San Quentin stretches drab and sun scorched along the blue waters of San Francisco Bay. Majestic clouds seem always to be riding the heavens on the watery horizon. Boats glide, far out on the bay, as if fearful of drawing too near the crowded castle of the doomed.

Originally built for less than two thousand prisoners, it now houses thirty-six hundred, about one hundred of whom are women. The roads are graveled. There is a detour sign two miles from the prison upon which is printed in large black letters beneath a hand pointing prisonward:

THIS IS THE RIGHT ROAD

The front of the prison is grass and flower bedecked. A horseshoe, token of good luck, is over the main gate. In spite of its beautiful setting it is, to me, the dreariest of American prisons-a Place where the music of the spheres is ragtime.

About twenty miles from San Francisco, the most charming of American cities, San Quentin is often bathed in fogs and lacerated with cold winds. The very sea gulls seem to fly over it with the monotony of despair. The guards live and bring up their children in the f ear of God and the law within a few hundred yards of where men are hanged with sanctimonious gesture.

I had called to visit several prisoners. A reporter for the San Francisco Examiner accompanied me. The city editor had telephoned the warden of our arrival. Less than a month on the job, the new warden, a man hunter all his life, was unusual in that he had none of the illiterate man's blind acceptance of life.

A very quiet man, between fifty and sixty, slightly stooped, with most of his upper teeth missing, he might have been the leader of a Salvation Army band, instead of one who had long been known to be quick on the trigger. A Hindu had once run amuck in a crowded courtroom. The new warden had drilled him dead with a bullet. That was his claim to fame in California.

He took us to the office of the captain of the guard.

We walked through three iron gates before reaching

the interior yard. Save for the small walks, this yard was literally covered with blooming flowers of many sizes and colors. After the drab cement and iron bars, and the stern dull faces of the guards, the contrast was startling.

We waited in this room until my friends arrived. They were Kid McCoy, Robert Joyce Tasker, Joe Mackin, and Paul Kelly.

Mackin, a shriveled little ex-jockey, perhaps with the seeds of a writer about to germinate in his head, doing a fifteen year jolt for highway robbery. Tasker, twenty-four, tall, good looking, a sheik type for society girls and stenographers, with black hair carefully combed, doing five to twenty-five years for holding up a crowded dance hall. He is now the associate editor of the San Quentin Bulletin and a contributor to the American Mercury.

As gruff old Carlyle might have said: "By such incontrovertible ways do men find themselves."

Kelly, accidentally caught up with bootleg gin and a woman, spasmodically married, was now working a loom in the jute mill, that modern California inferno which drives even dull men mad.

It is a place where a yell subsides to a whisper, so great is the whirring noise. Particles of hemp dust fly all about the mill. Wheels, pulleys, and machines roar with deafening noise. A convict must do his task each day-so many sacks, so much twine, or be penalized if he fails.

I had known Kelly in happier days. Generous, a square dealer, with the pride and the laughter of the Gael, life had always been to him a Lambs Club frolic.

And now the crows of trouble were walking around his eyes. The smile on his face was hard pushed to keep back the tears. An actor, Thomas Meighan, had contributed ten thousand dollars for his defense. Other friends had rallied to him.

Sensational newspapers, a corporation lawyer untrained in mob psychology, a shallow judge, and middle-class hatred of Hollywood had done for Kelly.

It was no time now for the imbecilities by which more fortunate men try to placate others in trouble.

The conversation lagged. There was a pause. Kelly's body trembled in its ill-fitting gray and hemp-dusty suit.

"Well, Paul – all you can do is take your jolt," I finally said.

"But I didn't kill him - I didn't kill him," and then, "God! - but it's great to get away from that jute mill - you've got to live it, Jim - to know it - there's no other way."

"I know, Paul - you're right - I'd rather read one page by a man who had been in hell -than all of Dante."

I watched his face. The deep lines running down from the eyes were those of an emotional man forced by the exigencies of circumstance and environment into a withering restraint. We walked toward Kid McCoy and the warden. The once great pugilist was saying, "I’ll tell you, Warden – Tunney hasn’t got a chance – no man has with Dempsey when he’s right. There’s too many big words in Tunney’s head."

Not wishing to rob McCoy of a moment’s pleasure, I turned my head.

Through the flowers, followed by a guard, walked a young girl, slim and beautiful. In white blouse and dark skirt, her hair carefully combed, and with blue laughing eyes, she seemed a pretty high school girl in her way to an easy lesson.

"Who’s that?" I asked Paul Kelly.

