r cared to investigate. The old
pain in my ribs and stomach is with me now as I write these lines. But
the poor, maltreated machinery has served its purpose. It has enabled me
to live thus far, and it will enable me to live the little longer to the
day they take me out in the shirt without a collar and stretch my neck
with the well-stretched rope.

But the double-jacketing was the last straw. It broke down Warden
Atherton. He surrendered to the demonstration that I was unkillable. As
I told him once:

"The only way you can get me, Warden, is to sneak in here some night with
a hatchet."

Jake Oppenheimer was responsible for a good one on the Warden which I
must relate:

"I say, Warden, it must be straight hell for you to have to wake up every
morning with yourself on your pillow."

And Ed Morrell to the Warden:

"Your mother must have been damn fond of children to have raised you."

It was really an offence to me when the jacketing ceased. I sadly missed
that dream world of mine. But not for long. I found that I could
suspend animation by the exercise of my will, aided mechanically by
constricting my chest and abdomen with the blanket. Thus I induced
physiological and psychological states similar to those caused by the
jacket. So, at will, and without the old torment, I was free to roam
through time.

Ed Morrell believed all my adventures, but Jake Oppenheimer remained
sceptical to the last. It was during my third year in solitary that I
paid Oppenheimer a visit. I was never able to do it but that once, and
that one time was wholly unplanned and unexpected.

It was merely after unconsciousness had come to me that I found myself in
his cell. My body, I knew, lay in the jacket back in my own cell.
Although never before had I seen him, I knew that this man was Jake
Oppenheimer. It was summer weather, and he lay without clothes on top
his blanket. I was shocked by his cadaverous face and skeleton-like
body. He was not even the shell of a man. He was merely the structure
of a man, the bones of a man, still cohering, stripped practically of all
flesh and covered with a parchment-like skin.

Not until back in my own cell and consciousness was I able to mull the
thing over and realize that just as was Jake Oppenheimer, so was Ed
Morrell, so was I. And I could not but thrill as I glimpsed the
vastitude of spirit that inhabited these frail, perishing carcasses of
us--the three incorrigibles of solit