The Jacket (The Star-Rover)

memories of other lives, yet I was unable to do more than flit like a

smus 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 Stainto

venturing 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

ve any such definiteness of previous personality. I became convinced, through the failure of my experime

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 drea

e 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 dy

l you that men are killed in prisons to-day as they have al

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 fe

rs mark my body. They go to the scaffold with me. Did I live a hundred

inted with the jacket. Let me describe, it, so that you will understand the method by which I achieved deat

our 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 o

face-downward on the flat canvas. If he refuses, he is man-handled. After that he lays himself down with a will, which is

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 gu

f 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

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

Morrison, gulletted me with his thumbs. Mobins, the dungeon trusty, a convict himself, struck me repeatedly with his fists. In the end I lay d

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

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

beast of the wild, I experienced ecstasies of fear, and yelled and howled until I realized that such vocal e

been no longer than a quarter of an hour. I grew dizzy with semi-asphyxiation, and my heart thumped until it seem

s I heard a voice f

nly faintly it percolated to me

ng," I c

and forget it,

dying,"

uick an' out of it. Go ahead and croak, but don't make so

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

mplained. "I ain't any more happy than you. My jacket's j

thinking him a new-comer compared to

re yesterday,"

the jacket,

efore yester

!" I sc

ut it. They cinched me with their feet in my back. I am some tight, believe m

hours and hour

make it so. I'm just tellin' you you ain'

ths. And yet this neighbour, balanced and equable, calm-voiced and almost benefice

e they going to kee

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 cat up hours for you. Mebbe you'll feel yourself gettin' woozy. Well, get woozy. You can't

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.

e 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! T

gs 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 th

913, and to-day, in the Year of Our Lord 1913, men a

lives be vouchsafed me, my parting from Philadelphia Red tha

," he called to me, as I was totteringly dragg

ed," the sergean

t," was t

t, Red," the ser

ldn't get nothin'. You couldn't get a free lunch, much less the job you've got now, if it wasn't for your brot

g above its extremity, fearless of the h

"So long. Be good, an' love the Warden. An' if you see 'em,

by the receipt of various kicks and