"Surely you don't think I'm holding out because I enjoy it?" I managed to
gasp, for at the moment Pie-Face Jones was forcing his foot into my back
in order to cinch me tighter, while I was trying with my muscle to steal
slack. "There is nothing to confess. Why, I'd cut off my right hand
right now to be able to lead you to any dynamite."

"Oh, I've seen your educated kind before," he sneered. "You get wheels
in your head, some of you, that make you stick to any old idea. You get
baulky, like horses. Tighter, Jones; that ain't half a cinch. Standing,
if you don't come across it's curtains. I stick by that."

One compensation I learned. As one grows weaker one is less susceptible
to suffering. There is less hurt because there is less to hurt. And the
man already well weakened grows weaker more slowly. It is of common
knowledge that unusually strong men suffer more severely from ordinary
sicknesses than do women or invalids. As the reserves of strength are
consumed there is less strength to lose. After all superfluous flesh is
gone what is left is stringy and resistant. In fact, that was what I
became--a sort of string-like organism that persisted in living.

Morrell and Oppenheimer were sorry for me, and rapped me sympathy and
advice. Oppenheimer told me he had gone through it, and worse, and still
lived.

"Don't let them beat you out," he spelled with his knuckles. "Don't let
them kill you, for that would suit them. And don't squeal on the plant."

"But there isn't any plant," I rapped back with the edge of the sole of
my shoe against the grating--I was in the jacket at the time and so could
talk only with my feet. "I don't know anything about the damned
dynamite."

"That's right," Oppenheimer praised. "He's the stuff, ain't he, Ed?"

Which goes to show what chance I had of convincing Warden Atherton of my
ignorance of the dynamite. His very persistence in the quest convinced a
man like Jake Oppenheimer, who could only admire me for the fortitude
with which I kept a close mouth.

During this first period of the jacket-inquisition I managed to sleep a
great deal. My dreams were remarkable. Of course they were vivid and
real, as most dreams are. What made them remarkable was their coherence
and continuity. Often I addressed bodies of scientists on abstruse
subjects, reading aloud to them carefully prepared papers on my own
researches or on my own deductions from the researches and experiments