Yes, and in my dreams, often, I got off the little narrow-gauge train where the straggly village stood beside the big dry creek, and got into the buckboard behind my mountain horses, and drove hour by hour past all the old familiar landmarks of my alfalfa meadows, and on to my upland pastures where my rotated crops of corn and barley and clover were ripe for harvesting and where I watched my men engaged in the harvest, while beyond, ever climbing, my goats browsed the higher slopes of brush into cleared, tilled fields.

But these were dreams, frank dreams, fancied adventures of my deductive subconscious mind.  Quite unlike them, as you shall see, were my other adventures when I passed through the gates of the living death and relived the reality of the other lives that had been mine in other days.

In the long hours of waking in the jacket I found that I dwelt a great deal on Cecil Winwood, the poet-forger who had wantonly put all this torment on me, and who was even then at liberty out in the free world again.  No; I did not hate him.  The word is too weak.  There is no word in the language strong enough to describe my feelings.  I can say only that I knew the gnawing of a desire for vengeance on him that was a pain in itself and that exceeded all the bounds of language.  I shall not tell you of the hours I devoted to plans of torture on him, nor of the diabolical means and devices of torture that I invented for him.  Just one example.  I was enamoured of the ancient trick whereby an iron basin, containing a rat, is fastened to a man’s body.  The only way out for the rat is through the man himself.  As I say, I was enamoured of this until I realized that such a death was too quick, whereupon I dwelt long and favourably on the Moorish trick of—­but no, I promised to relate no further of this matter.  Let it suffice that many of my pain-maddening waking hours were devoted to dreams of vengeance on Cecil Winwood.

CHAPTER IX

One thing of great value I learned in the long, pain-weary hours of waking—­namely, the mastery of the body by the mind.  I learned to suffer passively, as, undoubtedly, all men have learned who have passed through the post-graduate courses of strait-jacketing.  Oh, it is no easy trick to keep the brain in such serene repose that it is quite oblivious to the throbbing, exquisite complaint of some tortured nerve.

And it was this very mastery of the flesh by the spirit which I so acquired that enabled me easily to practise the secret Ed Morrell told to me.

“Think it is curtains?” Ed Morrell rapped to me one night.

I had just been released from one hundred hours, and I was weaker than I had ever been before.  So weak was I that though my whole body was one mass of bruise and misery, nevertheless I scarcely was aware that I had a body.

“It looks like curtains,” I rapped back.  “They will get me if they keep it up much longer.”