“Have you any complaint to make, Standing?” the Warden asked.

“Yes,” was my reply.  “On two counts.”

“What are they?”

“First,” I said, “the jacket is abominably loose.  Hutchins is an ass.  He could get a foot of slack if he wanted.”

“What is the other count?” Warden Atherton asked.

“That you are conceived of the devil, Warden.”

Captain Jamie and Doctor Jackson tittered, and the Warden, with a snort, led the way out of my cell.

* * * * *

Left alone, I strove to go into the dark and gain back to the wagon circle at Nephi.  I was interested to know the outcome of that doomed drifting of our forty great wagons across a desolate and hostile land, and I was not at all interested in what came of the mangy hermit with his rock-roweled ribs and stinking water-skin.  And I gained back, neither to Nephi nor the Nile, but to—­

But here I must pause in the narrative, my reader, in order to explain a few things and make the whole matter easier to your comprehension.  This is necessary, because my time is short in which to complete my jacket-memoirs.  In a little while, in a very little while, they are going to take me out and hang me.  Did I have the full time of a thousand lifetimes, I could not complete the last details of my jacket experiences.  Wherefore I must briefen the narrative.

First of all, Bergson is right.  Life cannot be explained in intellectual terms.  As Confucius said long ago:  “When we are so ignorant of life, can we know death?” And ignorant of life we truly are when we cannot explain it in terms of the understanding.  We know life only phenomenally, as a savage may know a dynamo; but we know nothing of life noumenonally, nothing of the nature of the intrinsic stuff of life.

Secondly, Marinetti is wrong when he claims that matter is the only mystery and the only reality.  I say and as you, my reader, realize, I speak with authority—­I say that matter is the only illusion.  Comte called the world, which is tantamount to matter, the great fetich, and I agree with Comte.

It is life that is the reality and the mystery.  Life is vastly different from mere chemic matter fluxing in high modes of notion.  Life persists.  Life is the thread of fire that persists through all the modes of matter.  I know.  I am life.  I have lived ten thousand generations.  I have lived millions of years.  I have possessed many bodies.  I, the possessor of these many bodies, have persisted.  I am life.  I am the unquenched spark ever flashing and astonishing the face of time, ever working my will and wreaking my passion on the cloddy aggregates of matter, called bodies, which I have transiently inhabited.

For look you.  This finger of mine, so quick with sensation, so subtle to feel, so delicate in its multifarious dexterities, so firm and strong to crook and bend or stiffen by means of cunning leverages—­this finger is not I. Cut it off.  I live.  The body is mutilated.  I am not mutilated.  The spirit that is I is whole.