“Wait till Pie-Face comes on to-night,” Morrell rapped to me.  “He sleeps most of his watch, and we can talk a streak.”

How we did talk that night!  Sleep was farthest from our eyes.  Pie-Face Jones was a mean and bitter man, despite his fatness; but we blessed that fatness because it persuaded to stolen snatches of slumber.  Nevertheless our incessant tapping bothered his sleep and irritated him so that he reprimanded us repeatedly.  And by the other night guards we were roundly cursed.  In the morning all reported much tapping during the night, and we paid for our little holiday; for, at nine, came Captain Jamie with several guards to lace us into the torment of the jacket.  Until nine the following morning, for twenty-four straight hours, laced and helpless on the floor, without food or water, we paid the price for speech.

Oh, our guards were brutes!  And under their treatment we had to harden to brutes in order to live.  Hard work makes calloused hands.  Hard guards make hard prisoners.  We continued to talk, and, on occasion, to be jacketed for punishment.  Night was the best time, and, when substitute guards chanced to be on, we often talked through a whole shift.

Night and day were one with us who lived in the dark.  We could sleep any time, we could knuckle-talk only on occasion.  We told one another much of the history of our lives, and for long hours Morrell and I have lain silently, while steadily, with faint, far taps, Oppenheimer slowly spelled out his life-story, from the early years in a San Francisco slum, through his gang-training, through his initiation into all that was vicious, when as a lad of fourteen he served as night messenger in the red light district, through his first detected infraction of the laws, and on and on through thefts and robberies to the treachery of a comrade and to red slayings inside prison walls.

They called Jake Oppenheimer the “Human Tiger.”  Some cub reporter coined the phrase that will long outlive the man to whom it was applied.  And yet I ever found in Jake Oppenheimer all the cardinal traits of right humanness.  He was faithful and loyal.  I know of the times he has taken punishment in preference to informing on a comrade.  He was brave.  He was patient.  He was capable of self-sacrifice—­I could tell a story of this, but shall not take the time.  And justice, with him, was a passion.  The prison-killings done by him were due entirely to this extreme sense of justice.  And he had a splendid mind.  A lifetime in prison, ten years of it in solitary, had not dimmed his brain.

Morrell, ever a true comrade, too had a splendid brain.  In fact, and I who am about to die have the right to say it without incurring the charge of immodesty, the three best minds in San Quentin from the Warden down were the three that rotted there together in solitary.  And here at the end of my days, reviewing all that I have known of life, I am compelled to the conclusion that strong minds are never docile.  The stupid men, the fearful men, the men ungifted with passionate rightness and fearless championship—­these are the men who make model prisoners.  I thank all gods that Jake Oppenheimer, Ed Morrell, and I were not model prisoners.