ent? You can't even kill me. Inefficient? You
couldn't kill a cornered rat with a stick of dynamite--_real_ dynamite,
and not the sort you are deluded into believing I have hidden away."

"Anything more?" he demanded, when I had ceased from my diatribe.

And into my mind flashed what I had told Fortini when he pressed his
insolence on me.

"Begone, you prison cur," I said. "Take your yapping from my door."

It must have been a terrible thing for a man of Warden Atherton's stripe
to be thus bearded by a helpless prisoner. His face whitened with rage
and his voice shook as he threatened:

"By God, Standing, I'll do for you yet."

"There is only one thing you can do," I said. "You can tighten this
distressingly loose jacket. If you won't, then get out. And I don't
care if you fail to come back for a week or for the whole ten days."

And what can even the Warden of a great prison do in reprisal on a
prisoner upon whom the ultimate reprisal has already been wreaked? It
may be that Warden Atherton thought of some possible threat, for he began
to speak. But my voice had strengthened with the exercise, and I began
to sing, "Sing cucu, sing cucu, sing cucu." And sing I did until my door
clanged and the bolts and locks squeaked and grated fast.

CHAPTER XII

Now that I had learned the trick the way was easy. And I knew the way
was bound to become easier the more I travelled it. Once establish a
line of least resistance, every succeeding journey along it will find
still less resistance. And so, as you shall see, my journeys from San
Quentin life into other lives were achieved almost automatically as time
went by.

After Warden Atherton and his crew had left me it was a matter of minutes
to will the resuscitated portion of my body back into the little death.
Death in life it was, but it was only the little death, similar to the
temporary death produced by an anaesthetic.

And so, from all that was sordid and vile, from brutal solitary and
jacket hell, from acquainted flies and sweats of darkness and the knuckle-
talk of the living dead, I was away at a bound into time and space.

Came the duration of darkness, and the slow-growing awareness of other
things and of another self. First of all, in this awareness, was dust.
It was in my nostrils, dry and acrid. It was on my lips. It coated my
face, my hands, and especially was it noticeable on the finger-tips when
touched by the ball of my thumb.