The Jacket (The Star-Rover)

nd hang me pretty soon. In the meantime I say my say,

rred 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 st

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,

ligence 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

, the introducing of disruptive foreign substances into the bodies of little black men-folk. It was laughable to behold Science prostituting

I had no aptitude for war. So did my officers find me out, because they made me a quar

secuted by the guards into becoming an "incorrigible." One's brain worked and I was punished for its working. As I told Warden Atherton, w

y 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 wa

I showed him what a fool he was, and as a resu

r 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

y 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-st

ast sentence had been only for seven years. Good credits would materially reduce this time. My time was life. Yet this miserable degener

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

th 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.

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

He claimed that he could dope t

Barnum. He's no good. He beat up that crazy Chink yesterday in Bughouse Alley-when he was off duty, too. He'

ave 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-bitte

e progress of the break-all fancied and fabricated in his own imagination. The Captain of the Yard demanded to be shown. Winwood showe

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

tain of the Yard m

ular thing. One of the convicts, a baker, was on the first night-sh

next time off he'll bring in the ammunition. But to-night he'll turn the automatics over

eturning 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 t

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

od. Next morning, when he encountered the Captain of the Yard,

l right as you said," the c

w half the prison sky-hi

at?" the Capt

led on. "Thirty-five pounds of it. Your

nearly died. I can actually sympathize with him-

at was his nickname-sat down a

cried. "I want it. T

Cecil Winwood

, being merely tobacco in small packages, it was long since

amie, getting himself in ha

him to. The thing did not exist, had never exist

hiding-places for things. And as Cecil Winwood led

d as Winwood also so testified, on the way to the hiding-pla

ds could see was too weak to work in the loom-room; I, who had been given the day off to recuperate-from too ter

e alleged hiding-place. Of cour

s given me the cross. He's lifted th

nwood into his own private office, looked the doors, and beat him up frightfully-all of which came out before the Board of Dire

on and that forty desperate lifers were ready for a break. Oh, he had Summerface in on the carpet, and, a

nshine and the light of day to the dungeons, and in the dungeons and in the sol

the dungeons, and was lying pain-racked in my cust

em 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

son down stone by stone," C

ss, 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 t