One thing of great value I learned is the mastery of the body by the mind. I learned to suffer passively. Oh, it is not easy! And it enabled me easily to practise the secret Ed Morrell told to me.

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.

“Don’t let them kill you,” Ed Morrell advised. “There is a way. I learned it myself, down in the dungeons. You must be very weak first, before you try it. If you try it when you are strong, you will lose. I made the mistake of telling Jake the trick when he was strong. He thinks I am kidding him. Is that right, Jake?”

And from cell thirteen Jake rapped back, “Don’t listen to it, Darrell. It’s nonsense.”

“Go on and tell me,” I rapped to Morrell.

“That is why I waited for you to get real weak,” he continued. “Now you need it, and I am going to tell you. It’s up to you [27] . If you have the will you can do it. I’ve done it three times, and I know.”

“Well, what is it?” I rapped eagerly.

“The trick is to die in the jacket, to will yourself to die. I know you don’t understand me yet, but wait. You know how you get numb [28] in the jacket—how your arm or your leg goes to sleep. But don’t wait for your legs or anything to go to sleep. You lie on your back as comfortable as you can get, and you begin to use your will.

“And this is the idea you must think to yourself, and that you must believe all the time you’re thinking it. If you don’t believe, then there’s nothing to it. The thing you must think and believe is that your body is one thing and your spirit is another thing. You are you, and your body is something else. You’re the boss. You don’t need any body. And thinking and believing all this you proceed to prove it by using your will. You make your body die.

“You begin with the toes, one at a time. You make your toes die. You will them to die. And if you’ve got the belief and the will your toes will die. That is the big job—to start the dying. Once you’ve got the first toe dead, the rest is easy. Then you put all your will into making the rest of the body die. I tell you, Darrell, I know. I’ve done it three times.

“By-and-by your legs are dead to the knees, and then to the thighs, and you are just the same as you always were.”

“And then what happens?” I queried.

“Well, when your body is all dead, you just leave your body. And when you leave your body you leave the cell. Stone walls and iron doors are to hold bodies in. They can’t hold the spirit in. You see, you are spirit outside of your body. You can look at your body from outside of it. I tell you I know because I have done it three times—looked at my body lying there with me outside of it.”

“Ha! ha! ha!” Jake Oppenheimer rapped his laughter.

“You see, that’s Jake’s trouble,” Morrell went on. “He can’t believe. That one time he tried it he was too strong and failed. And now he thinks I am kidding.”

“When you die you are dead, and dead men stay dead,” Oppenheimer retorted.

“I tell you I’ve been dead three times,” Morrell argued.

“And lived to tell us about it,” Oppenheimer jeered.

“But don’t forget one thing, Darrell,” Morrell rapped to me. “It is very risky. You have a feeling all the time that you are free. I can’t explain it, but I always had a feeling if I was away when they came and let my body out of the jacket that I couldn’t get back into my body again. I mean that my body would be dead. And I didn’t want it to be dead. I didn’t want to give Captain Jamie and the rest that satisfaction. But I tell you, Darrell, if you can make it you can laugh at the Warden. Once you make your body die that way it doesn’t matter whether they keep you in the jacket a month on end. You don’t suffer anymore, and your body doesn’t suffer. You know there are many people who have slept a whole year at a time. That will be with your body. It just stays there in the jacket, not hurting or anything, just waiting for you to come back. Try it.”

“And if he doesn’t come back?” Oppenheimer, asked.

“Then we will laugh at him, I guess, Jake,” Morrell answered. “Or, maybe, he will laugh at us: we are in this old dump when we could get away very easily.”

And here the conversation ended.

I lay long there in the silence, thinking about that Morrell’s proposition. Morrell’s method was so different from my method of self-hypnosis that I was interested in it. By my method, my consciousness went first of all. By his method, consciousness persisted last of all, and passed into stages so sublimated that it left the body, left the prison of San Quentin, and journeyed afar, and was still consciousness.

It was worth trying, anyway, I concluded. And, despite my sceptical attitude, I believed. I had no doubt I could do what Morrell said he had done three times.

Next morning Warden Atherton came into my cell to kill me. Next morning Warden Atherton came into my cell to kill me. His face showed it. His actions proved it. With him were Captain Jamie, Doctor Jackson, Pie-Face Jones [29] , and Al Hutchins [30] . Al Hutchins was a prisoner, but he for four years he had been head trusty [31] of San Quentin.

“Examine him,” Warden Atherton ordered Doctor Jackson. “Will he stand it?”

“Yes,” Doctor Jackson answered.

“How’s the heart?”

“Splendid.”

“You think he’ll stand ten days of it, Doc?”

“Sure.”

“I don’t believe it,” the Warden announced savagely. “But we’ll try it just the same. Lie down, Standing.”

I obeyed, stretching myself face-downward on the flat-spread jacket. The Warden seemed to debate with himself for a moment.

“Roll over,” he commanded.