Don’t you see?  Our truth, the very truth we told, was our damnation.  When forty men told the same things with such unanimity, Warden Atherton and Captain Jamie could only conclude that the testimony was a memorized lie which each of the forty rattled off parrot-like.

From the standpoint of the authorities, their situation was as desperate as ours.  As I learned afterward, the Board of Prison Directors had been summoned by telegraph, and two companies of state militia were being rushed to the prison.

It was winter weather, and the frost is sometimes shrewd even in a California winter.  We had no blankets in the dungeons.  Please know that it is very cold to stretch bruised human flesh on frosty stone.  In the end they did give us water.  Jeering and cursing us, the guards ran in the fire-hoses and played the fierce streams on us, dungeon by dungeon, hour after hour, until our bruised flesh was battered all anew by the violence with which the water smote us, until we stood knee-deep in the water which we had raved for and for which now we raved to cease.

I shall skip the rest of what happened in the dungeons.  In passing I shall merely state that no one of those forty lifers was ever the same again.  Luigi Polazzo never recovered his reason.  Long Bill Hodge slowly lost his sanity, so that a year later, he, too, went to live in Bughouse Alley.  Oh, and others followed Hodge and Polazzo; and others, whose physical stamina had been impaired, fell victims to prison-tuberculosis.  Fully 25 per cent. of the forty have died in the succeeding six years.

After my five years in solitary, when they took me away from San Quentin for my trial, I saw Skysail Jack.  I could see little, for I was blinking in the sunshine like a bat, after five years of darkness; yet