CHAPTER II.

I am Darrell Standing. They are going to take me out and hang me pretty

soon. In the meantime I say my say, and write in these pages of the

other times and places.

After my sentence, I came to spend the rest of my “natural life” in the

prison of San Quentin. I proved incorrigible. An incorrigible is a

terrible human being—at least such is the connotation of “incorrigible”

in prison psychology. I became an incorrigible because I abhorred waste

motion. The prison, like all prisons, was a scandal and an affront of

waste motion. They put me in the jute-mill. The criminality of

wastefulness irritated me. Why should it not? Elimination of waste

motion was my speciality. Before the invention of steam or steam-driven

looms three thousand years before, I had rotted in prison in old

Babylon; and, trust me, I speak the truth when I say that in that

ancient day we prisoners wove more efficiently on hand-looms than did

the prisoners in the steam-powered loom-rooms of San Quentin.

The crime of waste was abhorrent. I rebelled. I tried to show the

guards a score or so of more efficient ways. I was reported. I was

given the dungeon and the starvation of light and food. I emerged and

tried to work in the chaos of inefficiency of the loom-rooms. I

rebelled. I was given the dungeon, plus the strait-jacket. I was

spread-eagled, and thumbed-up, and privily beaten by the stupid guards

whose totality of intelligence was only just sufficient to show them

that I was different from them and not so stupid.

Two years of this witless persecution I endured. It is terrible for a

man to be tied down and gnawed by rats. The stupid brutes of guards

were rats, and they gnawed the intelligence of me, gnawed all the fine

nerves of the quick of me and of the consciousness of me. And I, who in

my past have been a most valiant fighter, in this present life was no

fighter at all. I was a farmer, an agriculturist, a desk-tied

professor, a laboratory slave, interested only in the soil and the

increase of the productiveness of the soil.

I fought in the Philippines because it was the tradition of the

Standings to fight. I had no aptitude for fighting. It was all too

ridiculous, the introducing of disruptive foreign substances into the

bodies of little black men-folk. It was laughable to behold Science

prostituting all the might of its achievement and the wit of its

inventors to the violent introducing of foreign substances into the

bodies of black folk.

As I say, in obedience to the tradition of the Standings I went to war

and found that I had no aptitude for war. So did my officers find me

out, because they made me a quartermaster’s clerk, and as a clerk, at a

desk, I fought through the Spanish-American War.

So it was not because I was a fighter, but because I was a thinker,

that I was enraged by the motion-wastage of the loom-rooms and was

persecuted by the guards into becoming an “incorrigible.” One’s brain

worked and I was punished for its working. As I told Warden Atherton,

when my incorrigibility had become so notorious that he had me in on

the carpet in his private office to plead with me; as I told him then:

“It is so absurd, my dear Warden, to think that your rat-throttlers of

guards can shake out of my brain the things that are clear and definite

in my brain. The whole organization of this prison is stupid. You are a

politician. You can weave the political pull of San Francisco

saloon-men and ward heelers into a position of graft such as this one

you occupy; but you can’t weave jute. Your loom-rooms are fifty years

behind the times. . . .”

But why continue the tirade?—for tirade it was. I showed him what a

fool he was, and as a result he decided that I was a hopeless

incorrigible.

Give a dog a bad name—you know the saw. Very well. Warden Atherton gave

the final sanction to the badness of my name. I was fair game. More

than one convict’s dereliction was shunted off on me, and was paid for

by me in the dungeon on bread and water, or in being triced up by the

thumbs on my tip-toes for long hours, each hour of which was longer

than any life I have ever lived.

Intelligent men are cruel. Stupid men are monstrously cruel. The guards

and the men over me, from the Warden down, were stupid monsters.

Listen, and you shall learn what they did to me. There was a poet in

the prison, a convict, a weak-chinned, broad-browed, degenerate poet.

He was a forger. He was a coward. He was a snitcher. He was a

stool—strange words for a professor of agronomics to use in writing,

but a professor of agronomics may well learn strange words when pent in

prison for the term of his natural life.

This poet-forger’s name was Cecil Winwood. He had had prior

convictions, and yet, because he was a snivelling cur of a yellow dog,

his last sentence had been only for seven years. Good credits would

materially reduce this time. My time was life. Yet this miserable

degenerate, in order to gain several short years of liberty for

himself, succeeded in adding a fair portion of eternity to my own

lifetime term.

