A man must be terribly weak and profoundly desperate to be able, under such circumstances, to beard the Warden in solitary.  Or he may be both, and, in addition, he may have faith.  I know now that I had the faith and so acted on it.  I believed what Morrell had told me.  I believed in the lordship of the mind over the body.  I believed that not even a hundred days in the jacket could kill me.

Captain Jamie must have sensed this faith that informed me, for he said: 

“I remember a Swede that went crazy twenty years ago.  That was before your time, Warden.  He’d killed a man in a quarrel over twenty-five cents and got life for it.  He was a cook.  He got religion.  He said that a golden chariot was coming to take him to heaven, and he sat down on top the red-hot range and sang hymns and hosannahs while he cooked.  They dragged him off, but he croaked two days afterward in hospital.  He was cooked to the bone.  And to the end he swore he’d never felt the heat.  Couldn’t get a squeal out of him.”

“We’ll make Standing squeal,” said the Warden.

“Since you are so sure of it, why don’t you accept my proposition?” I challenged.

The Warden was so angry that it would have been ludicrous to me had I not been in so desperate plight.  His face was convulsed.  He clenched his hands, and, for a moment, it seemed that he was about to fall upon me and give me a beating.  Then, with an effort, he controlled himself.

“All right, Standing,” he snarled.  “I’ll go you.  But you bet your sweet life you’ll have to go some to smile ten days from now.  Roll him over, boys, and cinch him till you hear his ribs crack.  Hutchins, show him you know how to do it.”

And they rolled me over and laced me as I had never been laced before.  The head trusty certainly demonstrated his ability.  I tried to steal what little space I could.  Little it was, for I had long since shed my flesh, while my muscles were attenuated to mere strings.  I had neither the strength nor bulk to steal more than a little, and the little I stole I swear I managed by sheer expansion at the joints of the bones of my frame.  And of this little I was robbed by Hutchins, who, in the old days before he was made head trusty, had learned all the tricks of the jacket from the inside of the jacket.

You see, Hutchins was a cur at heart, or a creature who had once been a man, but who had been broken on the wheel.  He possessed ten or twelve thousand dollars, and his freedom was in sight if he obeyed orders.  Later, I learned that there was a girl who had remained true to him, and who was even then waiting for him.  The woman factor explains many things of men.