“Ha! ha! ha!” Jake Oppenheimer rapped his laughter thirteen cells away.
“You see, that’s Jake’s trouble,” Morrell went on. “He can’t believe. That one time he tried it he was too strong and failed. And now he thinks I am kidding.”
“When you die you are dead, and dead men stay dead,” Oppenheimer retorted.
“I tell you I’ve been dead three times,” Morrell argued.
“And lived to tell us about it,” Oppenheimer jeered.
“But don’t forget one thing, Darrell,” Morrell rapped to me. “The thing is ticklish. You have a feeling all the time that you are taking liberties. I can’t explain it, but I always had a feeling if I was away when they came and let my body out of the jacket that I couldn’t get back into my body again. I mean that my body would be dead for keeps. And I didn’t want it to be dead. I didn’t want to give Captain Jamie and the rest that satisfaction. But I tell you, Darrell, if you can turn the trick you can laugh at the Warden. Once you make your body die that way it don’t matter whether they keep you in the jacket a month on end. You don’t suffer none, and your body don’t suffer. You know there are cases of people who have slept a whole year at a time. That’s the way it will be with your body. It just stays there in the jacket, not hurting or anything, just waiting for you to come back.
“You try it. I am giving you the straight steer.”
“And if he don’t come back?” Oppenheimer, asked.
“Then the laugh will be on him, I guess, Jake,” Morrell answered. “Unless, maybe, it will be on us for sticking round this old dump when we could get away that easy.”
And here the conversation ended, for Pie-Face Jones, waking crustily from stolen slumber, threatened Morrell and Oppenheimer with a report next morning that would mean the jacket for them. Me he did not threaten, for he knew I was doomed for the jacket anyway.
I lay long there in the silence, forgetting the misery of my body while I considered this proposition Morrell had advanced. Already, as I have explained, by mechanical self-hypnosis I had sought to penetrate back through time to my previous selves. That I had partly succeeded I knew; but all that I had experienced was a fluttering of apparitions that merged erratically and were without continuity.
But Morrell’s method was so patently the reverse of my method of self-hypnosis that I was fascinated. By my method, my consciousness went first of all. By his method, consciousness persisted last of all, and, when the body was quite gone, passed into stages so sublimated that it left the body, left the prison of San Quentin, and journeyed afar, and was still consciousness.
It was worth a trial, anyway, I concluded. And, despite the sceptical attitude of the scientist that was mine, I believed. I had no doubt I could do what Morrell said he had done three times. Perhaps this faith that so easily possessed me was due to my extreme debility. Perhaps I was not strong enough to be sceptical. This was the hypothesis already suggested by Morrell. It was a conclusion of pure empiricism, and I, too, as you shall see, demonstrated it empirically.
CHAPTER X
And above all things, next morning Warden Atherton came into my cell on murder intent. With him were Captain Jamie, Doctor Jackson, Pie-Face Jones, and Al Hutchins. Al Hutchins was serving a forty-years’ sentence, and was in hopes of being pardoned out. For four years he had been head trusty of San Quentin. That this was a position of great power you will realize when I tell you that the graft alone of the head trusty was estimated at three thousand dollars a year. Wherefore Al Hutchins, in possession of ten or twelve thousand dollars and of the promise of a pardon, could be depended upon to do the Warden’s bidding blind.
I have just said that Warden Atherton came into my cell intent on murder. His face showed it. His actions proved it.
“Examine him,” he ordered Doctor Jackson.
That wretched apology of a creature stripped from me my dirt-encrusted shirt that I had worn since my entrance to solitary, and exposed my poor wasted body, the skin ridged like brown parchment over the ribs and sore-infested from the many bouts with the jacket. The examination was shamelessly perfunctory.
“Will he stand it?” the Warden demanded.
“Yes,” Doctor Jackson answered.
“How’s the heart?”
“Splendid.”
“You think he’ll stand ten days of it, Doc.?”
“Sure.”
“I don’t believe it,” the Warden announced savagely. “But we’ll try it just the same.—Lie down, Standing.”
I obeyed, stretching myself face-downward on the flat-spread jacket. The Warden seemed to debate with himself for a moment.
“Roll over,” he commanded.
I made several efforts, but was too weak to succeed, and could only sprawl and squirm in my helplessness.
“Putting it on,” was Jackson ’s comment.
“Well, he won’t have to put it on when I’m done with him,” said the Warden. “Lend him a hand. I can’t waste any more time on him.”
So they rolled me over on my back, where I stared up into Warden Atherton’s face.
“Standing,” he said slowly, “I’ve given you all the rope I am going to. I am sick and tired of your stubbornness. My patience is exhausted. Doctor Jackson says you are in condition to stand ten days in the jacket. You can figure your chances. But I am going to give you your last chance now. Come across with the dynamite. The moment it is in my hands I’ll take you out of here. You can bathe and shave and get clean clothes. I’ll let you loaf for six months on hospital grub, and then I’ll put you trusty in the library. You can’t ask me to be fairer with you than that. Besides, you’re not squealing on anybody. You are the only person in San Quentin who knows where the dynamite is. You won’t hurt anybody’s feelings by giving in, and you’ll be all to the good from the moment you do give in. And if you don’t—”
He paused and shrugged his shoulders significantly.
“Well, if you don’t, you start in the ten days right now.”
The prospect was terrifying. So weak was I that I was as certain as the Warden was that it meant death in the jacket. And then I remembered Morrell’s trick. Now, if ever, was the need of it; and now, if ever, was the time to practise the faith of it. I smiled up in the face of Warden Atherton. And I put faith in that smile, and faith in the proposition I made to him.
“Warden,” I said, “do you see the way I am smiling? Well, if, at the end of the ten days, when you unlace me, I smile up at you in the same way, will you give a sack of Bull Durham and a package of brown papers to Morrell and Oppenheimer?”
“Ain’t they the crazy ginks, these college guys,” Captain Jamie snorted.
Warden Atherton was a choleric man, and he took my request for insulting braggadocio.
“Just for that you get an extra cinching,” he informed me.
“I made you a sporting proposition, Warden,” I said quietly. “You can cinch me as tight as you please, but if I smile ten days from now will you give the Bull Durham to Morrell and Oppenheimer?”
“You are mighty sure of yourself,” he retorted.
“That’s why I made the proposition,” I replied.
“Getting religion, eh?” he sneered.
“No,” was my answer. “It merely happens that I possess more life than you can ever reach the end of. Make it a hundred days if you want, and I’ll smile at you when it’s over.”
“I guess ten days will more than do you, Standing.”
“That’s your opinion,” I said. “Have you got faith in it? If you have you won’t even lose the price of the two five-cents sacks of tobacco. Anyway, what have you got to be afraid of?”