it. But my senses reeled and I shrank
back to the wall for protection. Again, summoning all my courage, I
attempted it. But my poor blear eyes, like a bat's, startled me at my
shadow on the flagstones. I attempted to avoid my own shadow, tripped,
fell over it, and like a drowning man struggling for shore crawled back
on hands and knees to the wall.

I leaned against the wall and cried. It was the first time in many years
that I had cried. I remember noting, even in my extremity, the warmth of
the tears on my cheeks and the salt taste when they reached my lips. Then
I had a chill, and for a time shook as with an ague. Abandoning the
openness of the yard as too impossible a feat for one in my condition,
still shaking with the chill, crouching close to the protecting wall, my
hands touching it, I started to skirt the yard.

Then it was, somewhere along, that the guard Thurston espied me. I saw
him, distorted by my bleared eyes, a huge, well-fed monster, rushing upon
me with incredible speed out of the remote distance. Possibly, at that
moment, he was twenty feet away. He weighed one hundred and seventy
pounds. The struggle between us can be easily imagined, but somewhere in
that brief struggle it was claimed that I struck him on the nose with my
fist to such purpose as to make that organ bleed.

At any rate, being a lifer, and the penalty in California for battery by
a lifer being death, I was so found guilty by a jury which could not
ignore the asseverations of the guard Thurston and the rest of the prison
hang-dogs that testified, and I was so sentenced by a judge who could not
ignore the law as spread plainly on the statute book.

I was well pummelled by Thurston, and all the way back up that prodigious
stairway I was roundly kicked, punched, and cuffed by the horde of
trusties and guards who got in one another's way in their zeal to assist
him. Heavens, if his nose did bleed, the probability is that some of his
own kind were guilty of causing it in the confusion of the scuffle. I
shouldn't care if I were responsible for it myself, save that it is so
pitiful a thing for which to hang a man. . . .

* * * * *

I have just had a talk with the man on shift of my death-watch. A little
less than a year ago, Jake Oppenheimer occupied this same death-cell on
the road to the gallows which I will tread to-morrow. This man was one
of the death-watch on Jake. He is an old soldier. He chews tobacco
constantly