"It’s the jazz murderess," he replied. "The kid who killed her mother." It was as if McCoy had smashed me under the heart. Another prisoner, perhaps seeing my expression, said, "There’s all kinds in here, Jim."

Tasker and the reporter joined us. Soon we bade the four men goodbye and walked into the garden. The warden went into his lunch. We walked toward the hospital. The reporter wished to ask the prison physician, Dr. L. L. Stanley, a question. There was a rumor that certain other prisoners had lately tried to kill the Rev. Herbert Wilson, arch bandit, murderer, informer, and one-time Baptist minister, with a poisoned arrow.

We accompanied Dr. Stanley to the dining room. The man who waited upon our table was Tom Mooney, whose conviction as a dynamiter stirred the nations of the world.. Still in middle life, the years are nevertheless crawling heavily across Mooney. Though even the intercession of Woodrow Wilson failed to get him a new trial, he still hopes for a pardon. A naive man, he dreams of justice.

Allowed to languish in prison the past dozen years, he is neglected by the parlor radicals, now grazing in more luscious publicity fields. Men high in financial power have said of Mooney: "Well, if he's not guilty of the Preparedness Day bombing, he's guilty of something else. He belongs in San Quentin." Mooney's enemies are unlike his friends; they know exactly what they want.

Mooney, now phonographic, talked for an hour, detailing his acquittals and convictions. If he is innocent, it seems incomprehensible that semicivilized men should be guilty of such a crime. But even Sinclair Lewis suppressed the hardness of a Babbitt to gain his end.

"Well, Tom," said the reporter, "if they let you out to-morrow, what would you do?"

Mooney stood erect, the picture of subdued virility. "I'll tell you what I'd do-I'd look after my health right away."

All of us glanced at the physician. No man spoke for a minute.

"What's the matter with your health, Tom?" the doctor finally asked.

"No reflections on you, Doctor," returned Mooney, "but you know how it is," and then further explanations, which wended back to the injustice of twelve years' imprisonment.

Those years have eaten at the mind of Mooney, stooping his shoulders. They have carved hollow places beneath his eyes.

As he went to the kitchen the doctor said, "It's the first time I've ever heard his story-you know there's thirty-six hundred of them here."

The reporter asked if the newspaper report of Clara Phillips' attempted suicide were true. "No, it wasn't," he replied, "but it's a wonder all the women don't go mad - cooped up the way they are." The corners of his mouth twitched with pity.

Dr. Stanley listens to the last heartbeats of gallows-hung men. He remains kindly, even sentimental over the most atrocious of his charges. He talked of Bluebeard Watson, said to be a hermaphrodite, convicted of having married and killed many women.

"It will be centuries before anyone is able to give Watson's case justice. He's my head nurse over in the hospital. He makes pets out of birds. There's nothing he won't do for a sick man. He nurses them as tenderly as a woman. I wish you'd say something about him. He's in here forever - he'll never get out - So all you can get him is a little understanding."

Eager to change the subject, I said, "You've been here a great many years, haven't you, Doctor?"

"Yes, yes," he half drawled, "a good many years. I went into private practice a short time, but I gave it up and came back. Got homesick, I guess."

Someone told the story of a ball-throwing contest in which a condemned young dope fiend had participated. He was soon to dangle in a noose.

Three thousand prisoners cheered the lad who was soon to leave for another country. Strangely enough, no contestant was in good form that day. Even the champion ball thrower, a giant Negro, was off. The youth won, amid cheers.

He died in the belief that he could throw a ball farther than any man in prison. Ego attends us all.

As we talked to the doctor there appeared James McNamara, the labor agitator, convicted of blowing up the Los Angeles Times Building and killing twenty-one people, and now serving his fifteenth year of a life sentence. Steel-gray eyes, perfect features, about forty-five years of age. McNamara smiled when asked if he were on the Los Angeles Times mailing list. Five years before I had said to him, "You'll get out soon."

His reply was: "What an optimist you are, Jim! Did you make four-minute speeches during the war? Tom Mooney's innocent and he can't get out. How long do you think they'll keep me?" Then with emphasis, "I'm supposed to have killed twenty-one men.

McNamara was then in charge of the condemned row. I had told him the outline of a novel in which a youthful radical was to be hanged. He was much interested in the plan.

He was eager to help me get the correct details and atmosphere. He talked of my embryonic leading character as though he were a reality.

"You want to get it right," he said "it'll help the cause."

He had followed my career and always asked me, "Are you still going to do the story of the boy?"

