“Lord, Lord, Warden, it is bitter weather,” I sneered. “The frost is sharp. Wherefore I am indeed grateful for your giving me two jackets. I shall be almost comfortable.”
“Tighter!” he urged to Al Hutchins, who was drawing the lacing. “Throw your feet into the skunk. Break his ribs.”
I must admit that Hutchins did his best.
“You will lie about me,” the Warden raved, the flush of wine and wrath flooding ruddier into his face. “Now see what you get for it. Your number is taken at last, Standing. This is your finish. Do you hear? This is your finish.”
“A favour, Warden,” I whispered faintly. Faint I was. Perforce I was nearly unconscious from the fearful constriction. “Make it a triple jacketing,” I managed to continue, while the cell walls swayed and reeled about me and while I fought with all my will to hold to my consciousness that was being squeezed out of me by the jackets. “Another jacket . . . Warden . . . It . . . will . . . be . . . so . . . much . . . er . . . warmer.”
And my whisper faded away as I ebbed down into the little death.
I was never the same man after that double-jacketing. Never again, to this day, no matter what my food, was I properly nurtured. I suffered internal injuries to an extent I never cared to investigate. The old pain in my ribs and stomach is with me now as I write these lines. But the poor, maltreated machinery has served its purpose. It has enabled me to live thus far, and it will enable me to live the little longer to the day they take me out in the shirt without a collar and stretch my neck with the well-stretched rope.
But the double-jacketing was the last straw. It broke down Warden Atherton. He surrendered to the demonstration that I was unkillable. As I told him once:
“The only way you can get me, Warden, is to sneak in here some night with a hatchet.”
Jake Oppenheimer was responsible for a good one on the Warden which I must relate: