The Jacket (The Star Rover)

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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.