have. There was a little juror that convicted me in
Oakland the time I got handed my fifty-years. And one day I found I'd
forgotten his name. Why, bo, I lay here for weeks puzzling for it. Now,
just because I could not dig it out of my memory box was no sign it was
not there. It was mislaid, that was all. And to prove it, one day, when
I was not even thinking about it, it popped right out of my brain to the
tip of my tongue. 'Stacy,' I said right out loud. 'Joseph Stacy.' That
was it. Get my drive?

"You only tell me about them scars what thousands of men know. I don't
know how you got the information, I guess you don't know yourself. That
ain't my lookout. But there she is. Telling me what many knows buys
nothing with me. You got to deliver a whole lot more than that to make
me swallow the rest of your whoppers."

Hamilton's Law of Parsimony in the weighing of evidence! So
intrinsically was this slum-bred convict a scientist, that he had worked
out Hamilton's law and rigidly applied it.

And yet--and the incident is delicious--Jake Oppenheimer was
intellectually honest. That night, as I was dozing off, he called me
with the customary signal.

"Say, Professor, you said you saw me wiggling my loose tooth. That has
got my goat. That is the one thing I can't figure out any way you could
know. It only went loose three days ago, and I ain't whispered it to a
soul."

CHAPTER XXI

Pascal somewhere says: "In viewing the march of human evolution, the
philosophic mind should look upon humanity as one man, and not as a
conglomeration of individuals."

I sit here in Murderers' Row in Folsom, the drowsy hum of flies in my
ears as I ponder that thought of Pascal. It is true. Just as the human
embryo, in its brief ten lunar months, with bewildering swiftness, in
myriad forms and semblances a myriad times multiplied, rehearses the
entire history of organic life from vegetable to man; just as the human
boy, in his brief years of boyhood, rehearses the history of primitive
man in acts of cruelty and savagery, from wantonness of inflicting pain
on lesser creatures to tribal consciousness expressed by the desire to
run in gangs; just so, I, Darrell Standing, have rehearsed and relived
all that primitive man was, and did, and became until he became even you
and me and the rest of our kind in a twentieth century civilization.

Truly do we carry in us, each human of us alive on the planet to-day, the
i