ring and cursing us, the guards ran in
the fire-hoses and played the fierce streams on us, dungeon by dungeon,
hour after hour, until our bruised flesh was battered all anew by the
violence with which the water smote us, until we stood knee-deep in the
water which we had raved for and for which now we raved to cease.

I shall skip the rest of what happened in the dungeons. In passing I
shall merely state that no one of those forty lifers was ever the same
again. Luigi Polazzo never recovered his reason. Long Bill Hodge slowly
lost his sanity, so that a year later, he, too, went to live in Bughouse
Alley. Oh, and others followed Hodge and Polazzo; and others, whose
physical stamina had been impaired, fell victims to prison-tuberculosis.
Fully 25 per cent. of the forty have died in the succeeding six years.

After my five years in solitary, when they took me away from San Quentin
for my trial, I saw Skysail Jack. I could see little, for I was blinking
in the sunshine like a bat, after five years of darkness; yet I saw
enough of Skysail Jack to pain my heart. It was in crossing the Prison
Yard that I saw him. His hair had turned white. He was prematurely old.
His chest had caved in. His cheeks were sunken. His hands shook as with
palsy. He tottered as he walked. And his eyes blurred with tears as he
recognized me, for I, too, was a sad wreck of what had once been a man. I
weighed eighty-seven pounds. My hair, streaked with gray, was a five-
years' growth, as were my beard and moustache. And I, too, tottered as I
walked, so that the guards helped to lead me across that sun-blinding
patch of yard. And Skysail Jack and I peered and knew each other under
the wreckage.

Men such as he are privileged, even in a prison, so that he dared an
infraction of the rules by speaking to me in a cracked and quavering
voice.

"You're a good one, Standing," he cackled. "You never squealed."

"But I never knew, Jack," I whispered back--I was compelled to whisper,
for five years of disuse had well-nigh lost me my voice. "I don't think
there ever was any dynamite."

"That's right," he cackled, nodding his head childishly. "Stick with it.
Don't ever let'm know. You're a good one. I take my hat off to you,
Standing. You never squealed."

And the guards led me on, and that was the last I saw of Skysail Jack. It
was plain that even he had become a believer in the dynamite myth.

* * * * *

Twice they had me before t