The Star Rover. Jack London

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      Of the dozen or more flies that lived with me during that period, there was only one who did not care for the game. He refused steadfastly to play and, having learned the penalty of alighting below the line, very carefully avoided the unsafe territory. That fly was a sullen, disgruntled creature. As the convicts would say, it had a "grouch" against the world. He never played with the other flies either. He was strong and healthy, too; for I studied him long to find out. His indisposition for play was temperamental, not physical.

      Believe me, I knew all my flies. It was surprising to me, the multitude of differences I distinguished between them. Oh, each was distinctly an individual—not merely in size and markings, strength and speed of flight, and in the manner and fancy of flight and play, of dodge and dart, of wheel and swiftly repeat or wheel and reverse, of touch and go on the danger wall, or of feint the touch and alight elsewhere within the safety zone. They were likewise sharply differentiated in the minutest shades of mentality and temperament.

      I knew the nervous ones, the phlegmatic ones. There was a little undersized one that would fly into real rages, sometimes with me, sometimes with its fellows. Have you ever seen a colt or calf throw up heels and dash madly about the pasture from sheer excess of vitality and spirits? Well, there was one fly—the keenest player of them all, by the way—who, when it had alighted three or four times in rapid succession on my taboo wall and succeeded each time in eluding the velvet-careful swoop of my hand, would grow so excited and jubilant that it would dart around and around my head at top speed, wheeling, veering, reversing, and always keeping within the limits of the narrow circle in which it celebrated its triumph over me.

      Why, I could tell well in advance when any particular fly was making up its mind to begin to play. There are a thousand details in this one matter alone that I shall not bore you with, although these details did serve to keep me from being bored too utterly during that first period in solitary. But one thing I must tell you. To me it is most memorable—the time when the one with a grouch, who never played, alighted in a moment of absentmindedness within the taboo precinct and was immediately captured in my hand. Do you know, he sulked for an hour afterward.

      And the hours were very long in solitary; nor could I sleep them all away; nor could I while them away with houseflies, no matter how intelligent For houseflies are houseflies, and I was a man, with a man's brain; and my brain was trained and active, stuffed with culture and science, and always geared to a high tension of eagerness to do. And there was nothing to do, and my thoughts ran abominably on in vain speculations. There was my pentose and methyl-pentose determination in grapes and wines to which I had devoted my last summer vacation at the Asti Vineyards. I had all but completed the series of experiments. Was anybody else going on with it? I wondered; and if so, with what success?

      You see, the world was dead to me. No news of it filtered in. The history of science was making fast, and I was interested in a thousand subjects. Why, there was my theory of the hydrolysis of casein by trypsin, which Professor Walters had been carrying out in his laboratory. Also, Professor Schleimer had similarly been collaborating with me in the detection of phytosterol in mixtures of animal and vegetable fats. The work surely was going on, but with what results? The very thought of all this activity just beyond the prison walls and in which I could take no part, of which I was never even to hear, was maddening. And in the meantime I lay there on my cell floor and played games with houseflies.

      And yet all was not silence in solitary. Early in my confinement I used to hear, at irregular intervals, faint low tappings. From farther away I also heard fainter and lower tappings. Continually these lappings were interrupted by the snarling of the guard. On occasion, when the tapping went on too persistency, extra guards were summoned, and I knew by the sounds that men were being strait-jacketed.

      The matter was easy of explanation. I had known, as every prisoner in San Quentin knew, that the two men in solitary were Ed Morrell and Jake Oppenheimer. And I knew that these were the two men who tapped knuckle-talk to each other and were punished for so doing.

      That the code they used was simple I had not the slightest doubt, yet I devoted many hours to a vain effort to work it out. Heaven knows, it had to be simple, yet I could not make head nor tail of it. And simple it proved to be, when I learned it; and simplest of all proved the trick they employed which had so baffled me. Not only each day did they change the point in the alphabet where the code initialed, but they changed it every conversation, and often in the midst of a conversation.

      Thus, there came a day when I caught the code at the right initial, listened to two clear sentences of conversation, and, the next time they talked, failed to understand a word. But that first time!

      "Say—Ed—what—would—you—give—right—now—for—brown—papers—and—a—sack—of—Bull—Durham?" asked the one who tapped from farther away.

      I nearly cried out in my joy. Here was communication! Here was companionship! I listened eagerly, and the nearer tapping, which I guessed must be Ed Morrell's, replied:

      "I—would—do—twenty—hours—straight—in—the—jacket—for—a—five—cent—sack—"

      Then came the snarling interruption of the guard:

      "Cut that out, Morrell!"

      It may be thought by the layman that the worst has been done to men sentenced to solitary for life, and therefore that a mere guard has no way of compelling obedience to his order to cease tapping. But the jacket remains. Starvation remains. Thirst remains. Manhandling remains. Truly, a man pent in a narrow cell is very helpless.

      So the tapping ceased, and that night, when it was next resumed, I was all at sea again. By prearrangement they had changed the initial letter of the code. But I had caught the clue and, in the matter of several days occurred again the same initialment I had understood. I did not wait on courtesy.

      "Hello," I tapped.

      "Hello, stranger," Morrell tapped back; and from Oppenheimer, "Welcome to our city."

      They were curious to know who I was, how long I was condemned to solitary, and why I had been so condemned. But all this I put to the side in order first to learn their system of changing the code initial. After I had this clear, we talked. It was a great day, for the two lifers had become three, although they accepted me only on probation. As they told me long after. they feared I might be a stool placed there to work a frame-up on them. It had been done before, to Oppenheimer, and he had paid dearly for the confidence he reposed in Warden Atherton's tool.

      To my surprise—yes, to my elation, be it said—both my fellow prisoners knew me through my record as an incorrigible. Even into the living grave Oppenheimer had occupied for ten years had my fame, or notoriety, rather, penetrated.

      I had much to tell them of prison happenings and of the outside world. The conspiracy to escape of the forty lifers, the search for the alleged dynamite, and all the treacherous frame- up of Cecil Winwood, was news to them. As they told me, news did occasionally dribble into solitary by way of the guards, but they had had nothing for a couple of months. The present guards on duty in solitary were a particularly bad and vindictive set.

      Again and again that day we were cursed for our knuckle- talking by whatever guard was on. But we could not refrain. The two of the living dead had become three, and we had so much to say, while the manner of saying it was exasperatingly slow and I was not so proficient as they at the knuckle game.

      "Wait till Pie-Face comes on tonight," Morrell rapped to me. "He sleeps most of his watch, and we can talk a streak."

      How we did talk that night. Sleep was farthest from our eyes. Pie-Face Jones was a mean and bitter СКАЧАТЬ