The Jacket (The Star-Rover)

CHAPTER I.

All my life I have had an awareness of other times and places. I have

been aware of other persons in me.—Oh, and trust me, so have you, my

reader that is to be. Read back into your childhood, and this sense of

awareness I speak of will be remembered as an experience of your

childhood. You were then not fixed, not crystallized. You were plastic,

a soul in flux, a consciousness and an identity in the process of

forming—ay, of forming and forgetting.

You have forgotten much, my reader, and yet, as you read these lines,

you remember dimly the hazy vistas of other times and places into which

your child eyes peered. They seem dreams to you to-day. Yet, if they

were dreams, dreamed then, whence the substance of them? Our dreams are

grotesquely compounded of the things we know. The stuff of our sheerest

dreams is the stuff of our experience. As a child, a wee child, you

dreamed you fell great heights; you dreamed you flew through the air as

things of the air fly; you were vexed by crawling spiders and

many-legged creatures of the slime; you heard other voices, saw other

faces nightmarishly familiar, and gazed upon sunrises and sunsets other

than you know now, looking back, you ever looked upon.

Very well. These child glimpses are of other-worldness, of

other-lifeness, of things that you had never seen in this particular

world of your particular life. Then whence? Other lives? Other worlds?

Perhaps, when you have read all that I shall write, you will have

received answers to the perplexities I have propounded to you, and that

you yourself, ere you came to read me, propounded to yourself.

Wordsworth knew. He was neither seer nor prophet, but just ordinary man

like you or any man. What he knew, you know, any man knows. But he most

aptly stated it in his passage that begins “Not in utter nakedness, not

in entire forgetfulness. . .”

Ah, truly, shades of the prison-house close about us, the new-born

things, and all too soon do we forget. And yet, when we were new-born

we did remember other times and places. We, helpless infants in arms or

creeping quadruped-like on the floor, dreamed our dreams of air-flight.

Yes; and we endured the torment and torture of nightmare fears of dim

and monstrous things. We new-born infants, without experience, were

born with fear, with memory of fear; and _memory is experience_.

As for myself, at the beginnings of my vocabulary, at so tender a

period that I still made hunger noises and sleep noises, yet even then

did I know that I had been a star-rover. Yes, I, whose lips had never

lisped the word “king,” remembered that I had once been the son of a

king. More—I remembered that once I had been a slave and a son of a

slave, and worn an iron collar round my neck.

Still more. When I was three, and four, and five years of age, I was

not yet I. I was a mere becoming, a flux of spirit not yet cooled solid

in the mould of my particular flesh and time and place. In that period

all that I had ever been in ten thousand lives before strove in me, and

troubled the flux of me, in the effort to incorporate itself in me and

become me.

Silly, isn’t it? But remember, my reader, whom I hope to have travel

far with me through time and space—remember, please, my reader, that I

have thought much on these matters, that through bloody nights and

sweats of dark that lasted years-long, I have been alone with my many

selves to consult and contemplate my many selves. I have gone through

the hells of all existences to bring you news which you will share with

me in a casual comfortable hour over my printed page.

So, to return, I say, during the ages of three and four and five, I was

not yet I. I was merely becoming as I took form in the mould of my

body, and all the mighty, indestructible past wrought in the mixture of

me to determine what the form of that becoming would be. It was not my

voice that cried out in the night in fear of things known, which I,

forsooth, did not and could not know. The same with my childish angers,

my loves, and my laughters. Other voices screamed through my voice, the

voices of men and women aforetime, of all shadowy hosts of progenitors.

And the snarl of my anger was blended with the snarls of beasts more

ancient than the mountains, and the vocal madness of my child hysteria,

with all the red of its wrath, was chorded with the insensate, stupid

cries of beasts pre-Adamic and progeologic in time.

And there the secret is out. The red wrath! It has undone me in this,

my present life. Because of it, a few short weeks hence, I shall be led

from this cell to a high place with unstable flooring, graced above by

a well-stretched rope; and there they will hang me by the neck until I

am dead. The red wrath always has undone me in all my lives; for the

red wrath is my disastrous catastrophic heritage from the time of the

slimy things ere the world was prime.

It is time that I introduce myself. I am neither fool nor lunatic. I

want you to know that, in order that you will believe the things I

shall tell you. I am Darrell Standing. Some few of you who read this

will know me immediately. But to the majority, who are bound to be

strangers, let me exposit myself. Eight years ago I was Professor of

Agronomics in the College of Agriculture of the University of

California. Eight years ago the sleepy little university town of

Berkeley was shocked by the murder of Professor Haskell in one of the

laboratories of the Mining Building. Darrell Standing was the murderer.

