dias. She was Mary the
Madonna, and Mary the Magdalene, and Mary the sister of Martha, also she
was Martha. And she was Brunnhilde and Guinevere, Iseult and Juliet,
Heloise and Nicolette. Yes, and she was Eve, she was Lilith, she was
Astarte. She was eleven years old, and she was all women that had been,
all women to be.

I sit in my cell now, while the flies hum in the drowsy summer afternoon,
and I know that my time is short. Soon they will apparel me in the shirt
without a collar. . . . But hush, my heart. The spirit is immortal.
After the dark I shall live again, and there will be women. The future
holds the little women for me in the lives I am yet to live. And though
the stars drift, and the heavens lie, ever remains woman, resplendent,
eternal, the one woman, as I, under all my masquerades and misadventures,
am the one man, her mate.

CHAPTER XXII

My time grows very short. All the manuscript I have written is safely
smuggled out of the prison. There is a man I can trust who will see that
it is published. No longer am I in Murderers Row. I am writing these
lines in the death cell, and the death-watch is set on me. Night and day
is this death-watch on me, and its paradoxical function is to see that I
do not die. I must be kept alive for the hanging, or else will the
public be cheated, the law blackened, and a mark of demerit placed
against the time-serving warden who runs this prison and one of whose
duties is to see that his condemned ones are duly and properly hanged.
Often I marvel at the strange way some men make their livings.

This shall be my last writing. To-morrow morning the hour is set. The
governor has declined to pardon or reprieve, despite the fact that the
Anti-Capital-Punishment League has raised quite a stir in California. The
reporters are gathered like so many buzzards. I have seen them all. They
are queer young fellows, most of them, and most queer is it that they
will thus earn bread and butter, cocktails and tobacco, room-rent, and,
if they are married, shoes and schoolbooks for their children, by
witnessing the execution of Professor Darrell Standing, and by describing
for the public how Professor Darrell Standing died at the end of a rope.
Ah, well, they will be sicker than I at the end of the affair.

As I sit here and muse on it all, the footfalls of the death-watch going
up and down outside my cage, the man's suspicious eyes ever peering in on
me, almost I