writing these lines in the very cell in Murderers' Row that Jake

Oppenheimer occupied ere they took him out and did to him what they
are going to do to me.

I warned you I had many things to write about. I shall now return
to my narrative. The Board of Prison Directors gave me my choice:

a prison trustyship and surcease from the jute-looms if I gave up
the non-existent dynamite; life imprisonment in solitary if I

refused to give up the non-existent dynamite.
They gave me twenty-four hours in the jacket to think it over. Then

I was brought before the Board a second time. What could I do? I
could not lead them to the dynamite that was not. I told them so,

and they told me I was a liar. They told me I was a hard case, a
dangerous man, a moral degenerate, the criminal of the century.

They told me many other things, and then they carried me away to the
solitary cells. I was put into Number One cell. In Number Five lay

Ed Morrell. In Number Twelve lay Jake Oppenheimer. And he had been
there for ten years. Ed Morrell had been in his cell only one year.

He was serving a fifty-years' sentence. Jake Oppenheimer was a
lifer. And so was I a lifer. Wherefore the outlook was that the

three of us would remain there for a long time. And yet, six years
only are past, and not one of us is in solitary. Jake Oppenheimer

was swung off. Ed Morrell was made head trusty of San Quentin and
then pardoned out only the other day. And here I am in Folsom

waiting the day duly set by Judge Morgan, which will be my last day.
The fools! As if they could throttle my immortality with their

clumsy device of rope and scaffold! I shall walk, and walk again,
oh, countless times, this fair earth. And I shall walk in the

flesh, be prince and peasant, savant and fool, sit in the high place
and groan under the wheel.

CHAPTER V
It was very lonely, at first, in solitary, and the hours were long.

Time was marked by the regular changing of the guards, and by the
alternation of day and night. Day was only a little light, but it

was better than the all-dark of the night. In solitary the day was
an ooze, a slimy seepage of light from the bright outer world.

Never was the light strong enough to read by. Besides, there was
nothing to read. One could only lie and think and think. And I was

a lifer, and it seemed certain, if I did not do a miracle, make
thirty-five pounds of dynamite out of nothing, that all the years of

my life would be spent in the silent dark.
My bed was a thin and rotten tick of straw spread on the cell floor.

One thin and filthy blanket constituted the covering. There was no
chair, no table--nothing but the tick of straw and the thin, aged

blanket. I was ever a short sleeper and ever a busy-brained man.
In solitary one grows sick of oneself in his thoughts, and the only

way to escape oneself is to sleep. For years I had averaged five
hours' sleep a night. I now cultivated sleep. I made a science of

it. I became able to sleep ten hours, then twelve hours, and, at
last, as high as fourteen and fifteen hours out of the twenty-four.

But beyond that I could not go, and, perforce, was compelled to lie
awake and think and think. And that way, for an active-brained man,

lay madness.
I sought devices to enable me mechanically to abide my waking hours.

I squared and cubed long series of numbers, and by concentration and
will carried on most astonishing geometric progressions. I even

dallied with the squaring of the circle . . . until I found myself
beginning to believe that that possibility could be accomplished.

Whereupon, realizing that there, too, lay madness, I forwent the
squaring of the circle, although I assure you it required a

considerable sacrifice on my part, for the mental exercise involved
was a splendid time-killer.

By sheer visualization under my eyelids I constructed chess-boards
and played both sides of long games through to checkmate. But when

I had become expert at this visualized game of memory the exercise
palled on me. Exercise it was, for there could be no real contest

when the same player played both sides. I tried, and tried vainly,
to split my personality into two personalities and to pit one

against the other. But ever I remained the one player, with no
planned ruse or strategy on one side that the other side did not

immediately apprehend.
And time was very heavy and very long. I played games with flies,

with ordinary houseflies that oozed into solitary as did the dim
gray light; and learned that they possessed a sense of play. For

instance, lying on the cell floor, I established an arbitrary and
imaginary line along the wall some three feet above the floor. When

they rested on the wall above this line they were left in peace.
The instant they lighted on the wall below the line I tried to catch

them. I was careful never to hurt them, and, in time, they knew as
precisely as did I where ran the imaginary line. When they desired

to play, they lighted below the line, and often for an hour at a
time a single fly would engage in the sport. When it grew tired, it

would come to rest on the safe territory above.
Of the dozen or more flies that lived with me, there was only one

who did not care for the game. He refused steadfastly to play, and,
having learned the penalty of alighting below the line, very

carefully avoided the unsafe territory. That fly was a sullen,
disgruntled creature. As the convicts would say, it had a "grouch"

against the world. He never played with the other flies either. He
was strong and healthy, too; for I studied him long to find out.

His indisposition for play was temperamental, not physical.
Believe me, I knew all my flies. It was surprising to me the

multitude of differences I distinguished between them. Oh, each was
distinctly an individual--not merely in size and markings, strength,

and speed of flight, and in the manner and fancy of flight and play,
of dodge and dart, of wheel and swiftly repeat or wheel and reverse,

of touch and go on the danger wall, or of feint the touch and alight
elsewhere within the zone. They were likewise sharply

differentiated in the minutest shades of mentality and temperament.
I knew the nervous ones, the phlegmatic ones. There was a little

undersized one that would fly into real rages, sometimes with me,
sometimes with its fellows. Have you ever seen a colt or a calf

throw up its heels and dash madly about the pasture from sheer
excess of vitality and spirits? Well, there was one fly--the

keenest player of them all, by the way--who, when it had alighted
three or four times in rapid succession on my taboo wall and

succeeded each time in eluding the velvet-careful swoop of my hand,
would grow so excited and jubilant that it would dart around and

around my head at top speed, wheeling, veering, reversing, and
always keeping within the limits of the narrow circle in which it

celebrated its triumph over me.
Why, I could tell well in advance when any particular fly was making

up its mind to begin to play. There are a thousand details in this
one matter alone that I shall not bore you with, although these

details did serve to keep me from being bored too utterly during
that first period in solitary. But one thing I must tell you. To

me it is most memorable--the time when the one with a grouch, who
never played, alighted in a moment of absent-mindedness within the

taboo precinct and was immediately captured in my hand. Do you
know, he sulked for an hour afterward.

And the hours were very long in solitary; nor could I sleep them all
away; nor could I while them away with house-flies, no matter how

intelligent. For house-flies are house-flies, and I was a man, with
a man's brain; and my brain was trained and active, stuffed with

culture and science, and always geared to a high tension of
eagerness to do. And there was nothing to do, and my thoughts ran

abominably on in vain speculations. There was my pentose and
methyl-pentose determination in grapes and wines to which I had