, and untidily, for his gray beard and moustache are stained
yellow. He is a widower, with fourteen living children, all married, and
is the grandfather of thirty-one living grandchildren, and the
great-grandfather of four younglings, all girls. It was like pulling
teeth to extract such information. He is a queer old codger, of a low
order of intelligence. That is why, I fancy, he has lived so long and
fathered so numerous a progeny. His mind must have crystallized thirty
years ago. His ideas are none of them later than that vintage. He
rarely says more than yes and no to me. It is not because he is surly.
He has no ideas to utter. I don't know, when I live again, but what one
incarnation such as his would be a nice vegetative existence in which to
rest up ere I go star-roving again. . . .

But to go back. I must take a line in which to tell, after I was hustled
and bustled, kicked and punched, up that terrible stairway by Thurston
and the rest of the prison-dogs, of the infinite relief of my narrow cell
when I found myself back in solitary. It was all so safe, so secure. I
felt like a lost child returned home again. I loved those very walls
that I had so hated for five years. All that kept the vastness of space,
like a monster, from pouncing upon me were those good stout walls of
mine, close to hand on every side. Agoraphobia is a terrible affliction.
I have had little opportunity to experience it, but from that little I
can only conclude that hanging is a far easier matter. . . .

I have just had a hearty laugh. The prison doctor, a likable chap, has
just been in to have a yarn with me, incidentally to proffer me his good
offices in the matter of dope. Of course I declined his proposition to
"shoot me" so full of morphine through the night that to-morrow I would
not know, when I marched to the gallows, whether I was "coming or going."

But the laugh. It was just like Jake Oppenheimer. I can see the lean
keenness of the man as he strung the reporters with his deliberate bull
which they thought involuntary. It seems, his last morning, breakfast
finished, incased in the shirt without a collar, that the reporters,
assembled for his last word in his cell, asked him for his views on
capital punishment.

--Who says we have more than the slightest veneer of civilization coated
over our raw savagery when a group of living men can ask such a question
of a man about to die and whom they are to see die?

B