sun did
not depress me, and I was swiftly to learn that God, not forgetting me
while I slumbered, had prepared other and wonderful blessings for me. I
would have fain rubbed my eyes and looked again, for, as far as I could
see, the rocks bordering upon the ocean were covered with seals. There
were thousands of them, and in the water other thousands disported
themselves, while the sound that went up from all their throats was
prodigious and deafening. I knew it when I saw it—meat lay there for
the taking, meat sufficient for a score of ships’ companies.

I directly seized my oar—than which there was no other stick of wood on
the island—and cautiously advanced upon all that immensity of
provender. It was quickly guessed by me that these creatures of the sea
were unacquainted with man. They betrayed no signals of timidity at my
approach, and I found it a boy’s task to rap them on the head with the
oar.

And when I had so killed my third and my fourth, I went immediately and
strangely mad. Indeed quite bereft was I of all judgment as I slew and
slew and continued to slay. For the space of two hours I toiled
unceasingly with the oar till I was ready to drop. What excess of
slaughter I might have been guilty of I know not, for at the end of
that time, as if by a signal, all the seals that still lived threw
themselves into the water and swiftly disappeared.

I found the number of slain seals to exceed two hundred, and I was
shocked and frightened because of the madness of slaughter that had
possessed me. I had sinned by wanton wastefulness, and after I had duly
refreshed myself with this good wholesome food, I set about as well as
I could to make amends. But first, ere the great task began, I returned
thanks to that Being through whose mercy I had been so miraculously
preserved. Thereupon I laboured until dark, and after dark, skinning
the seals, cutting the meat into strips, and placing it upon the tops
of rocks to dry in the sun. Also, I found small deposits of salt in the
nooks and crannies of the rocks on the weather side of the island. This
I rubbed into the meat as a preservative.

Four days I so toiled, and in the end was foolishly proud before God in
that no scrap of all that supply of meat had been wasted. The
unremitting labour was good for my body, which built up rapidly by
means of this wholesome diet in which I did not stint myself. Another
evidence of God’s mercy; never, in the eight years I spent on that
barren islet, was there so long a spell of clear weather and steady
sunshine as in the period immediately following the slaughter of the
seals.

Months were to pass ere ever the seals revisited my island. But in the
meantime I was anything but idle. I built me a hut of stone, and,
adjoining it, a storehouse for my cured meat. The hut I roofed with
many sealskins, so that it was fairly water-proof. But I could never
cease to marvel, when the rain beat on that roof, that no less than a
king’s ransom in the London fur market protected a castaway sailor from
the elements.

I was quickly aware of the importance of keeping some kind of reckoning
of time, without which I was sensible that I should soon lose all
knowledge of the day of the week, and be unable to distinguish one from
the other, and not know which was the Lord’s day.

I remembered back carefully to the reckoning of time kept in the
longboat by Captain Nicholl; and carefully, again and again, to make
sure beyond any shadow of uncertainty, I went over the tale of the days
and nights I had spent on the island. Then, by seven stones outside my
hut, I kept my weekly calendar. In one place on the oar I cut a small
notch for each week, and in another place on the oar I notched the
months, being duly careful indeed, to reckon in the additional days to
each month over and beyond the four weeks.

Thus I was enabled to pay due regard to the Sabbath. As the only mode
of worship I could adopt, I carved a short hymn, appropriate to my
situation, on the oar, which I never failed to chant on the Sabbath.
God, in His all-mercy, had not forgotten me; nor did I, in those eight
years, fail at all proper times to remember God.

It was astonishing the work required, under such circumstances, to
supply one’s simple needs of food and shelter. Indeed, I was rarely
idle, that first year. The hut, itself a mere lair of rocks,
nevertheless took six weeks of my time. The tardy curing and the
endless scraping of the sealskins, so as to make them soft and pliable
for garments, occupied my spare moments for months and months.

Then there was the matter of my water supply. After any heavy gale, the
flying spray salted my saved rainwater, so that at times I was
grievously put to live through till fresh rains fell unaccompanied by
high winds. Aware that a continual dropping will wear a stone, I
selected a large stone, fine and tight of texture and, by means of
smaller stones, I proceeded to pound it hollow. In five weeks of most
arduous toil I managed thus to make a jar which I estimated to hold a
gallon and a half. Later, I similarly made a four-gallon jar. It took
me nine weeks. Other small ones I also made from time to time. One,
that would have contained eight gallons, developed a flaw when I had
worked seven weeks on it.

But it was not until my fourth year on the island, when I had become
reconciled to the possibility that I might continue to live there for
the term of my natural life, that I created my masterpiece. It took me
eight months, but it was tight, and it held upwards of thirty gallons.
These stone vessels were a great gratification to me—so much so, that
at times I forgot my humility and was unduly vain of them. Truly, they
were more elegant to me than was ever the costliest piece of furniture
to any queen. Also, I made me a small rock vessel, containing no more
than a quart, with which to convey water from the catching-places to my
large receptacles. When I say that this one-quart vessel weighed all of
two stone, the reader will realize that the mere gathering of the
rainwater was no light task.

Thus, I rendered my lonely situation as comfortable as could be
expected. I had completed me a snug and secure shelter; and, as to
provision, I had always on hand a six months’ supply, preserved by
salting and drying. For these things, so essential to preserve life,
and which one could scarcely have expected to obtain upon a desert
island, I was sensible that I could not be too thankful.

Although denied the privilege of enjoying the society of any human
creature, not even of a dog or a cat, I was far more reconciled to my
lot than thousands probably would have been. Upon the desolate spot,
where fate had placed me, I conceived myself far more happy than many,
who, for ignominious crimes, were doomed to drag out their lives in
solitary confinement with conscience ever biting as a corrosive canker.

However dreary my prospects, I was not without hope that that
Providence, which, at the very moment when hunger threatened me with
dissolution, and when I might easily have been engulfed in the maw of
the sea, had cast me upon those barren rocks, would finally direct some
one to my relief.

If deprived of the society of my fellow creatures, and of the
conveniences of life, I could not but reflect that my forlorn situation
was yet attended with some advantages. Of the whole island, though
small, I had peaceable possession. No one, it was probable, would ever
appear to dispute my claim, unless it were the amphibious animals of
the ocean. Since the island was almost inaccessible, at night my repose
was not disturbed by continual apprehension of the approach of
cannibals or of beasts of prey. Again and again I thanked God on my
knees for these various and many benefactions.

Yet is man ever a strange and unaccountable creature. I, who had asked
of God’s mercy no more than putrid meat to eat and a sufficiency of
water not too brackish, was no sooner blessed with an abundance of
cured meat and sweet water than I began to know discontent with my lot.
I began to want fire, and the savour of cooked meat in my mouth. And
continually I would discover myself longing for certain delicacies of
the palate such as were part of the common daily fare on the home table
at Elkton. Strive as I would, ever my fancy eluded my will and wantoned
in day-dreaming of the good things I had eaten and of the good things I
would eat if ever I were rescued from my lonely situation.

It was the old Adam in me, I suppose—the taint of that first father who
was the first rebel against God’s commandments. Most strange is man,
ever insatiable, ever unsatisfied, never at peace with God or himself,
his days filled with restlessness and useless endeavour, his nights a
glut of vain dreams of desires wilful and wrong. Yes, and also I was
much annoyed by my craving for tobacco. My sleep was often a torment to
me, for it was then that my desires took licence to rove, so that a
thousand times I dreamed myself possessed of hogsheads of tobacco—ay,
and of warehouses of tobacco, and of shiploads and of entire
plantations of tobacco.

But I revenged myself upon myself. I prayed God unceasingly for a
humble heart, and chastised my flesh with unremitting toil. Unable to
improve my mind, I determined to improve my barren island. I laboured
four months at constructing a stone wall thirty feet long, including
its wings, and a dozen feet high. This was as a protection to the hut
in the periods of the great gales when all the island was as a tiny
petrel in the maw of the hurricane. Nor did I conceive the time
misspent. Thereafter I lay snug in the heart of calm while all the air
for a hundred feet above my head was one stream of gust-driven water.

In the third year I began me a pillar of rock. Rather was it a pyramid,
four-square, broad at the base, sloping upward not steeply to the apex.
In this fashion I was compelled to build, for gear and timber there was
none in all the island for the construction of scaffolding. Not until
the close of the fifth year was my pyramid complete. It stood on the
summit of the island. Now, when I state that the summit was but forty
feet above the sea, and that the peak of my pyramid was forty feet
above the summit, it will be conceived that I, without tools, had
doubled the stature of the island. It might be urged by some unthinking
ones that I interfered with God’s plan in the creation of the world.
Not so, I hold. For was not I equally a part of God’s plan, along with
this heap of rocks upjutting in the solitude of ocean? My arms with
which to work, my back with which to bend and lift, my hands cunning to
clutch and hold—were not these parts too in God’s plan? Much I pondered
the matter. I know that I was right.

In the sixth year I increased the base of my pyramid, so that in
eighteen months thereafter the height of my monument was fifty feet
above the height of the island. This was no tower of Babel. It served
two right purposes. It gave me a lookout from which to scan the ocean
for ships, and increased the likelihood of my island being sighted by
the careless roving eye of any seaman. And it kept my body and mind in
health. With hands never idle, there was small opportunity for Satan on
that island. Only in my dreams did he torment me, principally with
visions of varied foods and with imagined indulgence in the foul weed
called tobacco.

On the eighteenth day of the month of June, in the sixth year of my
sojourn on the island, I descried a sail. But it passed far to leeward
at too great a distance to discover me. Rather than suffering
disappointment, the very appearance of this sail afforded me the
liveliest satisfaction. It convinced me of a fact that I had before in
a degree doubted, to wit: that these seas were sometimes visited by
navigators.

Among other things, where the seals hauled up out of the sea, I built
wide-spreading wings of low rock walls that narrowed to a _cul de sac_,
where I might conveniently kill such seals as entered without exciting
their fellows outside and without permitting any wounded or frightening
seal to escape and spread a contagion of alarm. Seven months to this
structure alone were devoted.

As the time passed, I grew more contented with my lot, and the devil
came less and less in my sleep to torment the old Adam in me with
lawless visions of tobacco and savoury foods. And I continued to eat my
seal meat and call it good, and to drink the sweet rainwater of which
always I had plenty, and to be grateful to God. And God heard me, I
know, for during all my term on that island I knew never a moment of
sickness, save two, both of which were due to my gluttony, as I shall
later relate.

