was shocked by the murder of Professor Haskell[6] in one of the laboratories. Darrell Standing was the murderer.
I am Darrell Standing. I was caught. In a surge of anger, obsessed by red wrath, I killed that professor.
No; I am not to be hanged for his murder. I received a life-sentence[7] as my punishment. I was thirty-six years of age at the time. I am now forty-four years old. I have spent eight years in the California State Prison of San Quentin[8]. Five of these years I spent in the dark. Solitary confinement[9], they call it. But through these five years I managed to attain freedom such as few men have ever known. Not only did I range the world, but I ranged time. Truly, thanks to Ed Morrell[10], I have had five years of star-roving. But Ed Morrell is another story. I shall tell you about him a little later. I have so much to tell.
Well, a beginning. I was born in Minnesota. And I knew agriculture. It was my profession. I was born to it, reared to it, trained to it; and I was a master of it. I can look, not at land, but at landscape, and pronounce the virtues and the shortcomings of the soil. Corn? Who else knows corn? And farm management! I know it. Who else knows it?
And here I must close this first chapter of my narrative. It is nine o’clock, and that means lights out.
I am Darrell Standing. They are going to take me out and hang me soon. In the meantime I write in these pages of the other times and places.
After my sentence, I came to spend the rest of my life in the prison of San Quentin. They put me in the jute-mill[11]. The criminality of wastefulness irritated me. The crime of waste was abhorrent. I rebelled. I tried to show the guards more efficient ways. But I was given the dungeon and the starvation of light and food. And I rebelled again. I was given the dungeon, plus the strait-jacket[12]. I was beaten by the stupid guards.
Two years of this witless persecution I endured. It is terrible for a man to be tied down and gnawed by rats. The stupid guards were rats, and they gnawed my intelligence, gnawed all my nerves and my consciousness. And I, who in my past have been a fighter, in this present life was no fighter at all. I was a farmer, an agriculturist, a professor, a laboratory slave, interested only in the soil and the increase of the productiveness of the soil.