The Jacket (The Star-Rover)

nd Captain Jamie proceeded to put me to the

ill you in the jacket. Harder cases than you have come across before

s," I answered, "because I

n to immediate action. "

dred hours. Once each twenty-four hours I was permitted a drink of water. I had no desire for food, nor was food off

tealing a little space while they were lacing me. At the end of the first hundred hours' bout I was worn and tired, but that was all. Another bout of this duration they gave me, after a day and a

the jacket; or I would receive only four hours' rest. At the most unexpected hours of the night my door would clang open and the changing guards would lace me. Sometimes rhythms were instituted. Thus, for t

ith me. On occasion, when I had endured an extra severe jacketing, he almost pleaded with me to confess. Once he ev

eptical. He insisted that jacketing, no matter how prolonged, could never kill

n. Standing, you hear me. What you've got ain't a caution to what you're going to get. You might as well come across now

was forcing his foot into my back in order to cinch me tighter, while I was trying with my muscle to steal slac

of you, that make you stick to any old idea. You get baulky, like horses. Tighter, Jones;

re slowly. It is of common knowledge that unusually strong men suffer more severely from ordinary sicknesses than do women or invalids. As the reserves of strength are consumed there is

pped me sympathy and advice. Oppenheimer told me

is knuckles. "Don't let them kill you, for that

y shoe against the grating-I was in the jacket at the time and so could t

eimer praised. "He's t

of the dynamite. His very persistence in the quest convinced a man like Jake Oppe

sts on abstruse subjects, reading aloud to them carefully prepared papers on my own researches or on my own deductions from the researches and experiments of others. When I awakened my voice would seem still ringing in my ears, while my eyes still could see typed

this dream-region. The point I desire to call attention to was that it was always the same region. No essential feature of it ever differed in the different dreams. Thus it was always an eight-hour drive behind mountain horses from the alfalfa meadows (where I kept many Jer

men, did change. Thus on the upland pastures behind my alfalfa meadows I developed a new farm with the aid of Angora goats.

as they could stand and reach on their hind legs; the driftage of the pasture grasses that followed in the wake of the clearing by the goats. Yes, the continuity of such dreaming was its charm. Came the day when the men with axes chopped down all the taller brush so as to give the goats access to the leaves and buds and bark. Came the day, in winter weather, when the dry denuded skeletons of all these bushes were gathered into h

horses, and drove hour by hour past all the old familiar landmarks of my alfalfa meadows, and on to my upland pastures where my rotated crops of corn and barley and clover w

ite unlike them, as you shall see, were my other adventures when I passed through the gates o

of a desire for vengeance on him that was a pain in itself and that exceeded all the bounds of language. I shall not tell you of the hours I devoted to plans of torture on him, nor of the diabolical means and devices of torture that I invented for him. Just one example. I was enamoured of the ancient trick whereby an iron basin, containing a rat, is fastened to a man's bo