The Jacket (The Star Rover)

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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, Philomene Carteron.

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER XIII


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Father nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My father regarded me quizzically.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Now! all together!"

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

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

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

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

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