he full Board of Directors. I was alternately
bullied and cajoled. Their attitude resolved itself into two
propositions. If I delivered up the dynamite, they would give me a
nominal punishment of thirty days in the dungeon and then make me a
trusty in the prison library. If I persisted in my stubbornness and did
not yield up the dynamite, then they would put me in solitary for the
rest of my sentence. In my case, being a life prisoner, this was
tantamount to condemning me to solitary confinement for life.

Oh, no; California is civilized. There is no such law on the statute
books. It is a cruel and unusual punishment, and no modern state would
be guilty of such a law. Nevertheless, in the history of California I am
the third man who has been condemned for life to solitary confinement.
The other two were Jake Oppenheimer and Ed Morrell. I shall tell you
about them soon, for I rotted with them for years in the cells of
silence.

Oh, another thing. They are going to take me out and hang me in a little
while--no, not for killing Professor Haskell. I got life-imprisonment
for that. They are going to take me out and hang me because I was found
guilty of assault and battery. And this is not prison discipline. It is
law, and as law it will be found in the criminal statutes.

I believe I made a man's nose bleed. I never saw it bleed, but that was
the evidence. Thurston, his name was. He was a guard at San Quentin. He
weighed one hundred and seventy pounds and was in good health. I weighed
under ninety pounds, was blind as a bat from the long darkness, and had
been so long pent in narrow walls that I was made dizzy by large open
spaces. Really, mime was a well-defined case of incipient agoraphobia,
as I quickly learned that day I escaped from solitary and punched the
guard Thurston on the nose.

I struck him on the nose and made it bleed when he got in my way and
tried to catch hold of me. And so they are going to hang me. It is the
written law of the State of California that a lifetimer like me is guilty
of a capital crime when he strikes a prison guard like Thurston. Surely,
he could not have been inconvenienced more than half an hour by that
bleeding nose; and yet they are going to hang me for it.

And, see! This law, in my case, is _ex post facto_. It was not a law at
the time I killed Professor Haskell. It was not passed until after I
received my life-sentence. And this is the very point: my li