"Warden," Oppenheimer had said, "you've bitten off more than you can
chew. It ain't a case of killing Standing. It's a case of killing three
men, for as sure as you kill him, sooner or later Morrell and I will get
the word out and what you have done will be known from one end of
California to the other. You've got your choice. You've either got to
let up on Standing or kill all three of us. Standing's got your goat. So
have I. So has Morrell. You are a stinking coward, and you haven't got
the backbone and guts to carry out the dirty butcher's work you'd like to
do."

Oppenheimer got a hundred hours in the jacket for it, and, when he was
unlaced, spat in the Warden's face and received a second hundred hours on
end. When he was unlaced this time, the Warden was careful not to be in
solitary. That he was shaken by Oppenheimer's words there is no doubt.

But it was Doctor Jackson who was the arch-fiend. To him I was a
novelty, and he was ever eager to see how much more I could stand before
I broke.

"He can stand twenty days off the bat," he bragged to the Warden in my
presence.

"You are conservative," I broke in. "I can stand forty days. Pshaw! I
can stand a hundred when such as you administer it." And, remembering my
sea-cuny's patience of forty years' waiting ere I got my hands on Chong
Mong-ju's gullet, I added: "You prison curs, you don't know what a man
is. You think a man is made in your own cowardly images. Behold, I am a
man. You are feeblings. I am your master. You can't bring a squeal out
of me. You think it remarkable, for you know how easily you would
squeal."

Oh, I abused them, called them sons of toads, hell's scullions, slime of
the pit. For I was above them, beyond them. They were slaves. I was
free spirit. My flesh only lay pent there in solitary. I was not pent.
I had mastered the flesh, and the spaciousness of time was mine to wander
in, while my poor flesh, not even suffering, lay in the little death in
the jacket.

Much of my adventures I rapped to my two comrades. Morrell believed, for
he had himself tasted the little death. But Oppenheimer, enraptured with
my tales, remained a sceptic to the end. His regret was naive, and at
times really pathetic, in that I had devoted my life to the science of
agriculture instead of to fiction writing.

"But, man," I reasoned with him, "what do I know of myself about this Cho-
Sen? I am able to identify it with what is to-