f
guards can shake out of my brain the things that are clear and definite
in my brain. The whole organization of this prison is stupid. You are a
politician. You can weave the political pull of San Francisco saloon-men
and ward heelers into a position of graft such as this one you occupy;
but you can't weave jute. Your loom-rooms are fifty years behind the
times. . . ."

But why continue the tirade?--for tirade it was. I showed him what a
fool he was, and as a result he decided that I was a hopeless
incorrigible.

Give a dog a bad name--you know the saw. Very well. Warden Atherton
gave the final sanction to the badness of my name. I was fair game. More
than one convict's dereliction was shunted off on me, and was paid for by
me in the dungeon on bread and water, or in being triced up by the thumbs
on my tip-toes for long hours, each hour of which was longer than any
life I have ever lived.

Intelligent men are cruel. Stupid men are monstrously cruel. The guards
and the men over me, from the Warden down, were stupid monsters. Listen,
and you shall learn what they did to me. There was a poet in the prison,
a convict, a weak-chinned, broad-browed, degenerate poet. He was a
forger. He was a coward. He was a snitcher. He was a stool--strange
words for a professor of agronomics to use in writing, but a professor of
agronomics may well learn strange words when pent in prison for the term
of his natural life.

This poet-forger's name was Cecil Winwood. He had had prior convictions,
and yet, because he was a snivelling cur of a yellow dog, his last
sentence had been only for seven years. Good credits would materially
reduce this time. My time was life. Yet this miserable degenerate, in
order to gain several short years of liberty for himself, succeeded in
adding a fair portion of eternity to my own lifetime term.

I shall tell what happened the other way around, for it was only after a
weary period that I learned. This Cecil Winwood, in order to curry
favour with the Captain of the Yard, and thence the Warden, the Prison
Directors, the Board of Pardons, and the Governor of California, framed
up a prison-break. Now note three things: (a) Cecil Winwood was so
detested by his fellow-convicts that they would not have permitted him to
bet an ounce of Bull Durham on a bed-bug race--and bed-bug racing was a
great sport with the convicts; (b) I was the dog that had been given a
bad name: (c) for his frame-up