I am Darrell Standing. I was caught red-handed. Now the right and the

wrong of this affair with Professor Haskell I shall not discuss. It was

purely a private matter. The point is, that in a surge of anger,

obsessed by that catastrophic red wrath that has cursed me down the

ages, I killed my fellow professor. The court records show that I did;

and, for once, I agree with the court records.

No; I am not to be hanged for his murder. I received a life-sentence

for my punishment. I was thirty-six years of age at the time. I am now

forty-four years old. I have spent the eight intervening years in the

California State Prison of San Quentin. Five of these years I spent in

the dark. Solitary confinement, they call it. Men who endure it, call

it living death. But through these five years of death-in-life I

managed to attain freedom such as few men have ever known.

Closest-confined of prisoners, not only did I range the world, but I

ranged time. They who immured me for petty years gave to me, all

unwittingly, the largess of centuries. Truly, thanks to Ed Morrell, I

have had five years of star-roving. But Ed Morrell is another story. I

shall tell you about him a little later. I have so much to tell I

scarce know how to begin.

Well, a beginning. I was born on a quarter-section in Minnesota. My

mother was the daughter of an immigrant Swede. Her name was Hilda

Tonnesson. My father was Chauncey Standing, of old American stock. He

traced back to Alfred Standing, an indentured servant, or slave if you

please, who was transported from England to the Virginia plantations in

the days that were even old when the youthful Washington went

a-surveying in the Pennsylvania wilderness.

A son of Alfred Standing fought in the War of the Revolution; a

grandson, in the War of 1812. There have been no wars since in which

the Standings have not been represented. I, the last of the Standings,

dying soon without issue, fought as a common soldier in the

Philippines, in our latest war, and to do so I resigned, in the full

early ripeness of career, my professorship in the University of

Nebraska. Good heavens, when I so resigned I was headed for the

Deanship of the College of Agriculture in that university—I, the

star-rover, the red-blooded adventurer, the vagabondish Cain of the

centuries, the militant priest of remotest times, the moon-dreaming

poet of ages forgotten and to-day unrecorded in man’s history of man!

And here I am, my hands dyed red in Murderers’ Row, in the State Prison

of Folsom, awaiting the day decreed by the machinery of state when the

servants of the state will lead me away into what they fondly believe

is the dark—the dark they fear; the dark that gives them fearsome and

superstitious fancies; the dark that drives them, drivelling and

yammering, to the altars of their fear-created, anthropomorphic gods.

No; I shall never be Dean of any college of agriculture. And yet I knew

agriculture. It was my profession. I was born to it, reared to it,

trained to it; and I was a master of it. It was my genius. I can pick

the high-percentage butter-fat cow with my eye and let the Babcock

Tester prove the wisdom of my eye. I can look, not at land, but at

landscape, and pronounce the virtues and the shortcomings of the soil.

Litmus paper is not necessary when I determine a soil to be acid or

alkali. I repeat, farm-husbandry, in its highest scientific terms, was

my genius, and is my genius. And yet the state, which includes all the

citizens of the state, believes that it can blot out this wisdom of

mine in the final dark by means of a rope about my neck and the

abruptive jerk of gravitation—this wisdom of mine that was incubated

through the millenniums, and that was well-hatched ere the farmed

fields of Troy were ever pastured by the flocks of nomad shepherds!

Corn? Who else knows corn? There is my demonstration at Wistar, whereby

I increased the annual corn-yield of every county in Iowa by half a

million dollars. This is history. Many a farmer, riding in his

motor-car to-day, knows who made possible that motor-car. Many a

sweet-bosomed girl and bright-browed boy, poring over high-school

text-books, little dreams that I made that higher education possible by

my corn demonstration at Wistar.

And farm management! I know the waste of superfluous motion without

studying a moving picture record of it, whether it be farm or

farm-hand, the layout of buildings or the layout of the farm-hands’

labour. There is my handbook and tables on the subject. Beyond the

shadow of any doubt, at this present moment, a hundred thousand farmers

are knotting their brows over its spread pages ere they tap out their

final pipe and go to bed. And yet, so far was I beyond my tables, that

all I needed was a mere look at a man to know his predispositions, his

co-ordinations, and the index fraction of his motion-wastage.