And now, in leaving me, he said, "You ought to come over Friday, Jim, they'll top a guy here then. It'll be what you want for your book."

Topping is the prison term for hanging.

On Friday morning at six o'clock I started again for San Quentin with Raymond Griffith, the actor, and Malcolm Waldron, a reporter for the San Francisco Call. Fremont Older, that most humane of editors, had asked me to write a description of the execution.

The man was to mount the thirteen steps leading to the gallows at ten o'clock. The newspaper wanted a preliminary story. A morbid public was interested in how he had passed the night, and even what he had eaten for breakfast. Hence the early start.

As we huddled back from the foggy wind on the bay Griffith said: "They talk of Nietzsche and all that gang - why, those birds were soft! The real hard people are the Baptists, the Methodists, the Puritans. Nietzsche couldn't hang a man like this."

"Cromwell, for instance," I suggested.

"Yes - that's the guy - now, he was hard."

Said Waldron: "I covered a hanging in the East, and we were all given black coffee before we went to the death room. I wonder if they'll do that here?"

While Griffith tried to see Paul Kelly I went with Waldron. At the door of the warden's office was a plaster bust of Senator Hiram Johnson. Spectacles were upon it to accentuate the likeness. The artist seemed to have difficulty in adjusting the Senator's scarf. He compromised by allowing it to hang under his collar.

We met two other reporters in the office.

"Now listen, fellows," said Waldron, "we'll make a gentleman's agreement. There's only two 'phones here - so let's all 'phone our stories in together."

"All right," they agreed.

That weighty matter settled, we greeted the warden’s clerk. He was frozen indifference. The clerk of the Prison Board, a two-hundred-pound porpoise of a man, with a neck bulging over his collar, entered the room.

"Meet the newspaper boys here," suggested the warden’s clerk.

"I’ll meet ‘em later," was the terse reply.

"It’s mutual," returned a reporter as the clerk of the board passed into another room. From another reporter:

"That guy hates us – God, I’m glad! You know it’s funny about these hangings. I knew a fellow who covered thirty of them. He fainted at the last one."

It was not eight-thirty.

"Damn this waiting around," blurted a reporter whose eyes were swollen from a night’s debauch. "The time sure drags."

"It may for us," put in Waldron, "but I’ll bet it flies for him."

We remained silent for some time.

"That’s right – the poor devil," at last came from the reporter with the swollen eyes – then, smiling, "It won’t be long now."

"Is it true they give them a shot of booze or dope before they bump them?" The remark was delivered to the warden’s clerk.

He answered, "This guy says, 'A glass o' whisky.' Send up a barrel of it!" The clerk left.

'Well, it won't be long now," said the blear-eyed reporter for a second time, in the midst of a news competitor's words.

"I think it was here that they used to grant a fellow's dying request before they strung him up." He smiled. "A Negro asked the warden if he couldn't dance a jig on the gallows. That was a hard one for the warden, but he finally consented. The chaplain objected strenuously, though, in the name of dignity and religion, so the poor shine had to keep his feet still."

I watched a pelican sailing beautifully toward the sun. Waldron touched my arm. "A miserable business for 1927 - eh?"

"You've just got the fidgets, Waldron," I bantered as the warden entered the room.

His face sagged as if weights were on his chin. The warden of a California prison is forced to see all executions. His raised hand sends the doomed man downward. It was this warden's first.

"How do you feel?" a reporter asked.

"All right," he answered slowly, removing the pipe from his half toothless mouth. "It's not pleasant to jerk a man into the great beyond."

We agreed in silence and said no more while the warden remained in the room.

Waldron, looking toward the bay, said nervously, "Gee - the grass is nice and green - the sun's warm - even the sea gulls are more beautiful than I've ever seen them before."

We all knew his drift. Our minds were with him.

"Be a realist, Waldron," I jerked at him. "You mean it's hell to die on a morning like this."

He murmured weakly, "Yes."

"Well, it surely is hell," I half laughed, with the plain hope of lifting Waldron's mood, when my own was no higher. "But this fellow, Earl Clark, certainly got a tough break. If a fellow read about it in a book he wouldn't believe it. He escaped from the county jail in Los Angeles after he was convicted, and he beat it to this little town in South Dakota - married a girl who didn't know a thing about his record, and went into the painting business. He was getting along fine when a young kid who'd taken a mail-order course to become a detective turned him in. He was really making good, you know. Clark was supposed to have carried poison to bump himself off if they ever caught him, but he was too slow. I see where Frank Dewar, the jailer down in Los Angeles, wired the governor that there was even a chance that he wasn't guilty."

