I read the code as a matter of course.
“Thought you might be awake,” Oppenheimer tapped. “How goes it with the Professor?”
Then, dim and far, I could hear Morrell’s taps enunciating that they had put me in the jacket an hour before, and that, as usual, I was already deaf to all knuckle talk.
“He is a good guy,” Oppenheimer rapped on. “I always was suspicious of educated mugs, but he ain’t been hurt none by his education. He is sure square. Got all the spunk in the world, and you could not get him to squeal or double cross in a million years.”
To all of which, and with amplification, Ed Morrell agreed. And I must, right here, ere I go a word further, say that I have lived many years and many lives, and that in those many lives I have known proud moments; but that the proudest moment I have ever known was the moment when my two comrades in solitary passed this appraisal of me. Ed Morrell and Jake Oppenheimer were great spirits, and in all time no greater honour was ever accorded me than this admission of me to their comradeship. Kings have knighted me, emperors have ennobled me, and, as king myself, I have known stately moments. Yet of it all nothing do I adjudge so splendid as this accolade delivered by two lifers in solitary deemed by the world as the very bottom-most of the human cesspool.
Afterwards, recuperating from this particular bout with the jacket, I brought up my visit to Jake’s cell as a proof that my spirit did leave my body. But Jake was unshakable.
“It is guessing that is more than guessing,” was his reply, when I had described to him his successive particular actions at the time my spirit had been in his cell. “It is figuring. You have been close to three years in solitary yourself, Professor, and you can come pretty near to figuring what any guy will do to be killing time. There ain’t a thing you told me that you and Ed ain’t done thousands of times, from lying with your clothes off in hot weather to watching flies, tending sores, and rapping.”
Morrell sided with me, but it was no use.
“Now don’t take it hard, Professor,” Jake tapped. “I ain’t saying you lied. I just say you get to dreaming and figuring in the jacket without knowing you’re doing it. I know you believe what you say, and that you think it happened; but it don’t buy nothing with me. You figure it, but you don’t know you figure it—that is something you know all the time, though you don’t know you know it until you get into them dreamy, woozy states.”
“Hold on, Jake,” I tapped. “You know I have never seen you with my own eyes. Is that right?”