In the fifth year, ere I had convinced myself that the keels of ships
did on occasion plough these seas, I began carving on my oar minutes of
the more remarkable incidents that had attended me since I quitted the
peaceful shores of America. This I rendered as intelligible and
permanent as possible, the letters being of the smallest size. Six, and
even five, letters were often a day’s work for me, so painstaking was
I.

And, lest it should prove my hard fortune never to meet with the
long-wished opportunity to return to my friends and to my family at
Elkton, I engraved, or nitched, on the broad end of the oar, the legend
of my ill fate which I have already quoted near the beginning of this
narrative.

This oar, which had proved so serviceable to me in my destitute
situation, and which now contained a record of my own fate and that of
my shipmates, I spared no pains to preserve. No longer did I risk it in
knocking seals on the head. Instead, I equipped myself with a stone
club, some three feet in length and of suitable diameter, which
occupied an even month in the fashioning. Also, to secure the oar from
the weather (for I used it in mild breezes as a flagstaff on top of my
pyramid from which to fly a flag I made me from one of my precious
shirts) I contrived for it a covering of well-cured sealskins.

In the month of March of the sixth year of my confinement I experienced
one of the most tremendous storms that was perhaps ever witnessed by
man. It commenced at about nine in the evening, with the approach of
black clouds and a freshening wind from the south-west, which, by
eleven, had become a hurricane, attended with incessant peals of
thunder and the sharpest lightning I had ever witnessed.

I was not without apprehension for the safety of the island. Over every
part the seas made a clean breach, except of the summit of my pyramid.
There the life was nigh beaten and suffocated out of my body by the
drive of the wind and spray. I could not but be sensible that my
existence was spared solely because of my diligence in erecting the
pyramid and so doubling the stature of the island.

Yet, in the morning, I had great reason for thankfulness. All my saved
rainwater was turned brackish, save that in my largest vessel which was
sheltered in the lee of the pyramid. By careful economy I knew I had
drink sufficient until the next rain, no matter how delayed, should
fall. My hut was quite washed out by the seas, and of my great store of
seal meat only a wretched, pulpy modicum remained. Nevertheless I was
agreeably surprised to find the rocks plentifully distributed with a
sort of fish more nearly like the mullet than any I had ever observed.
Of these I picked up no less than twelve hundred and nineteen, which I
split and cured in the sun after the manner of cod. This welcome change
of diet was not without its consequence. I was guilty of gluttony, and
for all of the succeeding night I was near to death’s door.

In the seventh year of my stay on the island, in the very same month of
March, occurred a similar storm of great violence. Following upon it,
to my astonishment, I found an enormous dead whale, quite fresh, which
had been cast up high and dry by the waves. Conceive my gratification
when in the bowels of the great fish I found deeply imbedded a harpoon
of the common sort with a few fathoms of new line attached thereto.

Thus were my hopes again revived that I should finally meet with an
opportunity to quit the desolate island. Beyond doubt these seas were
frequented by whalemen, and, so long as I kept up a stout heart, sooner
or later I should be saved. For seven years I had lived on seal meat,
so that at sight of the enormous plentitude of different and succulent
food I fell a victim to my weakness and ate of such quantities that
once again I was well nigh to dying. And yet, after all, this, and the
affair of the small fish, were mere indispositions due to the
foreignness of the food to my stomach, which had learned to prosper on
seal meat and on nothing but seal meat.

Of that one whale I preserved a full year’s supply of provision. Also,
under the sun’s rays, in the rock hollows, I tried out much of the oil,
which, with the addition of salt, was a welcome thing in which to dip
my strips of seal-meat whilst dining. Out of my precious rags of shirts
I could even have contrived a wick, so that, with the harpoon for steel
and rock for flint, I might have had a light at night. But it was a
vain thing, and I speedily forwent the thought of it. I had no need for
light when God’s darkness descended, for I had schooled myself to sleep
from sundown to sunrise, winter and summer.

I, Darrell Standing, cannot refrain from breaking in on this recital of
an earlier existence in order to note a conclusion of my own. Since
human personality is a growth, a sum of all previous existences added
together, what possibility was there for Warden Atherton to break down
my spirit in the inquisition of solitary? I am life that survived, a
structure builded up through the ages of the past—and such a past! What
were ten days and nights in the jacket to me?—to me, who had once been
Daniel Foss, and for eight years learned patience in that school of
rocks in the far South Ocean?

At the end of my eighth year on the island in the month of September,
when I had just sketched most ambitious plans to raise my pyramid to
sixty feet above the summit of the island, I awoke one morning to stare
out upon a ship with topsails aback and nearly within hail. That I
might be discovered, I swung my oar in the air, jumped from rock to
rock, and was guilty of all manner of livelinesses of action, until I
could see the officers on the quarter-deck looking at me through their
spyglasses. They answered by pointing to the extreme westerly end of
the island, whither I hastened and discovered their boat manned by half
a dozen men. It seems, as I was to learn afterward, the ship had been
attracted by my pyramid and had altered its course to make closer
examination of so strange a structure that was greater of height than
the wild island on which it stood.

But the surf proved to be too great to permit the boat to land on my
inhospitable shore. After divers unsuccessful attempts they signalled
me that they must return to the ship. Conceive my despair at thus being
unable to quit the desolate island. I seized my oar (which I had long
since determined to present to the Philadelphia Museum if ever I were
preserved) and with it plunged headlong into the foaming surf. Such was
my good fortune, and my strength and agility, that I gained the boat.

I cannot refrain from telling here a curious incident. The ship had by
this time drifted so far away, that we were all of an hour in getting
aboard. During this time I yielded to my propensities that had been
baffled for eight long years, and begged of the second mate, who
steered, a piece of tobacco to chew. This granted, the second mate also
proffered me his pipe, filled with prime Virginia leaf. Scarce had ten
minutes passed when I was taken violently sick. The reason for this was
clear. My system was entirely purged of tobacco, and what I now
suffered was tobacco poisoning such as afflicts any boy at the time of
his first smoke. Again I had reason to be grateful to God, and from
that day to the day of my death, I neither used nor desired the foul
weed.

I, Darrell Standing, must now complete the amazingness of the details
of this existence which I relived while unconscious in the
strait-jacket in San Quentin prison. I often wondered if Daniel Foss
had been true in his resolve and deposited the carved oar in the
Philadelphia Museum.

It is a difficult matter for a prisoner in solitary to communicate with
the outside world. Once, with a guard, and once with a short-timer in
solitary, I entrusted, by memorization, a letter of inquiry addressed
to the curator of the Museum. Although under the most solemn pledges,
both these men failed me. It was not until after Ed Morrell, by a
strange whirl of fate, was released from solitary and appointed head
trusty of the entire prison, that I was able to have the letter sent. I
now give the reply, sent me by the curator of the Philadelphia Museum,
and smuggled to me by Ed Morrell:

“It is true there is such an oar here as you have described. But few
persons can know of it, for it is not on exhibition in the public
rooms. In fact, and I have held this position for eighteen years, I was
unaware of its existence myself.

“But upon consulting our old records I found that such an oar had been
presented by one Daniel Foss, of Elkton, Maryland, in the year 1821.
Not until after a long search did we find the oar in a disused attic
lumber-room of odds and ends. The notches and the legend are carved on
the oar just as you have described.

“We have also on file a pamphlet presented at the same time, written by
the said Daniel Foss, and published in Boston by the firm of N.
Coverly, Jr., in the year 1834. This pamphlet describes eight years of
a castaway’s life on a desert island. It is evident that this mariner,
in his old age and in want, hawked this pamphlet about among the
charitable.

“I am very curious to learn how you became aware of this oar, of the
existence of which we of the museum were ignorant. Am I correct in
assuming that you have read an account in some diary published later by
this Daniel Foss? I shall be glad for any information on the subject,
and am proceeding at once to have the oar and the pamphlet put back on
exhibition.

“Very truly yours,
“HOSEA SALSBURTY.”[1]

 [1] Since the execution of Professor Darrell Standing, at which time
 the manuscript of his memoirs came into our hands, we have written to
 Mr. Hosea Salsburty, Curator of the Philadelphia Museum, and, in
 reply, have received confirmation of the existence of the oar and the
 pamphlet.—THE EDITOR.




CHAPTER XX.


The time came when I humbled Warden Atherton to unconditional
surrender, making a vain and empty mouthing of his ultimatum, “Dynamite
or curtains.” He gave me up as one who could not be killed in a
strait-jacket. He had had men die after several hours in the jacket. He
had had men die after several days in the jacket, although, invariably,
they were unlaced and carted into hospital ere they breathed their last
. . . and received a death certificate from the doctor of pneumonia, or
Bright’s disease, or valvular disease of the heart.

But me Warden Atherton could never kill. Never did the urgency arise of
carting my maltreated and perishing carcass to the hospital. Yet I will
say that Warden Atherton tried his best and dared his worst. There was
the time when he double-jacketed me. It is so rich an incident that I
must tell it.

It happened that one of the San Francisco newspapers (seeking, as every
newspaper and as every commercial enterprise seeks, a market that will
enable it to realize a profit) tried to interest the radical portion of
the working class in prison reform. As a result, union labour
possessing an important political significance at the time, the
time-serving politicians at Sacramento appointed a senatorial committee
of investigation of the state prisons.

This State Senate committee _investigated_ (pardon my italicized sneer)
San Quentin. Never was there so model an institution of detention. The
convicts themselves so testified. Nor can one blame them. They had
experienced similar investigations in the past. They knew on which side
their bread was buttered. They knew that all their sides and most of
their ribs would ache very quickly after the taking of their testimony
. . . if said testimony were adverse to the prison administration. Oh,
believe me, my reader, it is a very ancient story. It was ancient in
old Babylon, many a thousand years ago, as I well remember of that old
time when I rotted in prison while palace intrigues shook the court.

As I have said, every convict testified to the humaneness of Warden
Atherton’s administration. In fact, so touching were their testimonials
to the kindness of the Warden, to the good and varied quality of the
food and the cooking, to the gentleness of the guards, and to the
general decency and ease and comfort of the prison domicile, that the
opposition newspapers of San Francisco raised an indignant cry for more
rigour in the management of our prisons, in that, otherwise, honest but
lazy citizens would be seduced into seeking enrolment as prison guests.

The Senate Committee even invaded solitary, where the three of us had
little to lose and nothing to gain. Jake Oppenheimer spat in its faces
and told its members, all and sundry, to go to hell. Ed Morrell told
them what a noisome stews the place was, insulted the Warden to his
face, and was recommended by the committee to be given a taste of the
antiquated and obsolete punishments that, after all, must have been
devised by previous Wardens out of necessity for the right handling of
hard characters like him.

