In Number Twelve lay Jake Oppenheimer.  And he had been there for ten years.  Ed Morrell had been in his cell only one year.  He was serving a fifty-years’ sentence.  Jake Oppenheimer was a lifer.  And so was I a lifer.  Wherefore the outlook was that the three of us would remain there for a long time.  And yet, six years only are past, and not one of us is in solitary.  Jake Oppenheimer was swung off.  Ed Morrell was made head trusty of San Quentin and then pardoned out only the other day.  And here I am in Folsom waiting the day duly set by Judge Morgan, which will be my last day.

The fools!  As if they could throttle my immortality with their clumsy device of rope and scaffold!  I shall walk, and walk again, oh, countless times, this fair earth.  And I shall walk in the flesh, be prince and peasant, savant and fool, sit in the high place and groan under the wheel.

CHAPTER V

It was very lonely, at first, in solitary, and the hours were long.  Time was marked by the regular changing of the guards, and by the alternation of day and night.  Day was only a little light, but it was better than the all-dark of the night.  In solitary the day was an ooze, a slimy seepage of light from the bright outer world.

Never was the light strong enough to read by.  Besides, there was nothing to read.  One could only lie and think and think.  And I was a lifer, and it seemed certain, if I did not do a miracle, make thirty-five pounds of dynamite out of nothing, that all the years of my life would be spent in the silent dark.

My bed was a thin and rotten tick of straw spread on the cell floor.  One thin and filthy blanket constituted the covering.  There was no chair, no table—­nothing but the tick of straw and the thin, aged blanket.  I was ever a short sleeper and ever a busy-brained man.  In solitary one grows sick of oneself in his thoughts, and the only way to escape oneself is to sleep.  For years I had averaged five hours’ sleep a night.  I now cultivated sleep.  I made a science of it.  I became able to sleep ten hours, then twelve hours, and, at last, as high as fourteen and fifteen hours out of the twenty-four.  But beyond that I could not go, and, perforce, was compelled to lie awake and think and think.  And that way, for an active-brained man, lay madness.

I sought devices to enable me mechanically to abide my waking hours.  I squared and cubed long series of numbers, and by concentration and will carried on most astonishing geometric progressions.  I even dallied with the squaring of the circle . . . until I found myself beginning to believe that that possibility could be accomplished.  Whereupon, realizing that there, too, lay madness, I forwent the squaring of the circle, although I assure you it required a considerable sacrifice on my part, for the mental exercise involved was a splendid time-killer.