I shall tell what happened the other way around, for it was only after

a weary period that I learned. This Cecil Winwood, in order to curry

favour with the Captain of the Yard, and thence the Warden, the Prison

Directors, the Board of Pardons, and the Governor of California, framed

up a prison-break. Now note three things: (a) Cecil Winwood was so

detested by his fellow-convicts that they would not have permitted him

to bet an ounce of Bull Durham on a bed-bug race—and bed-bug racing was

a great sport with the convicts; (b) I was the dog that had been given

a bad name: (c) for his frame-up, Cecil Winwood needed the dogs with

bad names, the lifetimers, the desperate ones, the incorrigibles.

But the lifers detested Cecil Winwood, and, when he approached them

with his plan of a wholesale prison-break, they laughed at him and

turned away with curses for the stool that he was. But he fooled them

in the end, forty of the bitterest-wise ones in the pen. He approached

them again and again. He told of his power in the prison by virtue of

his being trusty in the Warden’s office, and because of the fact that

he had the run of the dispensary.

“Show me,” said Long Bill Hodge, a mountaineer doing life for train

robbery, and whose whole soul for years had been bent on escaping in

order to kill the companion in robbery who had turned state’s evidence

on him.

Cecil Winwood accepted the test. He claimed that he could dope the

guards the night of the break.

“Talk is cheap,” said Long Bill Hodge. “What we want is the goods. Dope

one of the guards to-night. There’s Barnum. He’s no good. He beat up

that crazy Chink yesterday in Bughouse Alley—when he was off duty, too.

He’s on the night watch. Dope him to-night an’ make him lose his job.

Show me, and we’ll talk business with you.”

All this Long Bill told me in the dungeons afterward. Cecil Winwood

demurred against the immediacy of the demonstration. He claimed that he

must have time in which to steal the dope from the dispensary. They

gave him the time, and a week later he announced that he was ready.

Forty hard-bitten lifers waited for the guard Barnum to go to sleep on

his shift. And Barnum did. He was found asleep, and he was discharged

for sleeping on duty.

Of course, that convinced the lifers. But there was the Captain of the

Yard to convince. To him, daily, Cecil Winwood was reporting the

progress of the break—all fancied and fabricated in his own

imagination. The Captain of the Yard demanded to be shown. Winwood

showed him, and the full details of the showing I did not learn until a

year afterward, so slowly do the secrets of prison intrigue leak out.

Winwood said that the forty men in the break, in whose confidence he

was, had already such power in the Prison that they were about to begin

smuggling in automatic pistols by means of the guards they had bought

up.

“Show me,” the Captain of the Yard must have demanded.

And the forger-poet showed him. In the Bakery, night work was a regular

thing. One of the convicts, a baker, was on the first night-shift. He

was a stool of the Captain of the Yard, and Winwood knew it.

“To-night,” he told the Captain, “Summerface will bring in a dozen ’44

automatics. On his next time off he’ll bring in the ammunition. But

to-night he’ll turn the automatics over to me in the bakery. You’ve got

a good stool there. He’ll make you his report to-morrow.”

Now Summerface was a strapping figure of a bucolic guard who hailed

from Humboldt County. He was a simple-minded, good-natured dolt and not

above earning an honest dollar by smuggling in tobacco for the

convicts. On that night, returning from a trip to San Francisco, he

brought in with him fifteen pounds of prime cigarette tobacco. He had

done this before, and delivered the stuff to Cecil Winwood. So, on that

particular night, he, all unwitting, turned the stuff over to Winwood

in the bakery. It was a big, solid, paper-wrapped bundle of innocent

tobacco. The stool baker, from concealment, saw the package delivered

to Winwood and so reported to the Captain of the Yard next morning.

But in the meantime the poet-forger’s too-lively imagination ran away

with him. He was guilty of a slip that gave me five years of solitary

confinement and that placed me in this condemned cell in which I now

write. And all the time I knew nothing about it. I did not even know of

the break he had inveigled the forty lifers into planning. I knew

nothing, absolutely nothing. And the rest knew little. The lifers did

not know he was giving them the cross. The Captain of the Yard did not

know that the cross was being worked on him. Summerface was the most

innocent of all. At the worst, his conscience could have accused him

only of smuggling in some harmless tobacco.

