world. The conspiracy to escape of the forty lifers, the search for
the alleged dynamite, and all the treacherous frame-up of Cecil

Winwood was news to them. As they told me, news did occasionally
dribble into solitary by way of the guards, but they had had nothing

for a couple of months. The present guards on duty in solitary were
a particularly bad and vindictive set.

Again and again that day we were cursed for our knuckle talking by
whatever guard was on. But we could not refrain. The two of the

living dead had become three, and we had so much to say, while the
manner of saying it was exasperatingly slow and I was not so

proficient as they at the knuckle game.
"Wait till Pie-Face comes on to-night," Morrell rapped to me. "He

sleeps most of his watch, and we can talk a streak."
How we did talk that night! Sleep was farthest from our eyes. Pie-

Face Jones was a mean and bitter man, despite his fatness; but we
blessed that fatness because it persuaded to stolen snatches of

slumber. Nevertheless our incessant tapping bothered his sleep and
irritated him so that he reprimanded us repeatedly. And by the

other night guards we were roundly cursed. In the morning all
reported much tapping during the night, and we paid for our little

holiday; for, at nine, came Captain Jamie with several guards to
lace us into the torment of the jacket. Until nine the following

morning, for twenty-four straight hours, laced and helpless on the
floor, without food or water, we paid the price for speech.

Oh, our guards were brutes! And under their treatment we had to
harden to brutes in order to live. Hard work makes calloused hands.

Hard guards make hard prisoners. We continued to talk, and, on
occasion, to be jacketed for punishment. Night was the best time,

and, when substitute guards chanced to be on, we often talked
through a whole shift.

Night and day were one with us who lived in the dark. We could
sleep any time, we could knuckle-talk only on occasion. We told one

another much of the history of our lives, and for long hours Morrell
and I have lain silently, while steadily, with faint, far taps,

Oppenheimer slowly spelled out his life-story, from the early years
in a San Francisco slum, through his gang-training, through his

initiation into all that was vicious, when as a lad of fourteen he
served as night messenger in the red light district, through his

first detected infraction of the laws, and on and on through thefts
and robberies to the treachery of a comrade and to red slayings

inside prison walls.
They called Jake Oppenheimer the "Human Tiger." Some cub reporter

coined the phrase that will long outlive the man to whom it was
applied. And yet I ever found in Jake Oppenheimer all the cardinal

traits of right humanness. He was faithful and loyal. I know of
the times he has taken punishment in preference to informing on a

comrade. He was brave. He was patient. He was capable of self-
sacrifice--I could tell a story of this, but shall not take the

time. And justice, with him, was a passion. The prison-killings
done by him were due entirely to this extreme sense of justice. And

he had a splendid mind. A life-time in prison, ten years of it in
solitary, had not dimmed his brain.

Morrell, ever a true comrade, too had a splendid brain. In fact,
and I who am about to die have the right to say it without incurring

the charge of immodesty, the three best minds in San Quentin from
the Warden down were the three that rotted there together in

solitary. And here at the end of my days, reviewing all that I have
known of life, I am compelled to the conclusion that strong minds

are never docile. The stupid men, the fearful men, the men ungifted
with passionate rightness and fearless championship--these are the

men who make model prisoners. I thank all gods that Jake
Oppenheimer, Ed Morrell, and I were not model prisoners.

CHAPTER VI
There is more than the germ of truth in things erroneous in the

child's definition of memory as the thing one forgets with. To be
able to forget means sanity. Incessantly to remember, means

obsession, lunacy. So the problem I faced in solitary, where
incessant remembering strove for possession of me, was the problem

of forgetting. When I gamed with flies, or played chess with
myself, or talked with my knuckles, I partially forgot. What I

desired was entirely to forget.
There were the boyhood memories of other times and places--the

"trailing clouds of glory" of Wordsworth. If a boy had had these
memories, were they irretrievably lost when he had grown to manhood?

Could this particular content of his boy brain be utterly
eliminated? Or were these memories of other times and places still

residual, asleep, immured in solitary in brain cells similarly to
the way I was immured in a cell in San Quentin?

Solitary life-prisoners have been known to resurrect and look upon
the sun again. Then why could not these other-world memories of the

boy resurrect?
But how? In my judgment, by attainment of complete forgetfulness of

present and of manhood past.
And again, how? Hypnotism should do it. If by hypnotism the

conscious mind were put to sleep, and the subconscious mind
awakened, then was the thing accomplished, then would all the

dungeon doors of the brain be thrown wide, then would the prisoners
emerge into the sunshine.

So I reasoned--with what result you shall learn. But first I must
tell how, as a boy, I had had these other-world memories. I had

glowed in the clouds of glory I trailed from lives aforetime. Like
any boy, I had been haunted by the other beings I had been at other

times. This had been during my process of becoming, ere the flux of
all that I had ever been had hardened in the mould of the one

personality that was to be known by men for a few years as Darrell
Standing.

Let me narrate just one incident. It was up in Minnesota on the old
farm. I was nearly six years old. A missionary to China, returned

to the United States and sent out by the Board of Missions to raise
funds from the farmers, spent the night in our house. It was in the

kitchen just after supper, as my mother was helping me undress for
bed, and the missionary was showing photographs of the Holy Land.

And what I am about to tell you I should long since have forgotten
had I not heard my father recite it to wondering listeners so many

times during my childhood.
I cried out at sight of one of the photographs and looked at it,

first with eagerness, and then with disappointment. It had seemed
of a sudden most familiar, in much the same way that my father's

barn would have been in a photograph. Then it had seemed altogether
strange. But as I continued to look the haunting sense of

familiarity came back.
"The Tower of David," the missionary said to my mother.

"No!" I cried with great positiveness.
"You mean that isn't its name?" the missionary asked.

I nodded.
"Then what is its name, my boy?"

"It's name is . . ." I began, then concluded lamely, "I, forget."
"It don't look the same now," I went on after a pause. "They've ben

fixin' it up awful."
Here the missionary handed to my mother another photograph he had

sought out.
"I was there myself six months ago, Mrs. Standing." He pointed with

his finger. "That is the Jaffa Gate where I walked in and right up
to the Tower of David in the back of the picture where my finger is

now. The authorities are pretty well agreed on such matters. El