"He was guilty all right" - from a voice behind a desk.

"You'd think they'd give a fellow at least a life term after that," said Waldron.

"But there’s six feet of grass over the other guy - remember that," threw in the warden's clerk.

No man answered.

"The guy was sentimental, that's all," said the reporter with the bleared eyes. "He killed a sailor because he brought a red rose to his girl every night. Why didn't he wait a while - the sailor would have gone to sea - they all do - don't they?" looking at me as if I knew.

"Yes - I guess so - I think that's their job."

"But who was the dame?" the reporter asked.

"Just a broad," was the reply from somewhere.

"Just a broad," two voices took up.

"A million-dollar price for a ten-cent woman," said the reporter with the swollen eyes as we walked toward the main entrance.

At least seventy men in citizens' clothes stood in groups. I could tell by their faces that many were guards and detectives.

It was now twenty minutes of ten.

We marched one by one through the flower garden. A guard, laughing outright, pointed his club at a marching gentleman, and said, "He's turnin' pale already." Several of the marchers laughed.

Prisoners looked out of the hospital windows at life marching to see death. The subserviency of iron bars could not obliterate their contempt for us from their faces.

This section of the prison had the appearance of an abandoned sawmill. The accumulated debris of generations was about us.

To the left of the hospital was the condemned row where other cattle, in prison vernacular, awaited their chance to meet the Christians' God. Down a little hill we walked, passing on our left a heavy iron door with a large padlock upon it. It was the entrance to the cooler, where all was pitch darkness – eighteen stone cages of icy torture and Zolaesque despair.

The authorities often place men there for infractions of prison rules. They are given a diet of bread and water and their own thoughts, if any, on the mercy of mankind.

Farther on was the butcher shop - the morgue. Above us was a herder with a loaded rifle. I noted that the guards did not carry guns inside the prison. The reason seemed obvious. In a wild scramble of mutiny or for freedom the convicts might disarm them.

We reached the rear of the prison and walked down a less pretentious alley. We stopped at the foot of aged stairs which projected about five feet from the wall. They reached three flights. Fearful of the rickety steps, about twenty men were allowed upon them at a time. We now went two by two. Waldron walked with me.

A fat man grumbled at the long flight of steps.

"They do hangin's better in Folsom," he panted.

A guard near the railing commanded, "Step lively there!" I recognized his face. He was the Irish gentleman who had long before commented, "It used to be a good graft - sellin' the rope a dollar an inch - now the board makes us burn it."

And then, at the foot of the gallows, in showing me a leather contraption, he elucidated, "We put 'em in here if they wriggle." My mind on the Irish boy I was to hang in a book, I remembered.

As I counted the seventy-five decrepit steps I had the diabolical wish that they would crumple beneath us. "Wouldn't it be funny," I said to Waldron, "if all of us croaked before Clark?"

He made no answer. His mouth was tight shut. His eyes betrayed the life-hurt dreamer.

The debonair Griffith walked behind me. His face was more impassive than a Chinaman's at a lottery. I stumbled as I watched it. "Careful," he said as we turned in on the third floor.

We passed through the print shop. Four prisoners sat at desks, editing the prison paper. Tacked to the walls were the pictures of actresses of a long ago period. They looked smilingly grotesque in the abominable costumes and hats which were then in style.

"Convicts, forever free, must have tacked them there," I thought. Musing on the sex agonies of men in prison, I became more tolerant of the fatuous faces which stared from the lithographs.

Inside a small room were three prisoners. Thin, with suppressed leers and furtive eyes, they lolled about in the manner of laborers before the day's work begins. They were the scavenger crew. It was their job to take the dead man from the rope, place him in a fine coffin made by other convicts, and hurry him to the little cemetery on the hill where rest the men with broken necks.

We now halted in front of a large door, opening into a room which contained the gallows.

It was ten minutes of ten.

I stood within a half-dozen feet of the coffin. A guard with a hard, flat face, not over thirty, leaned upon it. Another guard approached. "Here's his overcoat," smiled the first guard.

I touched Waldron's arm. His body trembled. The shuffling of feet stopped. One could literally bear hearts beat. A sinuous three-quarter length picture of Lillian Russell smiled above the coffin at the nonchalant legality of murder. I started to say some words to Griffith. They rattled in my throat.

The door opened. We marched into the room of death.

It must have been sixty feet long and thirty wide. Save for the gallows, it was bare. It was painted a sickly blue, like a Kansas sky after a tornado. The death cell was about thirty feet from the gallows. It was also painted blue. It was quite large, the ceiling very high. A gas jet, about three feet long, hung from the center.

One rope, already knotted, hung from the gallows. About were three small ropes, one of which held the trap. In seven minutes they were to be cut by three guards. In this way, no man knew which one had sent the body dangling in the air. There was a small platform at the bottom. Thirteen steps led to the gallows. They were worn with the feet of many men who never came down alive.

Other lines of rope stretched from the ceiling. They were in different stages of testing process through which each rope must pass before its last service. The ropes were all new; they are used but once. To each was attached a tag bearing the name and execution date of the next man to die.

After a man is hanged his picture is placed, along with many others, behind a large glass in an adjustable frame. It stands in the Bertillon room. No face seems natural. By, perhaps, some thought transformation which takes place in each brain at the time the picture is taken, each mouth seems puckered as though the rope were quicker than the lens.

It was two minutes to ten.

The room was closed tightly. Not a rift of air entered. We were aware that a man must be pronounced dead before any of us could leave the room. Each one of us looked toward the raised gallows.

The warden and two doctors faced the gallows.

An oppressive silence rolled in waves through the room. The hinges of a door creaked. The doomed man entered. The chaplain preceded him.

His neck was bare. His eyes were wide open, glassy. His mouth sagged, as if too tired to appeal to ears that could not hear. His knees bent. All power of locomotion had gone from his legs. The eyes seemed to see nothing. His arms were strapped to his sides. Under each armpit was the hand of a heavy guard. Their iron arms did not bend. The man was literally carried to the trap. His legs were strapped together. The hood was pulled over his head. He turned slightly, as if to say a word. The rope was adjusted. The chaplain read from his book in a dreadful monotone. I recall the words: "Confide his soul to the mercy of God." The warden's hand raised. The trap sprang with an awful noise. The man's body dropped ten feet. It did not move.

A small stepladder was placed in front of the body. The sometime sentimental doctor stood upon it, ripped the dying man's shirt down to his heart, and applied a stethoscope. A convict, in the rear, held the body firm. An assistant physician held the victim's hand. Every now and then he would feel the pulse. I watched the hand become stiff and turn blue.

Griffith, the comedy actor, had turned his face to the wall. There were tears in his eyes. Waldron gulped. The warden stood, eyeing the slowly dying man. He might have been posing for the tragedy of mankind. He swallowed often. His hands opened and closed.

The minutes dragged, like horribly wounded soldiers, into eternity. A man held a watch near me.

A crash came at six minutes after ten. A two hundred pound railroad detective fainted to the floor. Men scrambled to carry him away. "It had to be a fellow that size," murmured someone. I thought it was Griffith. I smiled grimly. Suddenly, in a far corner, another form crashed to the floor. It was a very large policeman. "Another two-hundred pounder," whispered the same voice. It was now eight minutes after ten.

The doctor listened patiently, even tenderly, with his stethoscope. The warden still watched. Vengeance seemed to have fled temporarily from the hearts of all in the room.

Life was pumped from the powerful chest slowly. It was thirteen minutes after ten before the man was pronounced dead. The rope was cut. The scavenger crew came.

I hurried with Waldron to get a statement from the warden. As if fearful of comment, he eluded the writing craft.

The other reporters had vanished.

"Gosh, I hope they don't double-cross me," was Waldron's comment, as we rushed down the rickety stairs.

A guard yelled, "Hey there, you paddocks." We stopped. "You guys wait for the rest of the gang." When the other men joined us we marched out.

Once released from the curiosity brigade, we dashed into a telephone booth in the front office of the penitentiary. Waldron telephoned his story and my impressions to the Call. Mistrusting our fellow writers, we scooped them by accident.

We found them in the warden's office, busily telephoning their papers. Something else had happened.

The doomed man who in bidding farewell to the warden in the death cell had said to him, "I'll see you again if I'm lucky," had also left him a letter.

The reporters scrambled over the letter. Then two men copied it as another reporter read it aloud over the telephone.

The governor had refused to commute the dead man's sentence on account of his prison record. The letter, scribbled on coarse paper with a soft lead pencil, read:

Many thanks for the kind treatment. I know how you feel, sir, and, believe me, I can sympathize with you - it's your first and I hope your last. I have only a few minutes and I want to say now with my last breath that I had no more to do with De Silve's death than you did.

E. J. Clark

On the margin was scrawled:

This is true, so help me God. Just a few minutes to go.

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