The Jacket | Page 5

the Deanship of the
College of Agriculture in that university--I, the star-rover, the
red-blooded adventurer, the vagabondish Cain of the centuries, the
militant priest of remotest times, the moon-dreaming poet of ages
forgotten and to-day unrecorded in man's history of man!
And here I am, my hands dyed red in Murderers' Row, in the State
Prison of Folsom, awaiting the day decreed by the machinery of state
when the servants of the state will lead me away into what they fondly
believe is the dark--the dark they fear; the dark that gives them
fearsome and superstitious fancies; the dark that drives them, drivelling
and yammering, to the altars of their fear-created, anthropomorphic
gods.
No; I shall never be Dean of any college of agriculture. And yet I knew
agriculture. It was my profession. I was born to it, reared to it, trained
to it; and I was a master of it. It was my genius. I can pick the
high-percentage butter-fat cow with my eye and let the Babcock Tester
prove the wisdom of my eye. I can look, not at land, but at landscape,
and pronounce the virtues and the shortcomings of the soil. Litmus
paper is not necessary when I determine a soil to be acid or alkali. I
repeat, farm-husbandry, in its highest scientific terms, was my genius,
and is my genius. And yet the state, which includes all the citizens of
the state, believes that it can blot out this wisdom of mine in the final
dark by means of a rope about my neck and the abruptive jerk of
gravitation--this wisdom of mine that was incubated through the
millenniums, and that was well-hatched ere the farmed fields of Troy
were ever pastured by the flocks of nomad shepherds!

Corn? Who else knows corn? There is my demonstration at Wistar,
whereby I increased the annual corn-yield of every county in Iowa by
half a million dollars. This is history. Many a farmer, riding in his
motor-car to-day, knows who made possible that motor-car. Many a
sweet-bosomed girl and bright-browed boy, poring over high-school
text-books, little dreams that I made that higher education possible by
my corn demonstration at Wistar.
And farm management! I know the waste of superfluous motion
without studying a moving picture record of it, whether it be farm or
farm- hand, the layout of buildings or the layout of the farm-hands'
labour. There is my handbook and tables on the subject. Beyond the
shadow of any doubt, at this present moment, a hundred thousand
farmers are knotting their brows over its spread pages ere they tap out
their final pipe and go to bed. And yet, so far was I beyond my tables,
that all I needed was a mere look at a man to know his predispositions,
his co-ordinations, and the index fraction of his motion-wastage.
And here I must close this first chapter of my narrative. It is nine
o'clock, and in Murderers' Row that means lights out. Even now, I hear
the soft tread of the gum-shoed guard as he comes to censure me for
my coal-oil lamp still burning. As if the mere living could censure the
doomed to die!
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.
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