And now to the stupid, silly, melodramatic slip of Cecil Winwood. Next

morning, when he encountered the Captain of the Yard, he was

triumphant. His imagination took the bit in its teeth.

“Well, the stuff came in all right as you said,” the captain of the

Yard remarked.

“And enough of it to blow half the prison sky-high,” Winwood

corroborated.

“Enough of what?” the Captain demanded.

“Dynamite and detonators,” the fool rattled on. “Thirty-five pounds of

it. Your stool saw Summerface pass it over to me.”

And right there the Captain of the Yard must have nearly died. I can

actually sympathize with him—thirty-five pounds of dynamite loose in

the prison.

They say that Captain Jamie—that was his nickname—sat down and held his

head in his hands.

“Where is it now?” he cried. “I want it. Take me to it at once.”

And right there Cecil Winwood saw his mistake.

“I planted it,” he lied—for he was compelled to lie because, being

merely tobacco in small packages, it was long since distributed among

the convicts along the customary channels.

“Very well,” said Captain Jamie, getting himself in hand. “Lead me to

it at once.”

But there was no plant of high explosives to lead him to. The thing did

not exist, had never existed save in the imagination of the wretched

Winwood.

In a large prison like San Quentin there are always hiding-places for

things. And as Cecil Winwood led Captain Jamie he must have done some

rapid thinking.

As Captain Jamie testified before the Board of Directors, and as

Winwood also so testified, on the way to the hiding-place Winwood said

that he and I had planted the powder together.

And I, just released from five days in the dungeons and eighty hours in

the jacket; I, whom even the stupid guards could see was too weak to

work in the loom-room; I, who had been given the day off to

recuperate—from too terrible punishment—I was named as the one who had

helped hide the non-existent thirty-five pounds of high explosive!

Winwood led Captain Jamie to the alleged hiding-place. Of course they

found no dynamite in it.

“My God!” Winwood lied. “Standing has given me the cross. He’s lifted

the plant and stowed it somewhere else.”

The Captain of the Yard said more emphatic things than “My God!” Also,

on the spur of the moment but cold-bloodedly, he took Winwood into his

own private office, looked the doors, and beat him up frightfully—all

of which came out before the Board of Directors. But that was

afterward. In the meantime, even while he took his beating, Winwood

swore by the truth of what he had told.

What was Captain Jamie to do? He was convinced that thirty-five pounds

of dynamite were loose in the prison and that forty desperate lifers

were ready for a break. Oh, he had Summerface in on the carpet, and,

although Summerface insisted the package contained tobacco, Winwood

swore it was dynamite and was believed.

At this stage I enter or, rather, I depart, for they took me away out

of the sunshine and the light of day to the dungeons, and in the

dungeons and in the solitary cells, out of the sunshine and the light

of day, I rotted for five years.

I was puzzled. I had only just been released from the dungeons, and was

lying pain-racked in my customary cell, when they took me back to the

dungeon.

“Now,” said Winwood to Captain Jamie, “though we don’t know where it

is, the dynamite is safe. Standing is the only man who does know, and

he can’t pass the word out from the dungeon. The men are ready to make

the break. We can catch them red-handed. It is up to me to set the

time. I’ll tell them two o’clock to-night and tell them that, with the

guards doped, I’ll unlock their cells and give them their automatics.

If, at two o’clock to-night, you don’t catch the forty I shall name

with their clothes on and wide awake, then, Captain, you can give me

solitary for the rest of my sentence. And with Standing and the forty

tight in the dungeons, we’ll have all the time in the world to locate

the dynamite.”

“If we have to tear the prison down stone by stone,” Captain Jamie

added valiantly.

That was six years ago. In all the intervening time they have never

found that non-existent explosive, and they have turned the prison

upside-down a thousand times in searching for it. Nevertheless, to his

last day in office Warden Atherton believed in the existence of that

dynamite. Captain Jamie, who is still Captain of the Yard, believes to

this day that the dynamite is somewhere in the prison. Only yesterday,

he came all the way up from San Quentin to Folsom to make one more

effort to get me to reveal the hiding-place. I know he will never

breathe easy until they swing me off.