I was careful not to insult the Warden. I testified craftily, and as a
scientist, beginning with small beginnings, making an art of my
exposition, step by step, by tiny steps, inveigling my senatorial
auditors on into willingness and eagerness to listen to the next
exposure, the whole fabric so woven that there was no natural halting
place at which to drop a period or interpolate a query . . . in this
fashion, thus, I got my tale across.

Alas! no whisper of what I divulged ever went outside the prison walls.
The Senate Committee gave a beautiful whitewash to Warden Atherton and
San Quentin. The crusading San Francisco newspaper assured its
working-class readers that San Quentin was whiter than snow, and
further, that while it was true that the strait-jacket was still a
recognized legal method of punishment for the refractory, that,
nevertheless, at the present time, under the present humane and
spiritually right-minded Warden, the strait-jacket was never, under any
circumstance, used.

And while the poor asses of labourers read and believed, while the
Senate Committee dined and wined with the Warden at the expense of the
state and the tax payer, Ed Morrell, Jake Oppenheimer, and I were lying
in our jackets, laced just a trifle more tightly and more vindictively
than we had ever been laced before.

“It is to laugh,” Ed Morrell tapped to me, with the edge of the sole of
his shoe.

“I should worry,” tapped Jake.

And as for me, I too capped my bitter scorn and laughter, remembered
the prison houses of old Babylon, smiled to myself a huge cosmic smile,
and drifted off and away into the largeness of the little death that
made me heir of all the ages and the rider full-panoplied and astride
of time.

Yea, dear brother of the outside world, while the whitewash was running
off the press, while the august senators were wining and dining, we
three of the living dead, buried alive in solidarity, were sweating our
pain in the canvas torture.

And after the dinner, warm with wine, Warden Atherton himself came to
see how fared it with us. Me, as usual, they found in coma. Doctor
Jackson for the first time must have been alarmed. I was brought back
across the dark to consciousness with the bite of ammonia in my
nostrils. I smiled into the faces bent over me.

“Shamming,” snorted the Warden, and I knew by the flush on his face and
the thickness in his tongue that he had been drinking.

I licked my lips as a sign for water, for I desired to speak.

“You are an ass,” I at last managed to say with cold distinctness. “You
are an ass, a coward, a cur, a pitiful thing so low that spittle would
be wasted on your face. In such matter Jake Oppenheimer is
over-generous with you. As for me, without shame I tell you the only
reason I do not spit upon you is that I cannot demean myself nor so
degrade my spittle.”

“I’ve reached the limit of my patience!” he bellowed. “I will kill you,
Standing!”

“You’ve been drinking,” I retorted. “And I would advise you, if you
must say such things, not to take so many of your prison curs into your
confidence. They will snitch on you some day, and you will lose your
job.”

But the wine was up and master of him.

“Put another jacket on him,” he commanded. “You are a dead man,
Standing. But you’ll not die in the jacket. We’ll bury you from the
hospital.”

This time, over the previous jacket, the second jacket was put on from
behind and laced up in front.

“Lord, Lord, Warden, it is bitter weather,” I sneered. “The frost is
sharp. Wherefore I am indeed grateful for your giving me two jackets. I
shall be almost comfortable.”

“Tighter!” he urged to Al Hutchins, who was drawing the lacing. “Throw
your feet into the skunk. Break his ribs.”

I must admit that Hutchins did his best.

“You _will_ lie about me,” the Warden raved, the flush of wine and
wrath flooding ruddier into his face. “Now see what you get for it.
Your number is taken at last, Standing. This is your finish. Do you
hear? This is your finish.”

“A favour, Warden,” I whispered faintly. Faint I was. Perforce I was
nearly unconscious from the fearful constriction. “Make it a triple
jacketing,” I managed to continue, while the cell walls swayed and
reeled about me and while I fought with all my will to hold to my
consciousness that was being squeezed out of me by the jackets.
“Another jacket . . . Warden . . . It . . . will . . . be . . . so . .
. much . . . er . . . warmer.”

And my whisper faded away as I ebbed down into the little death.

I was never the same man after that double-jacketing. Never again, to
this day, no matter what my food, was I properly nurtured. I suffered
internal injuries to an extent I never cared to investigate. The old
pain in my ribs and stomach is with me now as I write these lines. But
the poor, maltreated machinery has served its purpose. It has enabled
me to live thus far, and it will enable me to live the little longer to
the day they take me out in the shirt without a collar and stretch my
neck with the well-stretched rope.

But the double-jacketing was the last straw. It broke down Warden
Atherton. He surrendered to the demonstration that I was unkillable. As
I told him once:

“The only way you can get me, Warden, is to sneak in here some night
with a hatchet.”

Jake Oppenheimer was responsible for a good one on the Warden which I
must relate:

“I say, Warden, it must be straight hell for you to have to wake up
every morning with yourself on your pillow.”

And Ed Morrell to the Warden:

“Your mother must have been damn fond of children to have raised you.”

It was really an offence to me when the jacketing ceased. I sadly
missed that dream world of mine. But not for long. I found that I could
suspend animation by the exercise of my will, aided mechanically by
constricting my chest and abdomen with the blanket. Thus I induced
physiological and psychological states similar to those caused by the
jacket. So, at will, and without the old torment, I was free to roam
through time.

Ed Morrell believed all my adventures, but Jake Oppenheimer remained
sceptical to the last. It was during my third year in solitary that I
paid Oppenheimer a visit. I was never able to do it but that once, and
that one time was wholly unplanned and unexpected.

It was merely after unconsciousness had come to me that I found myself
in his cell. My body, I knew, lay in the jacket back in my own cell.
Although never before had I seen him, I knew that this man was Jake
Oppenheimer. It was summer weather, and he lay without clothes on top
his blanket. I was shocked by his cadaverous face and skeleton-like
body. He was not even the shell of a man. He was merely the structure
of a man, the bones of a man, still cohering, stripped practically of
all flesh and covered with a parchment-like skin.

Not until back in my own cell and consciousness was I able to mull the
thing over and realize that just as was Jake Oppenheimer, so was Ed
Morrell, so was I. And I could not but thrill as I glimpsed the
vastitude of spirit that inhabited these frail, perishing carcasses of
us—the three incorrigibles of solitary. Flesh is a cheap, vain thing.
Grass is flesh, and flesh becomes grass; but the spirit is the thing
that abides and survives. I have no patience with these
flesh-worshippers. A taste of solitary in San Quentin would swiftly
convert them to a due appreciation and worship of the spirit.

But to return to my experience in Oppenheimer’s cell. His body was that
of a man long dead and shrivelled by desert heat. The skin that covered
it was of the colour of dry mud. His sharp, yellow-gray eyes seemed the
only part of him that was alive. They were never at rest. He lay on his
back, and the eyes darted hither and thither, following the flight of
the several flies that disported in the gloomy air above him. I noted,
too, a scar, just above his right elbow, and another scar on his right
ankle.

After a time he yawned, rolled over on his side, and inspected an
angry-looking sore just above his hip. This he proceeded to cleanse and
dress by the crude methods men in solitary must employ. I recognized
the sore as one of the sort caused by the strait-jacket. On my body, at
this moment of writing, are hundreds of scars of the jacket.

Next, Oppenheimer rolled on his back, gingerly took one of his front
upper teeth—an eye tooth—between thumb and forefinger, and
consideratively moved it back and forth. Again he yawned, stretched his
arms, rolled over, and knocked the call to Ed Morrell.

I read the code as a matter of course.

“Thought you might be awake,” Oppenheimer tapped. “How goes it with the
Professor?”

Then, dim and far, I could hear Morrell’s taps enunciating that they
had put me in the jacket an hour before, and that, as usual, I was
already deaf to all knuckle talk.

“He is a good guy,” Oppenheimer rapped on. “I always was suspicious of
educated mugs, but he ain’t been hurt none by his education. He is sure
square. Got all the spunk in the world, and you could not get him to
squeal or double cross in a million years.”

To all of which, and with amplification, Ed Morrell agreed. And I must,
right here, ere I go a word further, say that I have lived many years
and many lives, and that in those many lives I have known proud
moments; but that the proudest moment I have ever known was the moment
when my two comrades in solitary passed this appraisal of me. Ed
Morrell and Jake Oppenheimer were great spirits, and in all time no
greater honour was ever accorded me than this admission of me to their
comradeship. Kings have knighted me, emperors have ennobled me, and, as
king myself, I have known stately moments. Yet of it all nothing do I
adjudge so splendid as this accolade delivered by two lifers in
solitary deemed by the world as the very bottom-most of the human
cesspool.

Afterwards, recuperating from this particular bout with the jacket, I
brought up my visit to Jake’s cell as a proof that my spirit did leave
my body. But Jake was unshakable.

“It is guessing that is more than guessing,” was his reply, when I had
described to him his successive particular actions at the time my
spirit had been in his cell. “It is figuring. You have been close to
three years in solitary yourself, Professor, and you can come pretty
near to figuring what any guy will do to be killing time. There ain’t a
thing you told me that you and Ed ain’t done thousands of times, from
lying with your clothes off in hot weather to watching flies, tending
sores, and rapping.”

Morrell sided with me, but it was no use.

“Now don’t take it hard, Professor,” Jake tapped. “I ain’t saying you
lied. I just say you get to dreaming and figuring in the jacket without
knowing you’re doing it. I know you believe what you say, and that you
think it happened; but it don’t buy nothing with me. You figure it, but
you don’t know you figure it—that is something you know all the time,
though you don’t know you know it until you get into them dreamy, woozy
states.”

“Hold on, Jake,” I tapped. “You know I have never seen you with my own
eyes. Is that right?”

“I got to take your word for it, Professor. You might have seen me and
not known it was me.”

“The point is,” I continued, “not having seen you with your clothes
off, nevertheless I am able to tell you about that scar above your
right elbow, and that scar on your right ankle.”

“Oh, shucks,” was his reply. “You’ll find all that in my prison
description and along with my mug in the rogues’ gallery. They is
thousands of chiefs of police and detectives know all that stuff.”

“I never heard of it,” I assured him.

“You don’t remember that you ever heard of it,” he corrected. “But you
must have just the same. Though you have forgotten about it, the
information is in your brain all right, stored away for reference, only
you’ve forgot where it is stored. You’ve got to get woozy in order to
remember.”

