Almost I hope, when next I reinhabit form, that it shall be that of a peaceful farmer.  There is my dream-farm.  I should like to engage just for one whole life in that.  Oh, my dream-farm!  My alfalfa meadows, my efficient Jersey cattle, my upland pastures, my brush-covered slopes melting into tilled fields, while ever higher up the slopes my angora goats eat away brush to tillage!

There is a basin there, a natural basin high up the slopes, with a generous watershed on three sides.  I should like to throw a dam across the fourth side, which is surprisingly narrow.  At a paltry price of labour I could impound twenty million gallons of water.  For, see:  one great drawback to farming in California is our long dry summer.  This prevents the growing of cover crops, and the sensitive soil, naked, a mere surface dust-mulch, has its humus burned out of it by the sun.  Now with that dam I could grow three crops a year, observing due rotation, and be able to turn under a wealth of green manure. . . .

* * * * *

I have just endured a visit from the Warden.  I say “endured” advisedly.  He is quite different from the Warden of San Quentin.  He was very nervous, and perforce I had to entertain him.  This is his first hanging.  He told me so.  And I, with a clumsy attempt at wit, did not reassure him when I explained that it was also my first hanging.  He was unable to laugh.  He has a girl in high school, and his boy is a freshman at Stanford.  He has no income outside his salary, his wife is an invalid, and he is worried in that he has been rejected by the life insurance doctors as an undesirable risk.  Really, the man told me almost all his troubles.  Had I not diplomatically terminated the interview he would still be here telling me the remainder of them.

My last two years in San Quentin were very gloomy and depressing.  Ed Morrell, by one of the wildest freaks of chance, was taken out of solitary and made head trusty of the whole prison.  This was Al Hutchins’ old job, and it carried a graft of three thousand dollars a year.  To my misfortune, Jake Oppenheimer, who had rotted in solitary for so many years, turned sour on the world, on everything.  For eight months he refused to talk even to me.

In prison, news will travel.  Give it time and it will reach dungeon and solitary cell.  It reached me, at last, that Cecil Winwood, the poet-forger, the snitcher, the coward, and the stool, was returned for a fresh forgery.  It will be remembered that it was this Cecil Winwood who concocted the fairy story that I had changed the plant of the non-existent dynamite and who was responsible for the five years I had then spent in solitary.

I decided to kill Cecil Winwood.  You see, Morrell was gone, and Oppenheimer, until the outbreak that finished him, had remained in the silence.  Solitary had grown monotonous for me.  I had to do something.  So I remembered back to the time when I was Adam Strang and patiently nursed revenge for forty years.  What he had done I could do if once I locked my hands on Cecil Winwood’s throat.