mmittee to be given a taste of the
antiquated and obsolete punishments that, after all, must have been
devised by previous Wardens out of necessity for the right handling of
hard characters like him.

I was careful not to insult the Warden. I testified craftily, and as a
scientist, beginning with small beginnings, making an art of my
exposition, step by step, by tiny steps, inveigling my senatorial
auditors on into willingness and eagerness to listen to the next
exposure, the whole fabric so woven that there was no natural halting
place at which to drop a period or interpolate a query . . . in this
fashion, thus, I got my tale across.

Alas! no whisper of what I divulged ever went outside the prison walls.
The Senate Committee gave a beautiful whitewash to Warden Atherton and
San Quentin. The crusading San Francisco newspaper assured its working-
class readers that San Quentin was whiter than snow, and further, that
while it was true that the strait-jacket was still a recognized legal
method of punishment for the refractory, that, nevertheless, at the
present time, under the present humane and spiritually right-minded
Warden, the strait-jacket was never, under any circumstance, used.

And while the poor asses of labourers read and believed, while the Senate
Committee dined and wined with the Warden at the expense of the state and
the tax payer, Ed Morrell, Jake Oppenheimer, and I were lying in our
jackets, laced just a trifle more tightly and more vindictively than we
had ever been laced before.

"It is to laugh," Ed Morrell tapped to me, with the edge of the sole of
his shoe.

"I should worry," tapped Jake.

And as for me, I too capped my bitter scorn and laughter, remembered the
prison houses of old Babylon, smiled to myself a huge cosmic smile, and
drifted off and away into the largeness of the little death that made me
heir of all the ages and the rider full-panoplied and astride of time.

Yea, dear brother of the outside world, while the whitewash was running
off the press, while the august senators were wining and dining, we three
of the living dead, buried alive in solidarity, were sweating our pain in
the canvas torture.

And after the dinner, warm with wine, Warden Atherton himself came to see
how fared it with us. Me, as usual, they found in coma. Doctor Jackson
for the first time must have been alarmed. I was brought back across the
dark to consciousness with the bite of ammonia in my nostrils.