“Did you ever forget a man’s name you used to know as well as your own
brother’s? I have. There was a little juror that convicted me in
Oakland the time I got handed my fifty-years. And one day I found I’d
forgotten his name. Why, bo, I lay here for weeks puzzling for it. Now,
just because I could not dig it out of my memory box was no sign it was
not there. It was mislaid, that was all. And to prove it, one day, when
I was not even thinking about it, it popped right out of my brain to
the tip of my tongue. ‘Stacy,’ I said right out loud. ‘Joseph Stacy.’
That was it. Get my drive?

“You only tell me about them scars what thousands of men know. I don’t
know how you got the information, I guess you don’t know yourself. That
ain’t my lookout. But there she is. Telling me what many knows buys
nothing with me. You got to deliver a whole lot more than that to make
me swallow the rest of your whoppers.”

Hamilton’s Law of Parsimony in the weighing of evidence! So
intrinsically was this slum-bred convict a scientist, that he had
worked out Hamilton’s law and rigidly applied it.

And yet—and the incident is delicious—Jake Oppenheimer was
intellectually honest. That night, as I was dozing off, he called me
with the customary signal.

“Say, Professor, you said you saw me wiggling my loose tooth. That has
got my goat. That is the one thing I can’t figure out any way you could
know. It only went loose three days ago, and I ain’t whispered it to a
soul.”




CHAPTER XXI.


Pascal somewhere says: “In viewing the march of human evolution, the
philosophic mind should look upon humanity as one man, and not as a
conglomeration of individuals.”

I sit here in Murderers’ Row in Folsom, the drowsy hum of flies in my
ears as I ponder that thought of Pascal. It is true. Just as the human
embryo, in its brief ten lunar months, with bewildering swiftness, in
myriad forms and semblances a myriad times multiplied, rehearses the
entire history of organic life from vegetable to man; just as the human
boy, in his brief years of boyhood, rehearses the history of primitive
man in acts of cruelty and savagery, from wantonness of inflicting pain
on lesser creatures to tribal consciousness expressed by the desire to
run in gangs; just so, I, Darrell Standing, have rehearsed and relived
all that primitive man was, and did, and became until he became even
you and me and the rest of our kind in a twentieth century
civilization.

Truly do we carry in us, each human of us alive on the planet to-day,
the incorruptible history of life from life’s beginning. This history
is written in our tissues and our bones, in our functions and our
organs, in our brain cells and in our spirits, and in all sorts of
physical and psychic atavistic urgencies and compulsions. Once we were
fish-like, you and I, my reader, and crawled up out of the sea to
pioneer in the great, dry-land adventure in the thick of which we are
now. The marks of the sea are still on us, as the marks of the serpent
are still on us, ere the serpent became serpent and we became we, when
pre-serpent and pre-we were one. Once we flew in the air, and once we
dwelt arboreally and were afraid of the dark. The vestiges remain,
graven on you and me, and graven on our seed to come after us to the
end of our time on earth.

What Pascal glimpsed with the vision of a seer, I have lived. I have
seen myself that one man contemplated by Pascal’s philosophic eye. Oh,
I have a tale, most true, most wonderful, most real to me, although I
doubt that I have wit to tell it, and that you, my reader, have wit to
perceive it when told. I say that I have seen myself that one man
hinted at by Pascal. I have lain in the long trances of the jacket and
glimpsed myself a thousand living men living the thousand lives that
are themselves the history of the human man climbing upward through the
ages.

Ah, what royal memories are mine, as I flutter through the æons of the
long ago. In single jacket trances I have lived the many lives involved
in the thousand-years-long Odysseys of the early drifts of men.
Heavens, before I was of the flaxen-haired Aesir, who dwelt in Asgard,
and before I was of the red-haired Vanir, who dwelt in Vanaheim, long
before those times I have memories (living memories) of earlier drifts,
when, like thistledown before the breeze, we drifted south before the
face of the descending polar ice-cap.

I have died of frost and famine, fight and flood. I have picked berries
on the bleak backbone of the world, and I have dug roots to eat from
the fat-soiled fens and meadows. I have scratched the reindeer’s
semblance and the semblance of the hairy mammoth on ivory tusks gotten
of the chase and on the rock walls of cave shelters when the winter
storms moaned outside. I have cracked marrow-bones on the sites of
kingly cities that had perished centuries before my time or that were
destined to be builded centuries after my passing. And I have left the
bones of my transient carcasses in pond bottoms, and glacial gravels,
and asphaltum lakes.

I have lived through the ages known to-day among the scientists as the
Paleolithic, the Neolithic, and the Bronze. I remember when with our
domesticated wolves we herded our reindeer to pasture on the north
shore of the Mediterranean where now are France and Italy and Spain.
This was before the ice-sheet melted backward toward the pole. Many
processions of the equinoxes have I lived through and died in, my
reader . . . only that I remember and that you do not.

I have been a Son of the Plough, a Son of the Fish, a Son of the Tree.
All religions from the beginnings of man’s religious time abide in me.
And when the Dominie, in the chapel, here in Folsom of a Sunday,
worships God in his own good modern way, I know that in him, the
Dominie, still abide the worships of the Plough, the Fish, the Tree—ay,
and also all worships of Astarte and the Night.

I have been an Aryan master in old Egypt, when my soldiers scrawled
obscenities on the carven tombs of kings dead and gone and forgotten
aforetime. And I, the Aryan master in old Egypt, have myself builded my
two burial places—the one a false and mighty pyramid to which a
generation of slaves could attest; the other humble, meagre, secret,
rock-hewn in a desert valley by slaves who died immediately their work
was done. . . . And I wonder me here in Folsom, while democracy dreams
its enchantments o’er the twentieth century world, whether there, in
the rock-hewn crypt of that secret, desert valley, the bones still
abide that once were mine and that stiffened my animated body when I
was an Aryan master high-stomached to command.

And on the great drift, southward and eastward under the burning sun
that perished all descendants of the houses of Asgard and Vanaheim, I
have been a king in Ceylon, a builder of Aryan monuments under Aryan
kings in old Java and old Sumatra. And I have died a hundred deaths on
the great South Sea drift ere ever the rebirth of me came to plant
monuments, that only Aryans plant, on volcanic tropic islands that I,
Darrell Standing, cannot name, being too little versed to-day in that
far sea geography.

If only I were articulate to paint in the frail medium of words what I
see and know and possess incorporated in my consciousness of the mighty
driftage of the races in the times before our present written history
began! Yes, we had our history even then. Our old men, our priests, our
wise ones, told our history into tales and wrote those tales in the
stars so that our seed after us should not forget. From the sky came
the life-giving rain and the sunlight. And we studied the sky, learned
from the stars to calculate time and apportion the seasons; and we
named the stars after our heroes and our foods and our devices for
getting food; and after our wanderings, and drifts, and adventures; and
after our functions and our furies of impulse and desire.

And, alas! we thought the heavens unchanging on which we wrote all our
humble yearnings and all the humble things we did or dreamed of doing.
When I was a Son of the Bull, I remember me a lifetime I spent at
star-gazing. And, later and earlier, there were other lives in which I
sang with the priests and bards the taboo-songs of the stars wherein we
believed was written our imperishable record. And here, at the end of
it all, I pore over books of astronomy from the prison library, such as
they allow condemned men to read, and learn that even the heavens are
passing fluxes, vexed with star-driftage as the earth is by the drifts
of men.

Equipped with this modern knowledge, I have, returning through the
little death from my earlier lives, been able to compare the heavens
then and now. And the stars do change. I have seen pole stars and pole
stars and dynasties of pole stars. The pole star to-day is in Ursa
Minor. Yet, in those far days I have seen the pole star in Draco, in
Hercules, in Vega, in Cygnus, and in Cepheus. No; not even the stars
abide, and yet the memory and the knowledge of them abides in me, in
the spirit of me that is memory and that is eternal. Only spirit
abides. All else, being mere matter, passes, and must pass.

Oh, I do see myself to-day that one man who appeared in the elder
world, blonde, ferocious, a killer and a lover, a meat-eater and a
root-digger, a gypsy and a robber, who, club in hand, through
millenniums of years wandered the world around seeking meat to devour
and sheltered nests for his younglings and sucklings.

I am that man, the sum of him, the all of him, the hairless biped who
struggled upward from the slime and created love and law out of the
anarchy of fecund life that screamed and squalled in the jungle. I am
all that that man was and did become. I see myself, through the painful
generations, snaring and killing the game and the fish, clearing the
first fields from the forest, making rude tools of stone and bone,
building houses of wood, thatching the roofs with leaves and straw,
domesticating the wild grasses and meadow-roots, fathering them to
become the progenitors of rice and millet and wheat and barley and all
manner of succulent edibles, learning to scratch the soil, to sow, to
reap, to store, beating out the fibres of plants to spin into thread
and to weave into cloth, devising systems of irrigation, working in
metals, making markets and trade-routes, building boats, and founding
navigation—ay, and organizing village life, welding villages to
villages till they became tribes, welding tribes together till they
became nations, ever seeking the laws of things, ever making the laws
of humans so that humans might live together in amity and by united
effort beat down and destroy all manner of creeping, crawling,
squalling things that might else destroy them.

I was that man in all his births and endeavours. I am that man to-day,
waiting my due death by the law that I helped to devise many a thousand
years ago, and by which I have died many times before this, many times.
And as I contemplate this vast past history of me, I find several great
and splendid influences, and, chiefest of these, the love of woman,
man’s love for the woman of his kind. I see myself, the one man, the
lover, always the lover. Yes, also was I the great fighter, but somehow
it seems to me as I sit here and evenly balance it all, that I was,
more than aught else, the great lover. It was because I loved greatly
that I was the great fighter.

Sometimes I think that the story of man is the story of the love of
woman. This memory of all my past that I write now is the memory of my
love of woman. Ever, in the ten thousand lives and guises, I loved her.
I love her now. My sleep is fraught with her; my waking fancies, no
matter whence they start, lead me always to her. There is no escaping
her, that eternal, splendid, ever-resplendent figure of woman.

Oh, make no mistake. I am no callow, ardent youth. I am an elderly man,
broken in health and body, and soon to die. I am a scientist and a
philosopher. I, as all the generations of philosophers before me, know
woman for what she is—her weaknesses, and meannesses, and immodesties,
and ignobilities, her earth-bound feet, and her eyes that have never
seen the stars. But—and the everlasting, irrefragable fact remains:
_Her feet are beautiful, her eyes are beautiful, her arms and breasts
are paradise, her charm is potent beyond all charm that has ever
dazzled men; and, as the pole willy-nilly draws the needle, just so,
willy-nilly, does she draw men_.

