“Ha! ha! ha!” Jake Oppenheimer rapped his laughter thirteen cells away.
“You see, that’s Jake’s trouble,” Morrell went on. “He can’t believe. That one time he tried it he was too strong and failed. And now he thinks I am kidding.”
“When you die you are dead, and dead men stay dead,” Oppenheimer retorted.
“I tell you I’ve been dead three times,” Morrell argued.
“And lived to tell us about it,” Oppenheimer jeered.
“But don’t forget one thing, Darrell,” Morrell rapped to me. “The thing is ticklish. You have a feeling all the time that you are taking liberties. I can’t explain it, but I always had a feeling if I was away when they came and let my body out of the jacket that I couldn’t get back into my body again. I mean that my body would be dead for keeps. And I didn’t want it to be dead. I didn’t want to give Captain Jamie and the rest that satisfaction. But I tell you, Darrell, if you can turn the trick you can laugh at the Warden. Once you make your body die that way it don’t matter whether they keep you in the jacket a month on end. You don’t suffer none, and your body don’t suffer. You know there are cases of people who have slept a whole year at a time. That’s the way it will be with your body. It just stays there in the jacket, not hurting or anything, just waiting for you to come back.
“You try it. I am giving you the straight steer.”
“And if he don’t come back?” Oppenheimer, asked.
“Then the laugh will be on him, I guess, Jake,” Morrell answered. “Unless, maybe, it will be on us for sticking round this old dump when we could get away that easy.”
And here the conversation ended, for Pie-Face Jones, waking crustily from stolen slumber, threatened Morrell and Oppenheimer with a report next morning that would mean the jacket for them. Me he did not threaten, for he knew I was doomed for the jacket anyway.