that sometimes I think that is why I am still here, eating and
sleeping, thinking and dreaming, writing this narrative of my

various me's, and awaiting the incontestable rope that will put an
ephemeral period in my long-linked existence.

And then came death in life. I learned the trick, Ed Morrell taught
it me, as you shall see. It began through Warden Atherton and

Captain Jamie. They must have experienced a recrudescence of panic
at thought of the dynamite they believed hidden. They came to me in

my dark cell, and they told me plainly that they would jacket me to
death if I did not confess where the dynamite was hidden. And they

assured me that they would do it officially without any hurt to
their own official skins. My death would appear on the prison

register as due to natural causes.
Oh, dear, cotton-wool citizen, please believe me when I tell you

that men are killed in prisons to-day as they have always been
killed since the first prisons were built by men.

I well knew the terror, the agony, and the danger of the jacket.
Oh, the men spirit-broken by the jacket! I have seen them. And I

have seen men crippled for life by the jacket. I have seen men,
strong men, men so strong that their physical stamina resisted all

attacks of prison tuberculosis, after a prolonged bout with the
jacket, their resistance broken down, fade away, and die of

tuberculosis within six months. There was Slant-Eyed Wilson, with
an unguessed weak heart of fear, who died in the jacket within the

first hour while the unconvinced inefficient of a prison doctor
looked on and smiled. And I have seen a man confess, after half an

hour in the jacket, truths and fictions that cost him years of
credits.

I had had my own experiences. At the present moment half a thousand
scars mark my body. They go to the scaffold with me. Did I live a

hundred years to come those same scars in the end would go to the
grave with me.

Perhaps, dear citizen who permits and pays his hang-dogs to lace the
jacket for you--perhaps you are unacquainted with the jacket. Let

me describe, it, so that you will understand the method by which I
achieved death in life, became a temporary master of time and space,

and vaulted the prison walls to rove among the stars.
Have you ever seen canvas tarpaulins or rubber blankets with brass

eyelets set in along the edges? Then imagine a piece of stout
canvas, some four and one-half feet in length, with large and heavy

brass eyelets running down both edges. The width of this canvas is
never the full girth of the human body it is to surround. The width

is also irregular--broadest at the shoulders, next broadest at the
hips, and narrowest at the waist.

The jacket is spread on the floor. The man who is to be punished,
or who is to be tortured for confession, is told to lie face-

downward on the flat canvas. If he refuses, he is man-handled.
After that he lays himself down with a will, which is the will of

the hang-dogs, which is your will, dear citizen, who feeds and fees
the hang-dogs for doing this thing for you.

The man lies face-downward. The edges of the jacket are brought as
nearly together as possible along the centre of the man's back.

Then a rope, on the principle of a shoe-lace, is run through the
eyelets, and on the principle of a shoe-lacing the man is laced in

the canvas. Only he is laced more severely than any person ever
laces his shoe. They call it "cinching" in prison lingo. On

occasion, when the guards are cruel and vindictive, or when the
command has come down from above, in order to insure the severity of

the lacing the guards press with their feet into the man's back as
they draw the lacing tight.

Have you ever laced your shoe too tightly, and, after half an hour,
experienced that excruciating pain across the instep of the

obstructed circulation? And do you remember that after a few
minutes of such pain you simply could not walk another step and had

to untie the shoe-lace and ease the pressure? Very well. Then try
to imagine your whole body so laced, only much more tightly, and

that the squeeze, instead of being merely on the instep of one foot,
is on your entire trunk, compressing to the seeming of death your

heart, your lungs, and all the rest of your vital and essential
organs.

I remember the first time they gave me the jacket down in the
dungeons. It was at the beginning of my incorrigibility, shortly

after my entrance to prison, when I was weaving my loom-task of a
hundred yards a day in the jute-mill and finishing two hours ahead

of the average day. Yes, and my jute-sacking was far above the
average demanded. I was sent to the jacket that first time,

according to the prison books, because of "skips" and "breaks" in
the cloth, in short, because my work was defective. Of course this

was ridiculous. In truth, I was sent to the jacket because I, a new
convict, a master of efficiency, a trained expert in the elimination

of waste motion, had elected to tell the stupid head weaver a few
things he did not know about his business. And the head weaver,

with Captain Jamie present, had me called to the table where
atrocious weaving, such as could never have gone through my loom,

was exhibited against me. Three times was I thus called to the
table. The third calling meant punishment according to the loom-

room rules. My punishment was twenty-four hours in the jacket.
They took me down into the dungeons. I was ordered to lie face-

downward on the canvas spread flat upon the floor. I refused. One
of the guards, Morrison, gulletted me with his thumbs. Mobins, the

dungeon trusty, a convict himself, struck me repeatedly with his
fists. In the end I lay down as directed. And, because of the

struggle I had vexed them with, they laced me extra tight. Then
they rolled me over like a log upon my back.

It did not seem so bad at first. When they closed my door, with
clang and clash of levered boltage, and left me in the utter dark,

it was eleven o'clock in the morning. For a few minutes I was aware
merely of an uncomfortable constriction which I fondly believed

would ease as I grew accustomed to it. On the contrary, my heart
began to thump and my lungs seemed unable to draw sufficient air for

my blood. This sense of suffocation was terrorizing, and every
thump of the heart threatened to burst my already bursting lungs.

After what seemed hours, and after what, out of my countless
succeeding experiences in the jacket I can now fairly conclude to

have been not more than half-an-hour, I began to cry out, to yell,
to scream, to howl, in a very madness of dying. The trouble was the

pain that had arisen in my heart. It was a sharp, definite pain,
similar to that of pleurisy, except that it stabbed hotly through

the heart itself.
To die is not a difficult thing, but to die in such slow and

horrible fashion was maddening. Like a trapped beast of the wild, I
experienced ecstasies of fear, and yelled and howled until I

realized that such vocal exercise merely stabbed my heart more hotly
and at the same time consumed much of the little air in my lungs.

I gave over and lay quiet for a long time--an eternity it seemed
then, though now I am confident that it could have been no longer

than a quarter of an hour. I grew dizzy with semi-asphyxiation, and
my heart thumped until it seemed surely it would burst the canvas

that bound me. Again I lost control of myself and set up a mad
howling for help.

In the midst of this I heard a voice from the next dungeon.
"Shut up," it shouted, though only faintly it percolated to me.

"Shut up. You make me tired."
"I'm dying," I cried out.

"Pound your ear and forget it," was the reply.
"But I AM dying," I insisted.