orty 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 to-day in the Year of Our Lord 1913, and to-day, 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 VIII

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 l