heaps and burned. Came the day when I moved my goats on to
other brush-impregnable hillsides, with following in their wake my
cattle, pasturing knee-deep in the succulent grasses that grew where
before had been only brush. And came the day when I moved my cattle on,
and my plough-men went back and forth across the slopes'
contour--ploughing the rich sod under to rot to live and crawling humous
in which to bed my seeds of crops to be.

Yes, and in my dreams, often, I got off the little narrow-gauge train
where the straggly village stood beside the big dry creek, and got into
the buckboard behind my mountain horses, and drove hour by hour past all
the old familiar landmarks of my alfalfa meadows, and on to my upland
pastures where my rotated crops of corn and barley and clover were ripe
for harvesting and where I watched my men engaged in the harvest, while
beyond, ever climbing, my goats browsed the higher slopes of brush into
cleared, tilled fields.

But these were dreams, frank dreams, fancied adventures of my deductive
subconscious mind. Quite unlike them, as you shall see, were my other
adventures when I passed through the gates of the living death and
relived the reality of the other lives that had been mine in other days.

In the long hours of waking in the jacket I found that I dwelt a great
deal on Cecil Winwood, the poet-forger who had wantonly put all this
torment on me, and who was even then at liberty out in the free world
again. No; I did not hate him. The word is too weak. There is no word
in the language strong enough to describe my feelings. I can say only
that I knew the gnawing of a desire for vengeance on him that was a pain
in itself and that exceeded all the bounds of language. I shall not tell
you of the hours I devoted to plans of torture on him, nor of the
diabolical means and devices of torture that I invented for him. Just
one example. I was enamoured of the ancient trick whereby an iron basin,
containing a rat, is fastened to a man's body. The only way out for the
rat is through the man himself. As I say, I was enamoured of this until
I realized that such a death was too quick, whereupon I dwelt long and
favourably on the Moorish trick of--but no, I promised to relate no
further of this matter. Let it suffice that many of my pain-maddening
waking hours were devoted to dreams of vengeance on Cecil Winwood.

CHAPTER IX

One thing of great value I learned in the long, pain