Woman has made me laugh at death and distance, scorn fatigue and sleep.
I have slain men, many men, for love of woman, or in warm blood have
baptized our nuptials or washed away the stain of her favour to
another. I have gone down to death and dishonour, my betrayal of my
comrades and of the stars black upon me, for woman’s sake—for my sake,
rather, I desired her so. And I have lain in the barley, sick with
yearning for her, just to see her pass and glut my eyes with the
swaying wonder of her and of her hair, black with the night, or brown
or flaxen, or all golden-dusty with the sun.

For woman _is_ beautiful . . . to man. She is sweet to his tongue, and
fragrance in his nostrils. She is fire in his blood, and a thunder of
trumpets; her voice is beyond all music in his ears; and she can shake
his soul that else stands steadfast in the draughty presence of the
Titans of the Light and of the Dark. And beyond his star-gazing, in his
far-imagined heavens, Valkyrie or houri, man has fain made place for
her, for he could see no heaven without her. And the sword, in battle,
singing, sings not so sweet a song as the woman sings to man merely by
her laugh in the moonlight, or her love-sob in the dark, or by her
swaying on her way under the sun while he lies dizzy with longing in
the grass.

I have died of love. I have died for love, as you shall see. In a
little while they will take me out, me, Darrell Standing, and make me
die. And that death shall be for love. Oh, not lightly was I stirred
when I slew Professor Haskell in the laboratory at the University of
California. He was a man. I was a man. And there was a woman beautiful.
Do you understand? She was a woman and I was a man and a lover, and all
the heredity of love was mine up from the black and squalling jungle
ere love was love and man was man.

Oh, ay, it is nothing new. Often, often, in that long past have I given
life and honour, place and power for love. Man is different from woman.
She is close to the immediate and knows only the need of instant
things. We know honour above her honour, and pride beyond her wildest
guess of pride. Our eyes are far-visioned for star-gazing, while her
eyes see no farther than the solid earth beneath her feet, the lover’s
breast upon her breast, the infant lusty in the hollow of her arm. And
yet, such is our alchemy compounded of the ages, woman works magic in
our dreams and in our veins, so that more than dreams and far visions
and the blood of life itself is woman to us, who, as lovers truly say,
is more than all the world. Yet is this just, else would man not be
man, the fighter and the conqueror, treading his red way on the face of
all other and lesser life—for, had man not been the lover, the royal
lover, he could never have become the kingly fighter. We fight best,
and die best, and live best, for what we love.

I am that one man. I see myself the many selves that have gone into the
constituting of me. And ever I see the woman, the many women, who have
made me and undone me, who have loved me and whom I have loved.

I remember, oh, long ago when human kind was very young, that I made me
a snare and a pit with a pointed stake upthrust in the middle thereof,
for the taking of Sabre-Tooth. Sabre-Tooth, long-fanged and
long-haired, was the chiefest peril to us of the squatting place, who
crouched through the nights over our fires and by day increased the
growing shell-bank beneath us by the clams we dug and devoured from the
salt mud-flats beside us.

And when the roar and the squall of Sabre-Tooth roused us where we
squatted by our dying embers, and I was wild with far vision of the
proof of the pit and the stake, it was the woman, arms about me,
leg-twining, who fought with me and restrained me not to go out through
the dark to my desire. She was part-clad, for warmth only, in skins of
animals, mangy and fire-burnt, that I had slain; she was swart and
dirty with camp smoke, unwashed since the spring rains, with nails
gnarled and broken, and hands that were calloused like footpads and
were more like claws than like hands; but her eyes were blue as the
summer sky is, as the deep sea is, and there was that in her eyes, and
in her clasped arms about me, and in her heart beating against mine,
that withheld me . . . though through the dark until dawn, while
Sabre-Tooth squalled his wrath and his agony, I could hear my comrades
snickering and sniggling to their women in that I had not the faith in
my emprise and invention to venture through the night to the pit and
the stake I had devised for the undoing of Sabre-Tooth. But my woman,
my savage mate held me, savage that I was, and her eyes drew me, and
her arms chained me, and her twining legs and heart beating to mine
seduced me from my far dream of things, my man’s achievement, the goal
beyond goals, the taking and the slaying of Sabre-Tooth on the stake in
the pit.

Once I was Ushu, the archer. I remember it well. For I was lost from my
own people, through the great forest, till I emerged on the flat lands
and grass lands, and was taken in by a strange people, kin in that
their skin was white, their hair yellow, their speech not too remote
from mine. And she was Igar, and I drew her as I sang in the twilight,
for she was destined a race-mother, and she was broad-built and
full-dugged, and she could not but draw to the man heavy-muscled,
deep-chested, who sang of his prowess in man-slaying and in
meat-getting, and so, promised food and protection to her in her
weakness whilst she mothered the seed that was to hunt the meat and
live after her.

And these people knew not the wisdom of my people, in that they snared
and pitted their meat and in battle used clubs and stone
throwing-sticks and were unaware of the virtues of arrows swift-flying,
notched on the end to fit the thong of deer-sinew, well-twisted, that
sprang into straightness when released to the spring of the ask-stick
bent in the middle.

And while I sang, the stranger men laughed in the twilight. And only
she, Igar, believed and had faith in me. I took her alone to the
hunting, where the deer sought the water-hole. And my bow twanged and
sang in the covert, and the deer fell fast-stricken, and the warm meat
was sweet to us, and she was mine there by the water-hole.

And because of Igar I remained with the strange men. And I taught them
the making of bows from the red and sweet-smelling wood like unto
cedar. And I taught them to keep both eyes open, and to aim with the
left eye, and to make blunt shafts for small game, and pronged shafts
of bone for the fish in the clear water, and to flake arrow-heads from
obsidian for the deer and the wild horse, the elk and old Sabre-Tooth.
But the flaking of stone they laughed at, till I shot an elk through
and through, the flaked stone standing out and beyond, the feathered
shaft sunk in its vitals, the whole tribe applauding.

I was Ushu, the archer, and Igar was my woman and mate. We laughed
under the sun in the morning, when our man-child and woman-child,
yellowed like honey-bees, sprawled and rolled in the mustard, and at
night she lay close in my arms, and loved me, and urged me, because of
my skill at the seasoning of woods and the flaking of arrow-heads, that
I should stay close by the camp and let the other men bring to me the
meat from the perils of hunting. And I listened, and grew fat and
short-breathed, and in the long nights, unsleeping, worried that the
men of the stranger tribe brought me meat for my wisdom and honour, but
laughed at my fatness and undesire for the hunting and fighting.

And in my old age, when our sons were man-grown and our daughters were
mothers, when up from the southland the dark men, flat-browed,
kinky-headed, surged like waves of the sea upon us and we fled back
before them to the hill-slopes, Igar, like my mates far before and long
after, leg-twining, arm-clasping, unseeing far visions, strove to hold
me aloof from the battle.

And I tore myself from her, fat and short-breathed, while she wept that
no longer I loved her, and I went out to the night-fighting and
dawn-fighting, where, to the singing of bowstrings and the shrilling of
arrows, feathered, sharp-pointed, we showed them, the kinky-heads, the
skill of the killing and taught them the wit and the willing of
slaughter.

And as I died there at the end of the fighting, there were death songs
and singing about me, and the songs seemed to sing as these the words I
have written when I was Ushu, the archer, and Igar, my mate-woman,
leg-twining, arm-clasping, would have held me back from the battle.

Once, and heaven alone knows when, save that it was in the long ago
when man was young, we lived beside great swamps, where the hills drew
down close to the wide, sluggish river, and where our women gathered
berries and roots, and there were herds of deer, of wild horses, of
antelope, and of elk, that we men slew with arrows or trapped in the
pits or hill-pockets. From the river we caught fish in nets twisted by
the women of the bark of young trees.

I was a man, eager and curious as the antelope when we lured it by
waving grass clumps where we lay hidden in the thick of the grass. The
wild rice grew in the swamp, rising sheer from the water on the edges
of the channels. Each morning the blackbirds awoke us with their
chatter as they left their roosts to fly to the swamp. And through the
long twilight the air was filled with their noise as they went back to
their roosts. It was the time that the rice ripened. And there were
ducks also, and ducks and blackbirds feasted to fatness on the ripe
rice half unhusked by the sun.

Being a man, ever restless, ever questing, wondering always what lay
beyond the hills and beyond the swamps and in the mud at the river’s
bottom, I watched the wild ducks and blackbirds and pondered till my
pondering gave me vision and I saw. And this is what I saw, the
reasoning of it:

Meat was good to eat. In the end, tracing it back, or at the first,
rather, all meat came from grass. The meat of the duck and of the
blackbird came from the seed of the swamp rice. To kill a duck with an
arrow scarce paid for the labour of stalking and the long hours in
hiding. The blackbirds were too small for arrow-killing save by the
boys who were learning and preparing for the taking of larger game. And
yet, in rice season, blackbirds and ducks were succulently fat. Their
fatness came from the rice. Why should I and mine not be fat from the
rice in the same way?

And I thought it out in camp, silent, morose, while the children
squabbled about me unnoticed, and while Arunga, my mate-woman, vainly
scolded me and urged me to go hunting for more meat for the many of us.

Arunga was the woman I had stolen from the hill-tribes. She and I had
been a dozen moons in learning common speech after I captured her. Ah,
that day when I leaped upon her, down from the over-hanging tree-branch
as she padded the runway! Fairly upon her shoulders with the weight of
my body I smote her, my fingers wide-spreading to clutch her. She
squalled like a cat there in the runway. She fought me and bit me. The
nails of her hands were like the claws of a tree-cat as they tore at
me. But I held her and mastered her, and for two days beat her and
forced her to travel with me down out of the canyons of the Hill-Men to
the grass lands where the river flowed through the rice-swamps and the
ducks and the blackbirds fed fat.

I saw my vision when the rice was ripe. I put Arunga in the bow of the
fire-hollowed log that was most rudely a canoe. I bade her paddle. In
the stern I spread a deerskin she had tanned. With two stout sticks I
bent the stalks over the deerskin and threshed out the grain that else
the blackbirds would have eaten. And when I had worked out the way of
it, I gave the two stout sticks to Arunga, and sat in the bow paddling
and directing.

In the past we had eaten the raw rice in passing and not been pleased
with it. But now we parched it over our fire so that the grains puffed
and exploded in whiteness and all the tribe came running to taste.

After that we became known among men as the Rice-Eaters and as the Sons
of the Rice. And long, long after, when we were driven by the Sons of
the River from the swamps into the uplands, we took the seed of the
rice with us and planted it. We learned to select the largest grains
for the seed, so that all the rice we thereafter ate was larger-grained
and puffier in the parching and the boiling.