And here I must close this first chapter of my narrative. It is nine

o’clock, and in Murderers’ Row that means lights out. Even now, I hear

the soft tread of the gum-shoed guard as he comes to censure me for my

coal-oil lamp still burning. As if the mere living could censure the

doomed to die!

CHAPTER II.

I am Darrell Standing. They are going to take me out and hang me pretty

soon. In the meantime I say my say, and write in these pages of the

other times and places.

After my sentence, I came to spend the rest of my “natural life” in the

prison of San Quentin. I proved incorrigible. An incorrigible is a

terrible human being—at least such is the connotation of “incorrigible”

in prison psychology. I became an incorrigible because I abhorred waste

motion. The prison, like all prisons, was a scandal and an affront of

waste motion. They put me in the jute-mill. The criminality of

wastefulness irritated me. Why should it not? Elimination of waste

motion was my speciality. Before the invention of steam or steam-driven

looms three thousand years before, I had rotted in prison in old

Babylon; and, trust me, I speak the truth when I say that in that

ancient day we prisoners wove more efficiently on hand-looms than did

the prisoners in the steam-powered loom-rooms of San Quentin.

The crime of waste was abhorrent. I rebelled. I tried to show the

guards a score or so of more efficient ways. I was reported. I was

given the dungeon and the starvation of light and food. I emerged and

tried to work in the chaos of inefficiency of the loom-rooms. I

rebelled. I was given the dungeon, plus the strait-jacket. I was

spread-eagled, and thumbed-up, and privily beaten by the stupid guards

whose totality of intelligence was only just sufficient to show them

that I was different from them and not so stupid.

Two years of this witless persecution I endured. It is terrible for a

man to be tied down and gnawed by rats. The stupid brutes of guards

were rats, and they gnawed the intelligence of me, gnawed all the fine

nerves of the quick of me and of the consciousness of me. And I, who in

my past have been a most valiant fighter, in this present life was no

fighter at all. I was a farmer, an agriculturist, a desk-tied

professor, a laboratory slave, interested only in the soil and the

increase of the productiveness of the soil.

I fought in the Philippines because it was the tradition of the

Standings to fight. I had no aptitude for fighting. It was all too

ridiculous, the introducing of disruptive foreign substances into the

bodies of little black men-folk. It was laughable to behold Science

prostituting all the might of its achievement and the wit of its

inventors to the violent introducing of foreign substances into the

bodies of black folk.

As I say, in obedience to the tradition of the Standings I went to war

and found that I had no aptitude for war. So did my officers find me

out, because they made me a quartermaster’s clerk, and as a clerk, at a

desk, I fought through the Spanish-American War.

So it was not because I was a fighter, but because I was a thinker,

that I was enraged by the motion-wastage of the loom-rooms and was

persecuted by the guards into becoming an “incorrigible.” One’s brain

worked and I was punished for its working. As I told Warden Atherton,

when my incorrigibility had become so notorious that he had me in on

the carpet in his private office to plead with me; as I told him then:

“It is so absurd, my dear Warden, to think that your rat-throttlers of

guards can shake out of my brain the things that are clear and definite

in my brain. The whole organization of this prison is stupid. You are a

politician. You can weave the political pull of San Francisco

saloon-men and ward heelers into a position of graft such as this one

you occupy; but you can’t weave jute. Your loom-rooms are fifty years

behind the times. . . .”

But why continue the tirade?—for tirade it was. I showed him what a

fool he was, and as a result he decided that I was a hopeless

incorrigible.

Give a dog a bad name—you know the saw. Very well. Warden Atherton gave

the final sanction to the badness of my name. I was fair game. More

than one convict’s dereliction was shunted off on me, and was paid for

by me in the dungeon on bread and water, or in being triced up by the

thumbs on my tip-toes for long hours, each hour of which was longer

than any life I have ever lived.

Intelligent men are cruel. Stupid men are monstrously cruel. The guards

and the men over me, from the Warden down, were stupid monsters.

Listen, and you shall learn what they did to me. There was a poet in

the prison, a convict, a weak-chinned, broad-browed, degenerate poet.

He was a forger. He was a coward. He was a snitcher. He was a

stool—strange words for a professor of agronomics to use in writing,

but a professor of agronomics may well learn strange words when pent in

prison for the term of his natural life.

