an an hour, I had died a
thousand deaths. And yet this neighbour, balanced and equable,
calm-voiced and almost beneficent despite the harshness of his first
remarks, had been in the jacket fifty hours!

"How much longer are they going to keep you in?" I asked.

"The Lord only knows. Captain Jamie is real peeved with me, an' he won't
let me out until I'm about croakin'. Now, brother, I'm going to give you
the tip. The only way is shut your face an' forget it. Yellin' an'
hollerin' don't win you no money in this joint. An' the way to forget is
to forget. Just get to rememberin' every girl you ever knew. That'll
cat up hours for you. Mebbe you'll feel yourself gettin' woozy. Well,
get woozy. You can't beat that for killin' time. An' when the girls
won't hold you, get to thinkin' of the fellows you got it in for, an'
what you'd do to 'em if you got a chance, an' what you're goin' to do to
'em when you get that same chance."

That man was Philadelphia Red. Because of prior conviction he was
serving fifty years for highway robbery committed on the streets of
Alameda. He had already served a dozen of his years at the time he
talked to me in the jacket, and that was seven years ago. He was one of
the forty lifers who were double-crossed by Cecil Winwood. For that
offence Philadelphia Red lost his credits. He is middle-aged now, and he
is still in San Quentin. If he survives he will be an old man when they
let him out.

I lived through my twenty-four hours, and I have never been the same man
since. Oh, I don't mean physically, although next morning, when they
unlaced me, I was semi-paralyzed and in such a state of collapse that the
guards had to kick me in the ribs to make me crawl to my feet. But I was
a changed man mentally, morally. The brute physical torture of it was
humiliation and affront to my spirit and to my sense of justice. Such
discipline does not sweeten a man. I emerged from that first jacketing
filled with a bitterness and a passionate hatred that has only increased
through the years. My God--when I think of the things men have done to
me! Twenty-four hours in the jacket! Little I thought that morning when
they kicked me to my feet that the time would come when twenty-four hours
in the jacket meant nothing; when a hundred hours in the jacket found me
smiling when they released me; when two hundred and forty hours in the
jacket found the same smile on my lips.

Yes, two hundred and f