But Arunga. I have said she squalled and scratched like a cat when I
stole her. Yet I remember the time when her own kin of the Hill-Men
caught me and carried me away into the hills. They were her father, his
brother, and her two own blood-brothers. But she was mine, who had
lived with me. And at night, where I lay bound like a wild pig for the
slaying, and they slept weary by the fire, she crept upon them and
brained them with the war-club that with my hands I had fashioned. And
she wept over me, and loosed me, and fled with me, back to the wide
sluggish river where the blackbirds and wild ducks fed in the rice
swamps—for this was before the time of the coming of the Sons of the
River.

For she was Arunga, the one woman, the eternal woman. She has lived in
all times and places. She will always live. She is immortal. Once, in a
far land, her name was Ruth. Also has her name been Iseult, and Helen,
Pocahontas, and Unga. And no stranger man, from stranger tribes, but
has found her and will find her in the tribes of all the earth.

I remember so many women who have gone into the becoming of the one
woman. There was the time that Har, my brother, and I, sleeping and
pursuing in turn, ever hounding the wild stallion through the daytime
and night, and in a wide circle that met where the sleeping one lay,
drove the stallion unresting through hunger and thirst to the meekness
of weakness, so that in the end he could but stand and tremble while we
bound him with ropes twisted of deer-hide. On our legs alone, without
hardship, aided merely by wit—the plan was mine—my brother and I walked
that fleet-footed creature into possession.

And when all was ready for me to get on his back—for that had been my
vision from the first—Selpa, my woman, put her arms about me, and
raised her voice and persisted that Har, and not I, should ride, for
Har had neither wife nor young ones and could die without hurt. Also,
in the end she wept, so that I was raped of my vision, and it was Har,
naked and clinging, that bestrode the stallion when he vaulted away.

It was sunset, and a time of great wailing, when they carried Har in
from the far rocks where they found him. His head was quite broken, and
like honey from a fallen bee-tree his brains dripped on the ground. His
mother strewed wood-ashes on her head and blackened her face. His
father cut off half the fingers of one hand in token of sorrow. And all
the women, especially the young and unwedded, screamed evil names at
me; and the elders shook their wise heads and muttered and mumbled that
not their fathers nor their fathers’ fathers had betrayed such a
madness. Horse meat was good to eat; young colts were tender to old
teeth; and only a fool would come to close grapples with any wild horse
save when an arrow had pierced it, or when it struggled on the stake in
the midst of the pit.

And Selpa scolded me to sleep, and in the morning woke me with her
chatter, ever declaiming against my madness, ever pronouncing her claim
upon me and the claims of our children, till in the end I grew weary,
and forsook my far vision, and said never again would I dream of
bestriding the wild horse to fly swift as its feet and the wind across
the sands and the grass lands.

And through the years the tale of my madness never ceased from being
told over the camp-fire. Yet was the very telling the source of my
vengeance; for the dream did not die, and the young ones, listening to
the laugh and the sneer, redreamed it, so that in the end it was Othar,
my eldest-born, himself a sheer stripling, that walked down a wild
stallion, leapt on its back, and flew before all of us with the speed
of the wind. Thereafter, that they might keep up with him, all men were
trapping and breaking wild horses. Many horses were broken, and some
men, but I lived at the last to the day when, at the changing of
camp-sites in the pursuit of the meat in its seasons, our very babes,
in baskets of willow-withes, were slung side and side on the backs of
our horses that carried our camp-trappage and dunnage.

I, a young man, had seen my vision, dreamed my dream; Selpa, the woman,
had held me from that far desire; but Othar, the seed of us to live
after, glimpsed my vision and won to it, so that our tribe became
wealthy in the gains of the chase.

There was a woman—on the great drift down out of Europe, a weary drift
of many generations, when we brought into India the shorthorn cattle
and the planting of barley. But this woman was long before we reached
India. We were still in the mid-most of that centuries-long drift, and
no shrewdness of geography can now place for me that ancient valley.

The woman was Nuhila. The valley was narrow, not long, and the swift
slope of its floor and the steep walls of its rim were terraced for the
growing of rice and of millet—the first rice and millet we Sons of the
Mountain had known. They were a meek people in that valley. They had
become soft with the farming of fat land made fatter by water. Theirs
was the first irrigation we had seen, although we had little time to
mark their ditches and channels by which all the hill waters flowed to
the fields they had builded. We had little time to mark, for we Sons of
the Mountain, who were few, were in flight before the Sons of the
Snub-Nose, who were many. We called them the Noseless, and they called
themselves the Sons of the Eagle. But they were many, and we fled
before them with our shorthorn cattle, our goats, and our barleyseed,
our women and children.

While the Snub-Noses slew our youths at the rear, we slew at our fore
the folk of the valley who opposed us and were weak. The village was
mud-built and grass-thatched; the encircling wall was of mud, but quite
tall. And when we had slain the people who had built the wall, and
sheltered within it our herds and our women and children, we stood on
the wall and shouted insult to the Snub-Noses. For we had found the mud
granaries filled with rice and millet. Our cattle could eat the
thatches. And the time of the rains was at hand, so that we should not
want for water.

It was a long siege. Near to the beginning, we gathered together the
women, and elders, and children we had not slain, and forced them out
through the wall they had builded. But the Snub-Noses slew them to the
last one, so that there was more food in the village for us, more food
in the valley for the Snub-Noses.

It was a weary long siege. Sickness smote us, and we died of the plague
that arose from our buried ones. We emptied the mud-granaries of their
rice and millet. Our goats and shorthorns ate the thatch of the houses,
and we, ere the end, ate the goats and the shorthorns.

Where there had been five men of us on the wall, there came a time when
there was one; where there had been half a thousand babes and
younglings of ours, there were none. It was Nuhila, my woman, who cut
off her hair and twisted it that I might have a strong string for my
bow. The other women did likewise, and when the wall was attacked,
stood shoulder to shoulder with us, in the midst of our spears and
arrows raining down potsherds and cobblestones on the heads of the
Snub-Noses.

Even the patient Snub-Noses we well-nigh out-patienced. Came a time
when of ten men of us, but one was alive on the wall, and of our women
remained very few, and the Snub-Noses held parley. They told us we were
a strong breed, and that our women were men-mothers, and that if we
would let them have our women they would leave us alone in the valley
to possess for ourselves and that we could get women from the valleys
to the south.

And Nuhila said no. And the other women said no. And we sneered at the
Snub-Noses and asked if they were weary of fighting. And we were as
dead men then, as we sneered at our enemies, and there was little fight
left in us we were so weak. One more attack on the wall would end us.
We knew it. Our women knew it. And Nuhila said that we could end it
first and outwit the Snub-Noses. And all our women agreed. And while
the Snub-Noses prepared for the attack that would be final, there, on
the wall, we slew our women. Nuhila loved me, and leaned to meet the
thrust of my sword, there on the wall. And we men, in the love of
tribehood and tribesmen, slew one another till remained only Horda and
I alive in the red of the slaughter. And Horda was my elder, and I
leaned to his thrust. But not at once did I die. I was the last of the
Sons of the Mountain, for I saw Horda, himself fall on his blade and
pass quickly. And dying with the shouts of the oncoming Snub-Noses
growing dim in my ears, I was glad that the Snub-Noses would have no
sons of us to bring up by our women.

I do not know when this time was when I was a Son of the Mountain and
when we died in the narrow valley where we had slain the Sons of the
Rice and the Millet. I do not know, save that it was centuries before
the wide-spreading drift of all us Sons of the Mountain fetched into
India, and that it was long before ever I was an Aryan master in Old
Egypt building my two burial places and defacing the tombs of kings
before me.

I should like to tell more of those far days, but time in the present
is short. Soon I shall pass. Yet am I sorry that I cannot tell more of
those early drifts, when there was crushage of peoples, or descending
ice-sheets, or migrations of meat.

Also, I should like to tell of Mystery. For always were we curious to
solve the secrets of life, death, and decay. Unlike the other animals,
man was for ever gazing at the stars. Many gods he created in his own
image and in the images of his fancy. In those old times I have
worshipped the sun and the dark. I have worshipped the husked grain as
the parent of life. I have worshipped Sar, the Corn Goddess. And I have
worshipped sea gods, and river gods, and fish gods.

Yes, and I remember Ishtar ere she was stolen from us by the
Babylonians, and Ea, too, was ours, supreme in the Under World, who
enabled Ishtar to conquer death. Mitra, likewise, was a good old Aryan
god, ere he was filched from us or we discarded him. And I remember, on
a time, long after the drift when we brought the barley into India,
that I came down into India, a horse-trader, with many servants and a
long caravan at my back, and that at that time they were worshipping
Bodhisatwa.

Truly, the worships of the Mystery wandered as did men, and between
filchings and borrowings the gods had as vagabond a time of it as did
we. As the Sumerians took the loan of Shamashnapishtin from us, so did
the Sons of Shem take him from the Sumerians and call him Noah.

Why, I smile me to-day, Darrell Standing, in Murderers’ Row, in that I
was found guilty and awarded death by twelve jurymen staunch and true.
Twelve has ever been a magic number of the Mystery. Nor did it
originate with the twelve tribes of Israel. Star-gazers before them had
placed the twelve signs of the Zodiac in the sky. And I remember me,
when I was of the Assir, and of the Vanir, that Odin sat in judgment
over men in the court of the twelve gods, and that their names were
Thor, Baldur, Niord, Frey, Tyr, Bregi, Heimdal, Hoder, Vidar, Ull,
Forseti, and Loki.

Even our Valkyries were stolen from us and made into angels, and the
wings of the Valkyries’ horses became attached to the shoulders of the
angels. And our Helheim of that day of ice and frost has become the
hell of to-day, which is so hot an abode that the blood boils in one’s
veins, while with us, in our Helheim, the place was so cold as to
freeze the marrow inside the bones. And the very sky, that we dreamed
enduring, eternal, has drifted and veered, so that we find to-day the
scorpion in the place where of old we knew the goat, and the archer in
the place of the crab.

