But try as I would with my bright bit of straw in the oozement of light
into solitary, I failed to achieve any such definiteness of previous
personality. I became convinced, through the failure of my experiments,
that only through death could I clearly and coherently resurrect the
memories of my previous selves.

But the tides of life ran strong in me. I, Darrell Standing, was so
strongly disinclined to die that I refused to let Warden Atherton and
Captain Jamie kill me. I was always so innately urged to live that
sometimes I think that is why I am still here, eating and sleeping,
thinking and dreaming, writing this narrative of my various me's, and
awaiting the incontestable rope that will put an ephemeral period in my
long-linked existence.

And then came death in life. I learned the trick, Ed Morrell taught it
me, as you shall see. It began through Warden Atherton and Captain
Jamie. They must have experienced a recrudescence of panic at thought of
the dynamite they believed hidden. They came to me in my dark cell, and
they told me plainly that they would jacket me to death if I did not
confess where the dynamite was hidden. And they assured me that they
would do it officially without any hurt to their own official skins. My
death would appear on the prison register as due to natural causes.

Oh, dear, cotton-wool citizen, please believe me when I tell you that men
are killed in prisons to-day as they have always been killed since the
first prisons were built by men.

I well knew the terror, the agony, and the danger of the jacket. Oh, the
men spirit-broken by the jacket! I have seen them. And I have seen men
crippled for life by the jacket. I have seen men, strong men, men so
strong that their physical stamina resisted all attacks of prison
tuberculosis, after a prolonged bout with the jacket, their resistance
broken down, fade away, and die of tuberculosis within six months. There
was Slant-Eyed Wilson, with an unguessed weak heart of fear, who died in
the jacket within the first hour while the unconvinced inefficient of a
prison doctor looked on and smiled. And I have seen a man confess, after
half an hour in the jacket, truths and fictions that cost him years of
credits.

I had had my own experiences. At the present moment half a thousand
scars mark my body. They go to the scaffold with me. Did I live a
hundred years to come those same scars in the end would go to the grave
with me.

Perh