n chess.

But there was no convincing him that I had in truth brought this game
back to San Quentin across the centuries. He insisted that I had read
about it somewhere, and, though I had forgotten the reading, the stuff of
the reading was nevertheless in the content of my mind, ripe to be
brought out in any pipe-dream. Thus he turned the tenets and jargon of
psychology back on me.

"What's to prevent your inventing it right here in solitary?" was his
next hypothesis. "Didn't Ed invent the knuckle-talk? And ain't you and
me improving on it right along? I got you, bo. You invented it. Say,
get it patented. I remember when I was night-messenger some guy invented
a fool thing called Pigs in Clover and made millions out of it."

"There's no patenting this," I replied. "Doubtlessly the Asiatics have
been playing it for thousands of years. Won't you believe me when I tell
you I didn't invent it?"

"Then you must have read about it, or seen the Chinks playing it in some
of those hop-joints you was always hanging around," was his last word.

But I have a last word. There is a Japanese murderer here in Folsom--or
was, for he was executed last week. I talked the matter over with him;
and the game Adam Strang played, and which I taught Oppenheimer, proved
quite similar to the Japanese game. They are far more alike than is
either of them like the Western game.

CHAPTER XVII

You, my reader, will remember, far back at the beginning of this
narrative, how, when a little lad on the Minnesota farm, I looked at the
photographs of the Holy Land and recognized places and pointed out
changes in places. Also you will remember, as I described the scene I
had witnessed of the healing of the lepers, I told the missionary that I
was a big man with a big sword, astride a horse and looking on.

That childhood incident was merely a trailing cloud of glory, as
Wordsworth puts it. Not in entire forgetfulness had I, little Darrell
Standing, come into the world. But those memories of other times and
places that glimmered up to the surface of my child consciousness soon
failed and faded. In truth, as is the way with all children, the shades
of the prison-house closed about me, and I remembered my mighty past no
more. Every man born of woman has a past mighty as mine. Very few men
born of women have been fortunate enough to suffer years of solitary and
strait-jacketing. That was my good fortune. I was enabled to reme