torment, I was free to roam through time.
Ed Morrell believed all my adventures, but Jake Oppenheimer remained

sceptical to the last. It was during my third year in solitary that
I paid Oppenheimer a visit. I was never able to do it but that

once, and that one time was wholly unplanned and unexpected.
It was merely after unconsciousness had come to me that I found

myself in his cell. My body, I knew, lay in the jacket back in my
own cell. Although never before had I seen him, I knew that this

man was Jake Oppenheimer. It was summer weather, and he lay without
clothes on top his blanket. I was shocked by his cadaverous face

and skeleton-like body. He was not even the shell of a man. He was
merely the structure of a man, the bones of a man, still cohering,

stripped practically of all flesh and covered with a parchment-like
skin.

Not until back in my own cell and consciousness was I able to mull
the thing over and realize that just as was Jake Oppenheimer, so was

Ed Morrell, so was I. And I could not but thrill as I glimpsed the
vastitude of spirit that inhabited these frail, perishing carcasses

of us--the three incorrigibles of solitary. Flesh is a cheap, vain
thing. Grass is flesh, and flesh becomes grass; but the spirit is

the thing that abides and survives. I have no patience with these
flesh-worshippers. A taste of solitary in San Quentin would swiftly

convert them to a due appreciation and worship of the spirit.
But to return to my experience m Oppenheimer's cell. His body was

that of a man long dead and shrivelled by desert heat. The skin
that covered it was of the colour of dry mud. His sharp, yellow-

gray eyes seemed the only part of him that was alive. They were
never at rest. He lay on his back, and the eyes darted hither and

thither, following the flight of the several flies that disported in
the gloomy air above him. I noted, too, a scar, just above his

right elbow, and another scar on his right ankle.
After a time he yawned, rolled over on his side, and inspected an

angry-looking sore just above his hip. This he proceeded to cleanse
and dress by the crude methods men in solitary must employ. I

recognized the sore as one of the sort caused by the strait-jacket.
On my body, at this moment of writing, are hundreds of scars of the

jacket.
Next, Oppenheimer rolled on his back, gingerly took one of his front

upper tooth--an eye teeth--between thumb and forefinger, and
consideratively moved it back and forth. Again he yawned, stretched

his arms, rolled over, and knocked the call to Ed Morrell.
I read the code as a matter of course.

"Thought you might be awake," Oppenheimer tapped. "How goes it with
the Professor?"

Then, dim and far, I could hear Morrell's taps enunciating that they
had put me in the jacket an hour before, and that, as usual, I was

already deaf to all knuckle talk.
"He is a good guy," Oppenheimer rapped on. "I always was suspicious

of educated mugs, but he ain't been hurt none by his education. He
is sure square. Got all the spunk in the world, and you could not

get him to squeal or double cross in a million years."
To all of which, and with amplification, Ed Morrell agreed. And I

must, right here, ere I go a word further, say that I have lived
many years and many lives, and that in those many lives I have known

proud moments; but that the proudest moment I have ever known was
the moment when my two comrades in solitary passed this appraisal of

me. Ed Morrell and Jake Oppenheimer were great spirits, and in all
time no greater honour was ever accorded me than this admission of

me to their comradeship. Kings have knighted me, emperors have
ennobled me, and, as king myself, I have known stately moments. Yet

of it all nothing do I adjudge so splendid as this accolade
delivered by two lifers in solitary deemed by the world as the very

bottom-most of the human cesspool.
Afterwards, recuperating from this particular bout with the jacket,

I brought up my visit to Jake's cell as a proof that my spirit did
leave my body. But Jake was unshakable.

"It is guessing that is more than guessing," was his reply, when I
had described to him his successive particular actions at the time

my spirit had been in his cell. "It is figuring. You have been
close to three years in solitary yourself, Professor, and you can

come pretty near to figuring what any guy will do to be killing
time. There ain't a thing you told me that you and Ed ain't done

thousands of times, from lying with your clothes off in hot weather
to watching flies, tending sores, and rapping."

Morrell sided with me, but it was no use.
"Now don't take it hard, Professor," Jake tapped. "I ain't saying

you lied. I just say you get to dreaming and figuring in the jacket
without knowing you're doing it. I know you believe what you say,

and that you think it happened; but it don't buy nothing with me.
You figure it, but you don't know you figure it--that is something

you know all the time, though you don't know you know it until you
get into them dreamy, woozy states."

"Hold on, Jake," I tapped. "You know I have never seen you with my
own eyes. Is that right?"

"I got to take your word for it, Professor. You might have seen me
and not known it was me."

"The point is," I continued, "not having seen you with your clothes
off, nevertheless I am able to tell you about that scar above your

right elbow, and that scar on your right ankle."
"Oh, shucks," was his reply. "You'll find all that in my prison

description and along with my mug in the rogues' gallery. They is
thousands of chiefs of police and detectives know all that stuff."

"I never heard of it," I assured him.
"You don't remember that you ever heard of it," he corrected. "But

you must have just the same. Though you have forgotten about it,
the information is in your brain all right, stored away for

reference, only you've forgot where it is stored. You've got to get
woozy in order to remember."

"Did you ever forget a man's name you used to know as well as your
own brother's? I have. There was a little juror that convicted me

in Oakland the time I got handed my fifty-years. And one day I
found I'd forgotten his name. Why, bo, I lay here for weeks

puzzling for it. Now, just because I could not dig it out of my
memory box was no sign it was not there. It was mislaid, that was

all. And to prove it, one day, when I was not even thinking about
it, it popped right out of my brain to the tip of my tongue.

'Stacy,' I said right out loud. 'Joseph Stacy.' That was it. Get
my drive?

"You only tell me about them scars what thousands of men know. I
don't know how you got the information, I guess you don't know

yourself. That ain't my lookout. But there she is. Telling me
what many knows buys nothing with me. You got to deliver a whole

lot more than that to make me swallow the rest of your whoppers."
Hamilton's Law of Parsimony in the weighing of evidence! So

intrinsically was this slum-bred convict a scientist, that he had
worked out Hamilton's law and rigidlyapplied it.

And yet--and the incident is delicious--Jake Oppenheimer was
intellectually honest. That night, as I was dozing off, he called

me with the customary signal.
"Say, Professor, you said you saw me wiggling my loose tooth. That

has got my goat. That is the one thing I can't figure out any way
you could know. It only went loose three days ago, and I ain't

whispered it to a soul."
CHAPTER XXI

Pascal somewhere says: "In viewing the march of human evolution,
the philosophic mind should look upon humanity as one man, and not

as a conglomeration of individuals."