The Star Rover. Jack London
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I realized that such vocal exercise merely stabbed my heart more hotly and at the same time consumed much of the little air in my lungs.
I gave over and lay quiet for a long time—an eternity it seemed then, though now I am confident that it could have been no longer than a quarter of an hour. I grew dizzy with semi- asphyxiation, and my heart thumped until it seemed surely it would burst the canvas that bound me. Again I lost control of myself and set up a mad howling for help.
In the midst of this I heard a voice from the next dungeon.
"Shut up," it shouted, though only faintly it percolated to me. "Shut up. You make me tired."
"I'm dying," I cried out.
"Pound your ear and forget it," was the reply.
"But I am dying," I insisted.
"Then why worry?" came the voice. "You'll be dead pretty quick an' out of it. Go ahead and croak, but don't make so much noise about it. You're interruptin' my beauty sleep."
So angered was I by this callous indifference that I recovered self-control and was guilty of no more than smothered groans. This endured an endless time—possibly 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 when the prickling of the multitudinous darts ceased to hurt and only the numbness remained and continued verging into greater numbness, I once more grew frightened.
"How am I goin' to get a wink of sleep?" my neighbor complained. "I ain't any more happy than you. My jacket's just as tight as yourn, an' I want to sleep an' forget it."
"How long have you been in?" I asked, thinking him a newcomer compared to the centuries I had already suffered.
"Since day before yesterday," was his answer.
"I mean in the jacket," I amended.
"Since day before yesterday, brother."
"My God!" I screamed.
"Yes, brother, fifty straight hours, an' you don't hear me raisin' a roar about it. They cinched me with their feet in my back. I am some tight, believe me. You ain't the only one that's got troubles. You ain't ben in an hour yet."
"I've been in hours and hours," I protested.
"Brother, you may think so, but it don't make it so. I'm just tellin' you you ain't ben in an hour. I heard 'm lacin' you."
The thing was incredible. Already, in less than an hour, I had died a thousand deaths. And yet this neighbor, balanced and equable, calm-voiced and almost beneficent despite the harshness of his first remarks, had been in the jacket fifty hours!
"How much longer are they going to keep you in?" I asked.
"The Lord only knows. Captain Jamie is real peeved with me, an' he won't let me out until I'm about croakin'. Now, brother, I'm goin' to give you the tip. The only way is shut your face an' forget it. Yellin' an' hollerin' 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 eat up hours for you. Mebbe you'll feel yourself gettin' woozy. Well, get woozy. You can't beat that for killin' time. An' when the girls won't hold you, get to thinkin' of the fellows you got it in for, an' what you'd do to 'em if you got a chance, an' what you're goin' to do to 'em when you get that same chance."
That man was Philadelphia Red. Because of prior conviction he was serving fifty years for highway robbery committed on the streets of Alameda. He had already served a 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, a little later, were double- crossed by Cecil Winwood. For that offense, Philadelphia Red lost his credits. He is middle-aged now, and he is still in San Quentin. If he survives he will be an old man when they let him out
I lived through my twenty-four hours, and I have never been the same man since. Oh, I don't mean physically, although next morning, when they unlaced me, I was semi-paralyzed and in such a state of collapse that the guards had to kick me in the ribs to make me crawl to my feet. But I was a changed man mentally, morally. The 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! Twenty-four hours in the jacket! Little I thought that morning when they kicked me to my feet that the time would come when twenty-four hours in the jacket meant nothing; when a hundred hours in the jacket found me smiling when they released me; when two hundred and forty hours in the jacket found the same smile on my lips.
Yes, two hundred and forty hours. Dear cotton-woolly citizen, do you know what that means? It means ten days and ten nights in the jacket. Of course, such things 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 that it was done to me in San Quentin, and that I lived to laugh at them and to compel them to get rid of me by swinging me off because I bloodied a guard's nose.
I write these lines today in the Year of Our Lord 1913, and today, in the Year of Our Lord 1913, men are lying in the jacket in the dungeons of San Quentin.
I shall never forget, as long as further living and further lives be vouchsafed me, my parting from Philadelphia Red that morning. He had then been seventy-four hours in the jacket.
"Well, brother, you're still alive an' kickin'," he called to me as I was totteringly dragged from my cell into the corridor of dungeons.
"Shut up, you, Red," the sergeant snarled at him.
"Forget it," was the retort.
"I'll get you yet, Red," the sergeant threatened.
"Think so?" Philadelphia Red queried sweetly, ere his tones turned to savageness. "Why, you old stiff, you couldn't get nothin'. You couldn't get a free lunch, much less the job you've got, now, if it wasn't for your brother's pull. An' I guess we all ain't mistaken on the stink of the place where your brother's pull comes from."
It was admirable—the spirit of man rising above its extremity, fearless of the hurt any brute of the system could inflict.
"Well, so long, brother," Philadelphia Red next called to me. "So long. Be good, an' love the warden. An' if you see 'em, just tell 'em that you saw me but that you didn't see me saw."
The sergeant was red with rage and, by the receipt of various kicks and blows, I paid for Red's pleasantry.
Chapter 8
IN solitary, in Cell One, Warden Atherton and Captain Jamie proceeded to put me to the inquisition. As Warden Atherton said to me:
"Standing, you're going to come across with that dynamite or I'll kill you in the jacket. Harder cases than you have come across before I got done with them. You've got your choice—dynamite or curtains."
"Then I guess it is curtains," I answered, "because I don't know of any dynamite."
This irritated the warden to immediate action.
"Lie down," he commanded.
I obeyed, for I had learned the folly of fighting three or four strong men. They laced me tightly, and gave me a hundred hours. Once each twenty-four hours I was permitted a drink of water. I had no desire for food, nor was food offered me. Toward the end of the hundred hours, Jackson, the prison doctor, examined my physical condition several times.
But I had grown too used to the jacket during my incorrigible days to let a single jacketing injure me. Naturally, it weakened me, took the life out of me; but I had learned muscular tricks for stealing a little space while they were lacing me. At the end of the first hundred-hour bout I was worn and tired, but that was all. Another bout of this duration they gave me, after a day and a night to recuperate. And then they gave one hundred