ary. Flesh is a cheap, vain thing.
Grass is flesh, and flesh becomes grass; but the spirit is the thing that
abides and survives. I have no patience with these flesh-worshippers. A
taste of solitary in San Quentin would swiftly convert them to a due
appreciation and worship of the spirit.

But to return to my experience in Oppenheimer's cell. His body was that
of a man long dead and shrivelled by desert heat. The skin that covered
it was of the colour of dry mud. His sharp, yellow-gray eyes seemed the
only part of him that was alive. They were never at rest. He lay on his
back, and the eyes darted hither and thither, following the flight of the
several flies that disported in the gloomy air above him. I noted, too,
a scar, just above his right elbow, and another scar on his right ankle.

After a time he yawned, rolled over on his side, and inspected an angry-
looking sore just above his hip. This he proceeded to cleanse and dress
by the crude methods men in solitary must employ. I recognized the sore
as one of the sort caused by the strait-jacket. On my body, at this
moment of writing, are hundreds of scars of the jacket.

Next, Oppenheimer rolled on his back, gingerly took one of his front
upper tooth--an eye teeth--between thumb and forefinger, and
consideratively moved it back and forth. Again he yawned, stretched his
arms, rolled over, and knocked the call to Ed Morrell.

I read the code as a matter of course.

"Thought you might be awake," Oppenheimer tapped. "How goes it with the
Professor?"

Then, dim and far, I could hear Morrell's taps enunciating that they had
put me in the jacket an hour before, and that, as usual, I was already
deaf to all knuckle talk.

"He is a good guy," Oppenheimer rapped on. "I always was suspicious of
educated mugs, but he ain't been hurt none by his education. He is sure
square. Got all the spunk in the world, and you could not get him to
squeal or double cross in a million years."

To all of which, and with amplification, Ed Morrell agreed. And I must,
right here, ere I go a word further, say that I have lived many years and
many lives, and that in those many lives I have known proud moments; but
that the proudest moment I have ever known was the moment when my two
comrades in solitary passed this appraisal of me. Ed Morrell and Jake
Oppenheimer were great spirits, and in all time no greater honour was
ever accorded me than this admission of me to their com