The Jacket | Page 9

to the forty lifers to be
ready for the break. And two hours after midnight every guard in the
prison was under orders. This included the day-shift which should have
been asleep. When two o'clock came, they rushed the cells occupied by
the forty. The rush was simultaneous. The cells were opened at the
same moment, and without exception the men named by Winwood
were found out of their bunks, fully dressed, and crouching just inside
their doors. Of course, this was verification absolute of all the fabric of
lies that the poet-forger had spun for Captain Jamie. The forty lifers
were caught in red-handed readiness for the break. What if they did
unite, afterward, in averring that the break had been planned by
Winwood? The Prison Board of Directors believed, to a man, that the
forty lied in an effort to save themselves. The Board of Pardons
likewise believed, for, ere three months were up, Cecil Winwood,
forger and poet, most despicable of men, was pardoned out.
Oh, well, the stir, or the pen, as they call it in convict argot, is a training
school for philosophy. No inmate can survive years of it without having
had burst for him his fondest illusions and fairest metaphysical bubbles.
Truth lives, we are taught; murder will out. Well, this is a
demonstration that murder does not always come out. The Captain of
the Yard, the late Warden Atherton, the Prison Board of Directors to a
man--all believe, right now, in the existence of that dynamite that never
existed save in the slippery-geared and all too-accelerated brain of the
degenerate forger and poet, Cecil Winwood. And Cecil Winwood still

lives, while I, of all men concerned, the utterest, absolutist, innocentest,
go to the scaffold in a few short weeks.
And now I must tell how entered the forty lifers upon my dungeon
stillness. I was asleep when the outer door to the corridor of dungeons
clanged open and aroused me. "Some poor devil," was my thought; and
my next thought was that he was surely getting his, as I listened to the
scuffling of feet, the dull impact of blows on flesh, the sudden cries of
pain, the filth of curses, and the sounds of dragging bodies. For, you
see, every man was man-handled all the length of the way.
Dungeon-door after dungeon-door clanged open, and body after body
was thrust in, flung in, or dragged in. And continually more groups of
guards arrived with more beaten convicts who still were being beaten,
and more dungeon-doors were opened to receive the bleeding frames of
men who were guilty of yearning after freedom.
Yes, as I look back upon it, a man must be greatly a philosopher to
survive the continual impact of such brutish experiences through the
years and years. I am such a philosopher. I have endured eight years of
their torment, and now, in the end, failing to get rid of me in all other
ways, they have invoked the machinery of state to put a rope around
my neck and shut off my breath by the weight of my body. Oh, I know
how the experts give expert judgment that the fall through the trap
breaks the victim's neck. And the victims, like Shakespeare's traveller,
never return to testify to the contrary. But we who have lived in the stir
know of the cases that are hushed in the prison crypts, where the
victim's necks are not broken.
It is a funny thing, this hanging of a man. I have never seen a hanging,
but I have been told by eye-witnesses the details of a dozen hangings so
that I know what will happen to me. Standing on the trap, leg-manacled
and arm-manacled, the knot against the neck, the black cap drawn, they
will drop me down until the momentum of my descending weight is
fetched up abruptly short by the tautening of the rope. Then the doctors
will group around me, and one will relieve another in successive turns
in standing on a stool, his arms passed around me to keep me from
swinging like a pendulum, his ear pressed close to my chest, while he

counts my fading heart-beats. Sometimes twenty minutes elapse after
the trap is sprung ere the heart stops beating. Oh, trust me, they make
most scientifically sure that a man is dead once they get him on a rope.
I still wander aside from my narrative to ask a question or two of
society. I have a right so to wander and so to question, for in a little
while they are going to take me out and do this thing to me. If the neck
of the victim be broken by the alleged shrewd arrangement of knot and
noose, and by the alleged shrewd