This poet-forger’s name was Cecil Winwood. He had had prior

convictions, and yet, because he was a snivelling cur of a yellow dog,

his last sentence had been only for seven years. Good credits would

materially reduce this time. My time was life. Yet this miserable

degenerate, in order to gain several short years of liberty for

himself, succeeded in adding a fair portion of eternity to my own

lifetime term.

I shall tell what happened the other way around, for it was only after

a weary period that I learned. This Cecil Winwood, in order to curry

favour with the Captain of the Yard, and thence the Warden, the Prison

Directors, the Board of Pardons, and the Governor of California, framed

up a prison-break. Now note three things: (a) Cecil Winwood was so

detested by his fellow-convicts that they would not have permitted him

to bet an ounce of Bull Durham on a bed-bug race—and bed-bug racing was

a great sport with the convicts; (b) I was the dog that had been given

a bad name: (c) for his frame-up, Cecil Winwood needed the dogs with

bad names, the lifetimers, the desperate ones, the incorrigibles.

But the lifers detested Cecil Winwood, and, when he approached them

with his plan of a wholesale prison-break, they laughed at him and

turned away with curses for the stool that he was. But he fooled them

in the end, forty of the bitterest-wise ones in the pen. He approached

them again and again. He told of his power in the prison by virtue of

his being trusty in the Warden’s office, and because of the fact that

he had the run of the dispensary.

“Show me,” said Long Bill Hodge, a mountaineer doing life for train

robbery, and whose whole soul for years had been bent on escaping in

order to kill the companion in robbery who had turned state’s evidence

on him.

Cecil Winwood accepted the test. He claimed that he could dope the

guards the night of the break.

“Talk is cheap,” said Long Bill Hodge. “What we want is the goods. Dope

one of the guards to-night. There’s Barnum. He’s no good. He beat up

that crazy Chink yesterday in Bughouse Alley—when he was off duty, too.

He’s on the night watch. Dope him to-night an’ make him lose his job.

Show me, and we’ll talk business with you.”

All this Long Bill told me in the dungeons afterward. Cecil Winwood

demurred against the immediacy of the demonstration. He claimed that he

must have time in which to steal the dope from the dispensary. They

gave him the time, and a week later he announced that he was ready.

Forty hard-bitten lifers waited for the guard Barnum to go to sleep on

his shift. And Barnum did. He was found asleep, and he was discharged

for sleeping on duty.

Of course, that convinced the lifers. But there was the Captain of the

Yard to convince. To him, daily, Cecil Winwood was reporting the

progress of the break—all fancied and fabricated in his own

imagination. The Captain of the Yard demanded to be shown. Winwood

showed him, and the full details of the showing I did not learn until a

year afterward, so slowly do the secrets of prison intrigue leak out.

Winwood said that the forty men in the break, in whose confidence he

was, had already such power in the Prison that they were about to begin

smuggling in automatic pistols by means of the guards they had bought

up.

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

And the forger-poet showed him. In the Bakery, night work was a regular

thing. One of the convicts, a baker, was on the first night-shift. He

was a stool of the Captain of the Yard, and Winwood knew it.

“To-night,” he told the Captain, “Summerface will bring in a dozen ’44

automatics. On his next time off he’ll bring in the ammunition. But

to-night he’ll turn the automatics over to me in the bakery. You’ve got

a good stool there. He’ll make you his report to-morrow.”

Now Summerface was a strapping figure of a bucolic guard who hailed

from Humboldt County. He was a simple-minded, good-natured dolt and not

above earning an honest dollar by smuggling in tobacco for the

convicts. On that night, returning from a trip to San Francisco, he

brought in with him fifteen pounds of prime cigarette tobacco. He had

done this before, and delivered the stuff to Cecil Winwood. So, on that

particular night, he, all unwitting, turned the stuff over to Winwood

in the bakery. It was a big, solid, paper-wrapped bundle of innocent

tobacco. The stool baker, from concealment, saw the package delivered

to Winwood and so reported to the Captain of the Yard next morning.

But in the meantime the poet-forger’s too-lively imagination ran away

with him. He was guilty of a slip that gave me five years of solitary

confinement and that placed me in this condemned cell in which I now

write. And all the time I knew nothing about it. I did not even know of

the break he had inveigled the forty lifers into planning. I knew

nothing, absolutely nothing. And the rest knew little. The lifers did

not know he was giving them the cross. The Captain of the Yard did not

know that the cross 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.