I was to rest up
and recuperate for a few days, and then, if in the meantime I had not
confessed to the hiding-place of the dynamite, I should be given another
ten days in the jacket.

"Sorry to cause you so much trouble, Warden," I had said in reply. "It's
a pity I don't die in the jacket and so put you out of your misery."

At this time I doubt that I weighed an ounce over ninety pounds. Yet,
two years before, when the doors of San Quentin first closed on me, I had
weighed one hundred and sixty-five pounds. It seems incredible that
there was another ounce I could part with and still live. Yet in the
months that followed, ounce by ounce I was reduced until I know I must
have weighed nearer eighty than ninety pounds. I do know, after I
managed my escape from solitary and struck the guard Thurston on the
nose, that before they took me to San Rafael for trial, while I was being
cleaned and shaved I weighed eighty-nine pounds.

There are those who wonder how men grow hard. Warden Atherton was a hard
man. He made me hard, and my very hardness reacted on him and made him
harder. And yet he never succeeded in killing me. It required the state
law of California, a hanging judge, and an unpardoning governor to send
me to the scaffold for striking a prison guard with my fist. I shall
always contend that that guard had a nose most easily bleedable. I was a
bat-eyed, tottery skeleton at the time. I sometimes wonder if his nose
really did bleed. Of course he swore it did, on the witness stand. But
I have known prison guards take oath to worse perjuries than that.

Ed Morrell was eager to know if I had succeeded with the experiment; but
when he attempted to talk with me he was shut up by Smith, the guard who
happened to be on duty in solitary.

"That's all right, Ed," I rapped to him. "You and Jake keep quiet, and
I'll tell you about it. Smith can't prevent you from listening, and he
can't prevent me from talking. They have done their worst, and I am
still here."

"Cut that out, Standing!" Smith bellowed at me from the corridor on which
all the cells opened.

Smith was a peculiarly saturnine individual, by far the most cruel and
vindictive of our guards. We used to canvass whether his wife bullied
him or whether he had chronic indigestion.

I continued rapping with my knuckles, and he came to the wicket to glare
in at me.

"I told you to out that out," he snarled.

"Sorry," I said suavely. "But I have