_ In the meanwhile obtained the horror of the dungeons, after the
discovery of the plot to break prison. And never, during those
eternal hours of waiting, was it absent from my consciousness that I
should follow these other convicts out, endure the hells of
inquisition they endured, and be brought back a wreck and flung on
the stone floor of my stone-walled, iron-doored dungeon.
They came for me. Ungraciously and ungently, with blow and curse,
they haled me forth, and I faced Captain Jamie and Warden Atherton,
themselves arrayed with the strength of half a dozen state-bought,
tax-paid brutes of guards who lingered in the room to do any
bidding. But they were not needed.
"Sit down," said Warden Atherton, indicating a stout arm-chair.
I, beaten and sore, without water for a night long and a day long,
faint with hunger, weak from a beating that had been added to five
days in the dungeon 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 others--I, a wavering waif of a
human man and an erstwhile professor of agronomy in a quiet college
town, I hesitated to accept the invitation to sit down.
Warden Atherton was a large man and a very powerful man. His hands
flashed out to a grip on my shoulders. I was a straw in his
strength. He lifted me clear of the floor and crashed me down in
the chair.
" Now," he said, while I gasped and swallowed my pain, "tell me all
about it, Standing. Spit it out--all of it, if you know what's
healthy for you."
"I don't know anything about what has happened . . .", I began.
That was as far as I got. With a growl and a leap he was upon me.
Again he lifted me in the air and crashed me down into the chair.
"No nonsense, Standing," he warned. "Make a clean breast of it.
Where is the dynamite?"
"I don't know anything of any dynamite," I protested.
Once again I was lifted and smashed back into the chair.
I have endured tortures of various sorts, but when I reflect upon
them in the quietness of these my last days, I am confident that no
other 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 chair was brought, and in time that chair was demolished.
But more chairs were brought, and the eternal questioning about the
dynamite went on.
When Warden Atherton grew tired, Captain Jamie relieved him; and
then the guard Monohan took Captain Jamie's place in smashing me
down into the chair. And always it was dynamite, dynamite, "Where
is the dynamite?" and there was no dynamite. Why, toward the last I
would have given a large portion of my immortal soul for a few
pounds of dynamite to which I could confess.
I do not know how many chairs were broken by my body. I fainted
times without number, and toward the last the whole thing became
nightmarish. I was half-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-fiend of a short-timer
who would do anything to obtain the drug. As soon as I recognized
him I crawled to the grating and shouted out along the corridor:
"There is a stool in with me, fellows! He's Ignatius Irvine! Watch
out what you say!"
The outburst of imprecations that went up would have shaken the
fortitude of a braver man than Ignatius Irvine. He was pitiful in
his terror, while all about him, roaring like beasts, the pain-
racked lifers told him what awful things they would do to him in the
years that were to come.
Had there been secrets, the presence of a stool in the dungeons
would have kept the men quiet, As it was, having all sworn to tell
the truth, they talked openly 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 anything about the dynamite
they begged me to confess it and save them all from further misery.
And I could tell them only the truth, that I knew of no dynamite.
One thing the stool told me, before the guards removed him, showed
how serious was this matter of the dynamite. Of course, I passed
the word along, which 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 one of the various prison-
factories would be operated again until after the discovery of some
dynamite that somebody had hidden somewhere in the prison.
And ever the examination went on. Ever, one at a time, convicts
were dragged away and dragged or carried back again. They reported
that Warden Atherton and Captain Jamie, exhausted by their efforts,
relieved each other every two hours. While one slept, the other
examined. And they slept in their clothes in the very room in which
strong man after strong man was being broken.
And hour by hour, in the dark dungeons, our madness of torment grew.
Oh, trust me as one who knows, hanging is an easy thing compared
with the way live men may be hurt in all the life of them and still
live. I, too, suffered equally 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
frightful thing to see a strong man broken. About me, at the one
time, were forty strong men being broken. Ever the cry for water
went up, and the place became lunatic with the crying, sobbing,
babbling and raving of men in delirium.
Don't you see? Our truth, the very truth we told, was our
damnation. When forty men told the same things with such unanimity,
Warden Atherton and Captain Jamie could only conclude that the
testimony was a memorized lie which each of the forty rattled off
parrot-like.
From the standpoint of the authorities, their situation was as
desperate as ours. As I learned afterward, the Board of Prison
Directors had been summoned by telegraph, and two companies of state
militia were being rushed to the prison.
It was winter weather, and the frost is sometimes shrewd even in a
California winter. We had no blankets in the dungeons. Please know
that it is very cold to stretch bruised human flesh 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, until our bruised flesh was
battered all anew by the violence with which the water smote us,
until we stood knee-deep in the water which we had raved for and for
which now we raved to cease.
