The Jacket (The Star-Rover)

eternal hours of waiting, was it absent from my consciousness that I should follow these other convicts out, endure the hells

Captain Jamie and Warden Atherton, themselves arrayed with the strength of half a dozen state-bou

en Atherton, indicati

n 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 o

flashed out to a grip on my shoulders. I was a straw in his strengt

pain, "tell me all about it, Standing. Spit it o

g about what has happ

a leap he was upon me. Again he lifted me i

arned. "Make a clean breast o

thing of any dyna

ifted and smashed

r 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 cha

ing me down into the chair. And always it was dynamite, dynamite, "Where is the dynamite?" and there was no dynamite. Why,

f-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-

, fellows! He's Ignatius Irv

Ignatius Irvine. He was pitiful in his terror, while all about him, roaring like beasts, the pa

penly 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 anythi

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

orted that Warden Atherton and Captain Jamie, exhausted by their efforts, relieved each other every two hours. While one slep

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

the same things with such unanimity, Warden Atherton and Captain Jamie could only conclud

rs. As I learned afterward, the Board of Prison Directors had been summoned by

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, unt

r 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 Pola

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 weighe

so that he dared an infraction of the rules by

tanding," he cackled.

d to whisper, for five years of disuse had well-nigh lost

"Stick with it. Don't ever let'm know. You're a good one.

t I saw of Skysail Jack. It was plain that eve

*

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

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.

ll. I got life-imprisonment for that. They are going to take me out and hang me because I was found guilty of assa

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 la

he 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 Thurs

e-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 o

tablish 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 pre

these lines in the very cell in Murderers' Row that Jake Oppenheimer occu

n Directors gave me my choice: a prison trustyship and surcease from the jute-looms if I gave up the

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 t

ld! I shall walk, and walk again, oh, countless times, this fair earth. And I shall walk in the