Because of prior conviction he was serving fifty years for highway robbery committed on the streets of Alameda.
He had already served a dozen of his years at the time he talked to me in the jacket, and that was seven years ago.
He was one of the forty lifers who were double-crossed by Cecil Winwood.
For that offence Philadelphia Red lost his credits.
He is middle-aged now, and he is still in San Quentin.
If he survives he will be an old man when they let him out.
I lived through my twenty-four hours, and I have never been the same man since.
Oh, I don’t mean physically, although next morning, when they unlaced me, I was semi-paralyzed and in such a state of collapse that the guards had to kick me in the ribs to make me crawl to my feet.
But I was a changed man mentally, morally.
The brute physical torture of it was humiliation and affront to my spirit and to my sense of justice. Such discipline does not sweeten a man.
I emerged from that first jacketing filled with a bitterness and a passionate hatred that has only increased through the years.
My God—when I think of the things men have done to me!
Twenty-four hours in the jacket!
Little I thought that morning when they kicked me to my feet that the time would come when twenty-four hours in the jacket meant nothing; when a hundred hours in the jacket found me smiling when they released me; when two hundred and forty hours in the jacket found the same smile on my lips.
Yes, two hundred and forty hours. Dear cotton-woolly citizen, do you know what that means?
It means ten days and ten nights in the jacket.
Of course, such things are not done anywhere in the Christian world nineteen hundred years after Christ.
I don’t ask you to believe me.
I don’t believe it myself.
I merely know that it was done to me in San Quentin, and that I lived to laugh at them and to compel them to get rid of me by swinging me off because I bloodied a guard’s nose.
I write these lines to-day in the Year of Our Lord 1913, and to-day, in the Year of Our Lord 1913, men are lying in the jacket in the dungeons of San Quentin.
I shall never forget, as long as further living and further lives be vouchsafed me, my parting from Philadelphia Red that morning.
He had then been seventy-four hours in the jacket.
“Well, brother, you’re still alive an’ kickin’,” he called to me, as I was totteringly dragged from my cell into the corridor of dungeons.
“Shut up, you, Red,” the sergeant snarled at him.
“Forget it,” was the retort.
“I’ll get you yet, Red,” the sergeant threatened.
“Think so?” Philadelphia Red queried sweetly, ere his tones turned to savageness. “Why, you old stiff, you couldn’t get nothin’.
You couldn’t get a free lunch, much less the job you’ve got now, if it wasn’t for your brother’s pull.
An’ I guess we all ain’t mistaken on the stink of the place where your brother’s pull comes from.”
It was admirable—the spirit of man rising above its extremity, fearless of the hurt any brute of the system could inflict.
“Well, so long, brother,” Philadelphia Red next called to me. “So long. Be good, an’ love the Warden.
An’ if you see ’em, just tell ’em that you saw me but that you didn’t see me saw.”
The sergeant was red with rage, and, by the receipt of various kicks and blows, I paid for Red’s pleasantry.
CHAPTER VIII
In solitary, in Cell One, Warden Atherton and Captain Jamie proceeded to put me to the inquisition.
As Warden Atherton said to me:
“Standing, you’re going to come across with that dynamite, or I’ll kill you in the jacket.
Harder cases than you have come across before I got done with them.
You’ve got your choice—dynamite or curtains.”
“Then I guess it is curtains,” I answered, “because I don’t know of any dynamite.”
This irritated the Warden to immediate action.
“Lie down,” he commanded.
I obeyed, for I had learned the folly of fighting three or four strong men.
They laced me tightly, and gave me a hundred hours.
Once each twenty-four hours I was permitted a drink of water.
I had no desire for food, nor was food offered me.
Toward the end of the hundred hours Jackson, the prison doctor, examined my physical condition several times.
But I had grown too used to the jacket during my incorrigible days to let a single jacketing injure me.
Naturally, it weakened me, took the life out of me; but I had learned muscular tricks for stealing a little space while they were lacing me.