I shall skip the rest of what happened in the dungeons. In passing
I shall merely state that no one of those forty lifers was ever the
same again. Luigi Polazzo never 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 Polazzo;
and others, whose physical stamina had been impaired, fell victims
to prison-tuberculosis. Fully 25 per cent. of the forty have died
in the succeeding six years.
After my five years in solitary, when they took me away from San
Quentin for my trial, I saw Skysail Jack. I could see little, for I
was blinking in the sunshine like a bat, after five years of
darkness; yet I saw enough of Skysail Jack to pain my heart. It was
in crossing the Prison Yard 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 weighed eighty-
seven pounds. My hair, streaked with gray, was a five-years'
growth, as were my beard and moustache. And I, too, tottered as I
walked, so that the guards helped to lead me across that sun-
blinding patch of yard. And Skysail Jack and I peered and knew each
other under the wreckage.
Men such as he are privileged, even in a prison, so that he dared an
infraction of the rules by speaking to me in a cracked and quavering
voice.
"You're a good one, Standing," he cackled. "You never squealed."
"But I never knew, Jack," I whispered back--I was compelled to
whisper, for five years of disuse had well-nigh lost me my voice.
"I don't think there ever was any dynamite."
"That's right," he cackled, nodding his head childishly. "Stick
with it. Don't ever let'm know. You're a good one. I take my hat
off to you, Standing. You never squealed."
And the guards led me on, and that was the last I saw of Skysail
Jack. It was plain that even he had become a believer in the
dynamite myth.
Twice they had me before the full Board of Directors. I was
alternately bullied and cajoled. Their attitude resolved itself
into two propositions. If I delivered up the dynamite, 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 dynamite, then they would put
me in solitary for the rest of my sentence. In my case, being a
life prisoner, this was tantamount to condemning me to solitary
confinement for life.
Oh, no; California is civilized. There is no such law on the
statute books. It is a cruel and unusual punishment, and no modern
state would be 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. The other two were Jake Oppenheimer and Ed
Morrell. I shall tell you about them soon, for I rotted with them
for years in the cells of silence.
Oh, another thing. They are going to take me out and hang me in a
little while--no, not for killing Professor Haskell. I got life-
imprisonment for that. They are going to take me out and hang me
because I was found guilty of assault and battery. And this is not
prison discipline. It is law, and as law it will be found in the
criminal statutes.
I believe I made a man's nose bleed. I never saw it bleed, but that
was the evidence. Thurston, his name was. He was a guard at San
Quentin. He weighed one hundred and seventy 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 large open spaces. Really, mime was a well-defined
case of incipient agoraphobia, as I quickly learned that day I
escaped from solitary and punched the guard Thurston on the nose.
I struck him on the nose and made it bleed when he got in my way and
tried to catch hold of me. And so they are going to hang me. It is
the written law of the State of California that a life-timer like me
is guilty of a capital crime when he strikes a prison guard like
Thurston. Surely, he could not have been inconvenienced more than
half an hour by that bleeding nose; and yet they are going to hang
me for it.
And, see! This law, in my case, is EX POST FACTO. It was not a law
at the time I killed Professor Haskell. It was not passed until
after I received my life-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 of my status of life-
timer that I am to be hanged for battery committed on the guard
Thurston. It is clearly EX POST FACTO, and, therefore,
unconstitutional.
But what bearing has the Constitution on constitutional lawyers when
they want to put the notorious Professor Darrell Standing out of the
way? Nor do I even establish 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 precisely similar
offence . . . only, in his case of battery, he was not guilty of
making a guard's nose bleed. He cut a convict unintentionally with
a bread-knife.
It is strange--life and men's ways and laws and tangled paths. I am
writing these lines in the very cell in Murderers' Row that Jake
Oppenheimer occupied ere they took him out and did to him what they
are going to do to me.
I warned you I had many things to write about. I shall now return
to my narrative. The Board of Prison Directors gave me my choice:
a prison trustyship and surcease from the jute-looms if I gave up
the non-existent dynamite; life imprisonment in solitary if I
refused to give up the non-existent dynamite.
They gave me twenty-four hours in the jacket to think it over. Then
I was brought before the Board a second time. What could I do? I
could not lead them to the dynamite that was not. I told them so,
and they told me I was a liar. They told me I was a hard case, a
dangerous man, a moral degenerate, the criminal of the century.
They told me many other 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 the outlook was that the
three of us would remain there for a long time. And yet, six years
only are past, and not one of us is in solitary. Jake Oppenheimer
was swung off. Ed Morrell was made head trusty of San Quentin and
then pardoned out only the other day. And here I am in Folsom
waiting the day duly set by Judge Morgan, which will be my last day.
The fools! As if they could throttle my immortality with their
clumsy device of rope and scaffold! I shall walk, and walk again,
oh, countless times, this fair earth. And I shall walk in the
flesh, be prince and peasant, savant and fool, sit in the high place
and groan under the wheel. _