Worships and worships! Ever the pursuit of the Mystery! I remember the
lame god of the Greeks, the master-smith. But their vulcan was the
Germanic Wieland, the master-smith captured and hamstrung lame of a leg
by Nidung, the kind of the Nids. But before that he was our
master-smith, our forger and hammerer, whom we named Il-marinen. And
him we begat of our fancy, giving him the bearded sun-god for father,
and nursing him by the stars of the bear. For, he, Vulcan, or Wieland,
or Il-marinen, was born under the pine tree, from the hair of the wolf,
and was called also the bear-father ere ever the Germans and Greeks
purloined and worshipped him. In that day we called ourselves the Sons
of the Bear and the Sons of the Wolf, and the bear and the wolf were
our totems. That was before our drift south on which we joined with the
Sons of the Tree-Grove and taught them our totems and tales.

Yes, and who was Kashyapa, who was Pururavas, but our lame
master-smith, our iron-worker, carried by us in our drifts and re-named
and worshipped by the south-dwellers and the east-dwellers, the Sons of
the Pole and of the Fire Drill and Fire Socket.

But the tale is too long, though I should like to tell of the
three-leaved Herb of Life by which Sigmund made Sinfioti alive again.
For this is the very soma-plant of India, the holy grail of King
Arthur, the—but enough! enough!

And yet, as I calmly consider it all, I conclude that the greatest
thing in life, in all lives, to me and to all men, has been woman, is
woman, and will be woman so long as the stars drift in the sky and the
heavens flux eternal change. Greater than our toil and endeavour, the
play of invention and fancy, battle and star-gazing and
mystery—greatest of all has been woman.

Even though she has sung false music to me, and kept my feet solid on
the ground, and drawn my star-roving eyes ever back to gaze upon her,
she, the conserver of life, the earth-mother, has given me my great
days and nights and fulness of years. Even mystery have I imaged in the
form of her, and in my star-charting have I placed her figure in the
sky.

All my toils and devices led to her; all my far visions saw her at the
end. When I made the fire-drill and fire-socket, it was for her. It was
for her, although I did not know it, that I put the stake in the pit
for old Sabre-Tooth, tamed the horse, slew the mammoth, and herded my
reindeer south in advance of the ice-sheet. For her I harvested the
wild rice, tamed the barley, the wheat, and the corn.

For her, and the seed to come after whose image she bore, I have died
in tree-tops and stood long sieges in cave-mouths and on mud-walls. For
her I put the twelve signs in the sky. It was she I worshipped when I
bowed before the ten stones of jade and adored them as the moons of
gestation.

Always has woman crouched close to earth like a partridge hen mothering
her young; always has my wantonness of roving led me out on the shining
ways; and always have my star-paths returned me to her, the figure
everlasting, the woman, the one woman, for whose arms I had such need
that clasped in them I have forgotten the stars.

For her I accomplished Odysseys, scaled mountains, crossed deserts; for
her I led the hunt and was forward in battle; and for her and to her I
sang my songs of the things I had done. All ecstasies of life and
rhapsodies of delight have been mine because of her. And here, at the
end, I can say that I have known no sweeter, deeper madness of being
than to drown in the fragrant glory and forgetfulness of her hair.

One word more. I remember me Dorothy, just the other day, when I still
lectured on agronomy to farmer-boy students. She was eleven years old.
Her father was dean of the college. She was a woman-child, and a woman,
and she conceived that she loved me. And I smiled to myself, for my
heart was untouched and lay elsewhere.

Yet was the smile tender, for in the child’s eyes I saw the woman
eternal, the woman of all times and appearances. In her eyes I saw the
eyes of my mate of the jungle and tree-top, of the cave and the
squatting-place. In her eyes I saw the eyes of Igar when I was Ushu the
archer, the eyes of Arunga when I was the rice-harvester, the eyes of
Selpa when I dreamed of bestriding the stallion, the eyes of Nuhila who
leaned to the thrust of my sword. Yes, there was that in her eyes that
made them the eyes of Lei-Lei whom I left with a laugh on my lips, the
eyes of the Lady Om for forty years my beggar-mate on highway and
byway, the eyes of Philippa for whom I was slain on the grass in old
France, the eyes of my mother when I was the lad Jesse at the Mountain
Meadows in the circle of our forty great wagons.

She was a woman-child, but she was daughter of all women, as her mother
before her, and she was the mother of all women to come after her. She
was Sar, the corn-goddess. She was Isthar who conquered death. She was
Sheba and Cleopatra; she was Esther and Herodias. She was Mary the
Madonna, and Mary the Magdalene, and Mary the sister of Martha, also
she was Martha. And she was Brünnhilde and Guinevere, Iseult and
Juliet, Héloïse and Nicolette. Yes, and she was Eve, she was Lilith,
she was Astarte. She was eleven years old, and she was all women that
had been, all women to be.

I sit in my cell now, while the flies hum in the drowsy summer
afternoon, and I know that my time is short. Soon they will apparel me
in the shirt without a collar. . . . But hush, my heart. The spirit is
immortal. After the dark I shall live again, and there will be women.
The future holds the little women for me in the lives I am yet to live.
And though the stars drift, and the heavens lie, ever remains woman,
resplendent, eternal, the one woman, as I, under all my masquerades and
misadventures, am the one man, her mate.




CHAPTER XXII.


My time grows very short. All the manuscript I have written is safely
smuggled out of the prison. There is a man I can trust who will see
that it is published. No longer am I in Murderers Row. I am writing
these lines in the death cell, and the death-watch is set on me. Night
and day is this death-watch on me, and its paradoxical function is to
see that I do not die. I must be kept alive for the hanging, or else
will the public be cheated, the law blackened, and a mark of demerit
placed against the time-serving warden who runs this prison and one of
whose duties is to see that his condemned ones are duly and properly
hanged. Often I marvel at the strange way some men make their livings.

This shall be my last writing. To-morrow morning the hour is set. The
governor has declined to pardon or reprieve, despite the fact that the
Anti-Capital-Punishment League has raised quite a stir in California.
The reporters are gathered like so many buzzards. I have seen them all.
They are queer young fellows, most of them, and most queer is it that
they will thus earn bread and butter, cocktails and tobacco, room-rent,
and, if they are married, shoes and schoolbooks for their children, by
witnessing the execution of Professor Darrell Standing, and by
describing for the public how Professor Darrell Standing died at the
end of a rope. Ah, well, they will be sicker than I at the end of the
affair.

As I sit here and muse on it all, the footfalls of the death-watch
going up and down outside my cage, the man’s suspicious eyes ever
peering in on me, almost I weary of eternal recurrence. I have lived so
many lives. I weary of the endless struggle and pain and catastrophe
that come to those who sit in the high places, tread the shining ways,
and wander among the stars.

Almost I hope, when next I reinhabit form, that it shall be that of a
peaceful farmer. There is my dream-farm. I should like to engage just
for one whole life in that. Oh, my dream-farm! My alfalfa meadows, my
efficient Jersey cattle, my upland pastures, my brush-covered slopes
melting into tilled fields, while ever higher up the slopes my angora
goats eat away brush to tillage!

There is a basin there, a natural basin high up the slopes, with a
generous watershed on three sides. I should like to throw a dam across
the fourth side, which is surprisingly narrow. At a paltry price of
labour I could impound twenty million gallons of water. For, see: one
great drawback to farming in California is our long dry summer. This
prevents the growing of cover crops, and the sensitive soil, naked, a
mere surface dust-mulch, has its humus burned out of it by the sun. Now
with that dam I could grow three crops a year, observing due rotation,
and be able to turn under a wealth of green manure. . . .

I have just endured a visit from the Warden. I say “endured” advisedly.
He is quite different from the Warden of San Quentin. He was very
nervous, and perforce I had to entertain him. This is his first
hanging. He told me so. And I, with a clumsy attempt at wit, did not
reassure him when I explained that it was also my first hanging. He was
unable to laugh. He has a girl in high school, and his boy is a
freshman at Stanford. He has no income outside his salary, his wife is
an invalid, and he is worried in that he has been rejected by the life
insurance doctors as an undesirable risk. Really, the man told me
almost all his troubles. Had I not diplomatically terminated the
interview he would still be here telling me the remainder of them.

My last two years in San Quentin were very gloomy and depressing. Ed
Morrell, by one of the wildest freaks of chance, was taken out of
solitary and made head trusty of the whole prison. This was Al
Hutchins’ old job, and it carried a graft of three thousand dollars a
year. To my misfortune, Jake Oppenheimer, who had rotted in solitary
for so many years, turned sour on the world, on everything. For eight
months he refused to talk even to me.

In prison, news will travel. Give it time and it will reach dungeon and
solitary cell. It reached me, at last, that Cecil Winwood, the
poet-forger, the snitcher, the coward, and the stool, was returned for
a fresh forgery. It will be remembered that it was this Cecil Winwood
who concocted the fairy story that I had changed the plant of the
non-existent dynamite and who was responsible for the five years I had
then spent in solitary.

I decided to kill Cecil Winwood. You see, Morrell was gone, and
Oppenheimer, until the outbreak that finished him, had remained in the
silence. Solitary had grown monotonous for me. I had to do something.
So I remembered back to the time when I was Adam Strang and patiently
nursed revenge for forty years. What he had done I could do if once I
locked my hands on Cecil Winwood’s throat.

It cannot be expected of me to divulge how I came into possession of
the four needles. They were small cambric needles. Emaciated as my body
was, I had to saw four bars, each in two places, in order to make an
aperture through which I could squirm. I did it. I used up one needle
to each bar. This meant two cuts to a bar, and it took a month to a
cut. Thus I should have been eight months in cutting my way out.
Unfortunately, I broke my last needle on the last bar, and I had to
wait three months before I could get another needle. But I got it, and
I got out.

I regret greatly that I did not get Cecil Winwood. I had calculated
well on everything save one thing. The certain chance to find Winwood
would be in the dining-room at dinner hour. So I waited until Pie-Face
Jones, the sleepy guard, should be on shift at the noon hour. At that
time I was the only inmate of solitary, so that Pie-Face Jones was
quickly snoring. I removed my bars, squeezed out, stole past him along
the ward, opened the door and was free . . . to a portion of the inside
of the prison.

And here was the one thing I had not calculated on—myself. I had been
five years in solitary. I was hideously weak. I weighed eighty-seven
pounds. I was half blind. And I was immediately stricken with
agoraphobia. I was affrighted by spaciousness. Five years in narrow
walls had unfitted me for the enormous declivity of the stairway, for
the vastitude of the prison yard.

The descent of that stairway I consider the most heroic exploit I ever
accomplished. The yard was deserted. The blinding sun blazed down on
it. Thrice I essayed to cross it. But my senses reeled and I shrank
back to the wall for protection. Again, summoning all my courage, I
attempted it. But my poor blear eyes, like a bat’s, startled me at my
shadow on the flagstones. I attempted to avoid my own shadow, tripped,
fell over it, and like a drowning man struggling for shore crawled back
on hands and knees to the wall.

