After my five years in solitary, when they took me away from San Quentin for my trial, I saw Skysail Jack [21] . His hair had turned white. He was prematurely old. His cheeks were sunken. His hands shook. He tottered as he walked. And his eyes blurred with tears as he recognized me.

“You’re a good one, Standing,” he said. “You told them nothing.”

“But I never knew, Jack,” I whispered back—I was compelled to whisper, for I had lost my voice.

They are going to take me out and hang me in a little while—no, not for killing Professor Haskell. I got life-imprisonment for that. They are going to hang me because I was found guilty of assault.

I believe I made a man’s nose bleed. I never saw it bleed, but that was the evidence. Thurston [22] , his name was. He was a guard at San Quentin. He weighed one hundred and seventy pounds and was in good health. I weighed under ninety pounds, and was blind as a bat from the long darkness.

I struck Thurston on the nose and made it bleed when he got in my way and tried to catch me. And so they are going to hang me. It is the written law of the State of California.

Life is strange. I warned you I had many things to write about. I shall now return to my narrative. They gave me twenty-four hours in the jacket to think everything over. Then I was brought before the Board a second time. What could I do? They told me I was a liar. They told me I was a hard case, a dangerous man, a moral degenerate, the criminal of the century. They told me many other things, and then they carried me away to the solitary cells. I was put into Number One cell. In Number Five lay Ed Morrell. In Number Twelve lay Jake Oppenheimer [23] . And he had been there for ten years. Ed Morrell had been in his cell only one year. He was serving a fifty-years’ sentence. Jake Oppenheimer was a lifer. And so was I.

The fools! As if they could throttle my immortality with their clumsy device of rope and scaffold! I shall walk, and walk again, oh, countless times, this earth.

It was very lonely at first, in solitary, and the hours were long. Time was marked by the regular changing of the guards, and by the alternation of day and night. Day was only a little light, but it was better than the all-dark of the night.

Never was the light strong enough to read by. Besides, there was nothing to read. One could only lie and think and think. And I was a lifer, and it seemed certain, that all the years of my life would be spent in the silent dark.

My bed was a thin and rotten tick of straw spread on the cell floor. And a thin and filthy blanket. There was no chair, no table—nothing but the tick of straw and the thin, aged blanket. For years I had slept five hours a night. But I became able to sleep ten hours, then twelve hours, and, at last, as high as fourteen and fifteen hours out of the twenty-four. But beyond that I could not go, and, perforce, was compelled to lie awake and think and think.

I was trying to do something. I counted numbers, I imagined chess-boards and played both sides of long games. I tried, and tried vainly, to split my personality into two personalities and to play one against the other. But ever I remained the one player.

And time was very heavy and very long. I played games with flies, with ordinary house-flies; and learned that they possessed a sense of play. For instance, lying on the cell floor, I established an arbitrary and imaginary line along the wall some three feet above the floor. When they rested on the wall above this line they were left in peace. When they passed that line I tried to catch them.

Of the dozen or more flies that lived with me, there was only one who did not care for the game. He refused steadfastly to play, and very carefully avoided the unsafe territory. He never played with the other flies either. He was strong and healthy.

Believe me, I knew all my flies. Oh, each was distinctly an individual—not merely in size and markings, strength, and speed of flight. They were differentiated in the mentality and temperament.

I knew the nervous ones, the phlegmatic ones. Moreover, I could tell in advance when any particular fly was beginning to play.

But the hours were very long in solitary. I could not sleep them all away. House-flies are house-flies, and I was a man, with a man’s brain; and my brain was trained and active. And there was nothing to do, and my thoughts ran abominably on in vain speculations.

The world was dead to me. No news of it filtered in. The history of science was making fast, and I was interested in a thousand subjects. The very thought of science just beyond the prison walls and in which I could take no part, was maddening. And in the meantime I lay there on my cell floor and played games with house-flies.

And yet all was not silence in solitary. One day I heard, at irregular intervals, faint, low tappings. Continually these tappings were interrupted by the snarling of the guard.