I leaned against the wall and cried. It was the first time in many
years that I had cried. I remember noting, even in my extremity, the
warmth of the tears on my cheeks and the salt taste when they reached
my lips. Then I had a chill, and for a time shook as with an ague.
Abandoning the openness of the yard as too impossible a feat for one in
my condition, still shaking with the chill, crouching close to the
protecting wall, my hands touching it, I started to skirt the yard.

Then it was, somewhere along, that the guard Thurston espied me. I saw
him, distorted by my bleared eyes, a huge, well-fed monster, rushing
upon me with incredible speed out of the remote distance. Possibly, at
that moment, he was twenty feet away. He weighed one hundred and
seventy pounds. The struggle between us can be easily imagined, but
somewhere in that brief struggle it was claimed that I struck him on
the nose with my fist to such purpose as to make that organ bleed.

At any rate, being a lifer, and the penalty in California for battery
by a lifer being death, I was so found guilty by a jury which could not
ignore the asseverations of the guard Thurston and the rest of the
prison hang-dogs that testified, and I was so sentenced by a judge who
could not ignore the law as spread plainly on the statute book.

I was well pummelled by Thurston, and all the way back up that
prodigious stairway I was roundly kicked, punched, and cuffed by the
horde of trusties and guards who got in one another’s way in their zeal
to assist him. Heavens, if his nose did bleed, the probability is that
some of his own kind were guilty of causing it in the confusion of the
scuffle. I shouldn’t care if I were responsible for it myself, save
that it is so pitiful a thing for which to hang a man. . . .

I have just had a talk with the man on shift of my death-watch. A
little less than a year ago, Jake Oppenheimer occupied this same
death-cell on the road to the gallows which I will tread to-morrow.
This man was one of the death-watch on Jake. He is an old soldier. He
chews tobacco constantly, and untidily, for his gray beard and
moustache are stained yellow. He is a widower, with fourteen living
children, all married, and is the grandfather of thirty-one living
grandchildren, and the great-grandfather of four younglings, all girls.
It was like pulling teeth to extract such information. He is a queer
old codger, of a low order of intelligence. That is why, I fancy, he
has lived so long and fathered so numerous a progeny. His mind must
have crystallized thirty years ago. His ideas are none of them later
than that vintage. He rarely says more than yes and no to me. It is not
because he is surly. He has no ideas to utter. I don’t know, when I
live again, but what one incarnation such as his would be a nice
vegetative existence in which to rest up ere I go star-roving again. .
. .

But to go back. I must take a line in which to tell, after I was
hustled and bustled, kicked and punched, up that terrible stairway by
Thurston and the rest of the prison-dogs, of the infinite relief of my
narrow cell when I found myself back in solitary. It was all so safe,
so secure. I felt like a lost child returned home again. I loved those
very walls that I had so hated for five years. All that kept the
vastness of space, like a monster, from pouncing upon me were those
good stout walls of mine, close to hand on every side. Agoraphobia is a
terrible affliction. I have had little opportunity to experience it,
but from that little I can only conclude that hanging is a far easier
matter. . . .

I have just had a hearty laugh. The prison doctor, a likable chap, has
just been in to have a yarn with me, incidentally to proffer me his
good offices in the matter of dope. Of course I declined his
proposition to “shoot me” so full of morphine through the night that
to-morrow I would not know, when I marched to the gallows, whether I
was “coming or going.”

But the laugh. It was just like Jake Oppenheimer. I can see the lean
keenness of the man as he strung the reporters with his deliberate bull
which they thought involuntary. It seems, his last morning, breakfast
finished, incased in the shirt without a collar, that the reporters,
assembled for his last word in his cell, asked him for his views on
capital punishment.

—Who says we have more than the slightest veneer of civilization coated
over our raw savagery when a group of living men can ask such a
question of a man about to die and whom they are to see die?

But Jake was ever game. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I hope to live to see
the day when capital punishment is abolished.”

I have lived many lives through the long ages. Man, the individual, has
made no moral progress in the past ten thousand years. I affirm this
absolutely. The difference between an unbroken colt and the patient
draught-horse is purely a difference of training. Training is the only
moral difference between the man of to-day and the man of ten thousand
years ago. Under his thin skin of morality which he has had polished
onto him, he is the same savage that he was ten thousand years ago.
Morality is a social fund, an accretion through the painful ages. The
new-born child will become a savage unless it is trained, polished, by
the abstract morality that has been so long accumulating.

“Thou shalt not kill”—piffle! They are going to kill me to-morrow
morning. “Thou shalt not kill”—piffle! In the shipyards of all
civilized countries they are laying to-day the keels of Dreadnoughts
and of Superdreadnoughts. Dear friends, I who am about to die, salute
you with—“Piffle!”

I ask you, what finer morality is preached to-day than was preached by
Christ, by Buddha, by Socrates and Plato, by Confucius and whoever was
the author of the “Mahabharata”? Good Lord, fifty thousand years ago,
in our totem-families, our women were cleaner, our family and group
relations more rigidly right.

I must say that the morality we practised in those old days was a finer
morality than is practised to-day. Don’t dismiss this thought hastily.
Think of our child labour, of our police graft and our political
corruption, of our food adulteration and of our slavery of the
daughters of the poor. When I was a Son of the Mountain and a Son of
the Bull, prostitution had no meaning. We were clean, I tell you. We
did not dream such depths of depravity. Yea, so are all the lesser
animals of to-day clean. It required man, with his imagination, aided
by his mastery of matter, to invent the deadly sins. The lesser
animals, the other animals, are incapable of sin.

I read hastily back through the many lives of many times and many
places. I have never known cruelty more terrible, nor so terrible, as
the cruelty of our prison system of to-day. I have told you what I have
endured in the jacket and in solitary in the first decade of this
twentieth century after Christ. In the old days we punished drastically
and killed quickly. We did it because we so desired, because of whim,
if you so please. But we were not hypocrites. We did not call upon
press, and pulpit, and university to sanction us in our wilfulness of
savagery. What we wanted to do we went and did, on our legs upstanding,
and we faced all reproof and censure on our legs upstanding, and did
not hide behind the skirts of classical economists and bourgeois
philosophers, nor behind the skirts of subsidized preachers,
professors, and editors.

Why, goodness me, a hundred years ago, fifty years ago, five years ago,
in these United States, assault and battery was not a civil capital
crime. But this year, the year of Our Lord 1913, in the State of
California, they hanged Jake Oppenheimer for such an offence, and
to-morrow, for the civil capital crime of punching a man on the nose,
they are going to take me out and hang me. Query: Doesn’t it require a
long time for the ape and the tiger to die when such statutes are
spread on the statute book of California in the
nineteen-hundred-and-thirteenth year after Christ? Lord, Lord, they
only crucified Christ. They have done far worse to Jake Oppenheimer and
me. . . .

As Ed Morrell once rapped to me with his knuckles: “The worst possible
use you can put a man to is to hang him.” No, I have little respect for
capital punishment. Not only is it a dirty game, degrading to the
hang-dogs who personally perpetrate it for a wage, but it is degrading
to the commonwealth that tolerates it, votes for it, and pays the taxes
for its maintenance. Capital punishment is so _silly_, so stupid, so
horribly unscientific. “To be hanged by the neck until dead” is
society’s quaint phraseology . . .

Morning is come—my last morning. I slept like a babe throughout the
night. I slept so peacefully that once the death-watch got a fright. He
thought I had suffocated myself in my blankets. The poor man’s alarm
was pitiful. His bread and butter was at stake. Had it truly been so,
it would have meant a black mark against him, perhaps discharge and the
outlook for an unemployed man is bitter just at present. They tell me
that Europe began liquidating two years ago, and that now the United
States has begun. That means either a business crisis or a quiet panic
and that the armies of the unemployed will be large next winter, the
bread-lines long. . . .

I have had my breakfast. It seemed a silly thing to do, but I ate it
heartily. The Warden came with a quart of whiskey. I presented it to
Murderers Row with my compliments. The Warden, poor man, is afraid, if
I be not drunk, that I shall make a mess of the function and cast
reflection on his management . . .

They have put on me the shirt without a collar. . .

It seems I am a very important man this day. Quite a lot of people are
suddenly interested in me. . . .

The doctor has just gone. He has taken my pulse. I asked him to. It is
normal. . . .

I write these random thoughts, and, a sheet at a time, they start on
their secret way out beyond the walls. . . .

I am the calmest man in the prison. I am like a child about to start on
a journey. I am eager to be gone, curious for the new places I shall
see. This fear of the lesser death is ridiculous to one who has gone
into the dark so often and lived again. . . .

The Warden with a quart of champagne. I have dispatched it down
Murderers Row. Queer, isn’t it, that I am so considered this last day.
It must be that these men who are to kill me are themselves afraid of
death. To quote Jake Oppenheimer: I, who am about to die, must seem to
them something God-awful. . . .

Ed Morrell has just sent word in to me. They tell me he has paced up
and down all night outside the prison wall. Being an ex-convict, they
have red-taped him out of seeing me to say good-bye. Savages? I don’t
know. Possibly just children. I’ll wager most of them will be afraid to
be alone in the dark to-night after stretching my neck.

But Ed Morrell’s message: “My hand is in yours, old pal. I know you’ll
swing off game.” . . .

The reporters have just left. I’ll see them next, and last time, from
the scaffold, ere the hangman hides my face in the black cap. They will
be looking curiously sick. Queer young fellows. Some show that they
have been drinking. Two or three look sick with foreknowledge of what
they have to witness. It seems easier to be hanged than to look on. . .
.

My last lines. It seems I am delaying the procession. My cell is quite
crowded with officials and dignitaries. They are all nervous. They want
it over. Without a doubt, some of them have dinner engagements. I am
really offending them by writing these few words. The priest has again
preferred his request to be with me to the end. The poor man—why should
I deny him that solace? I have consented, and he now appears quite
cheerful. Such small things make some men happy! I could stop and laugh
for a hearty five minutes, if they were not in such a hurry.

Here I close. I can only repeat myself. There is no death. Life is
spirit, and spirit cannot die. Only the flesh dies and passes, ever
a-crawl with the chemic ferment that informs it, ever plastic, ever
crystallizing, only to melt into the flux and to crystallize into fresh
and diverse forms that are ephemeral and that melt back into the flux.
Spirit alone endures and continues to build upon itself through
successive and endless incarnations as it works upward toward the
light. What shall I be when I live again? I wonder. I wonder. . . .






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