I am Darrell Standing. I was caught redhanded. Now the right and the wrong of this affair with Professor Haskell I shall not discuss. It was purely a private matter. The point is, that in a surge of anger, obsessed by that catastrophic red wrath that has cursed me down the ages, I killed my fellow professor. The court records show that I did; and, for once, I agree with the court records.
No; I am not to be hanged for his murder. I received a lifesentence for my punishment. I was thirtysix years of age at the time. I am now fortyfour years old. I have spent the eight intervening years in the California State Prison of San Quentin. Five of these years I spent in the dark. Solitary confinement, they call it. Men who endure it, call it living death. But through these five years of deathinlife I managed to attain freedom such as few men have ever known. Closestconfined of prisoners, not only did I range the world, but I ranged time. They who immured me for petty years gave to me, all unwittingly, the largess of centuries. Truly, thanks to Ed Morrell, 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 I scarce know how to begin.
Well, a beginning. I was born on a quartersection in Minnesota. My mother was the daughter of an immigrant Swede. Her name was Hilda Tonnesson. My father was Chauncey Standing, of old American stock. He traced back to Alfred Standing, an indentured servant, or slave if you please, who was transported from England to the Virginia plantations in the days that were even old when the youthful Washington went asurveying in the Pennsylvania wilderness.
A son of Alfred Standing fought in the War of the Revolution; a grandson, in the War of 1812. There have been no wars since in which the Standings have not been represented. I, the last of the Standings, dying soon without issue, fought as a common soldier in the Philippines, in our latest war, and to do so I resigned, in the full early ripeness of career, my professorship in the University of Nebraska. Good heavens, when I so resigned I was headed for the Deanship of the College of Agriculture in that universityI, the starrover, the redblooded adventurer, the vagabondish Cain of the centuries, the militant priest of remotest times, the moondreaming poet of ages forgotten and today unrecorded in man's history of man!
And here I am, my hands dyed red in Murderers' Row, in the State Prison of Folsom, awaiting the day decreed by the machinery of state when the servants of the state will lead me away into what they fondly believe is the darkthe dark they fear; the dark that gives them fearsome and superstitious fancies; the dark that drives them, drivelling and yammering, to the altars of their fearcreated, anthropomorphic gods.
No; I shall never be Dean of any college of agriculture. And yet 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. It was my genius. I can pick the highpercentage butterfat cow with my eye and let the Babcock Tester prove the wisdom of my eye. I can look, not at land, but at landscape, and pronounce the virtues and the shortcomings of the soil. Litmus paper is not necessary when I determine a soil to be acid or alkali. I repeat, farmhusbandry, in its highest scientific terms, was my genius, and is my genius. And yet the state, which includes all the citizens of the state, believes that it can blot out this wisdom of mine in the final dark by means of a rope about my neck and the abruptive jerk of gravitationthis wisdom of mine that was incubated through the millenniums, and that was wellhatched ere the farmed fields of Troy were ever pastured by the flocks of nomad shepherds!
Corn? Who else knows corn? There is my demonstration at Wistar, whereby I increased the annual cornyield of every county in Iowa by half a million dollars. This is history. Many a farmer, riding in his motor car today, knows who made possible that motorcar. Many a sweetbosomed girl and brightbrowed boy, poring over highschool textbooks, little dreams that I made that higher education possible by my corn demonstration at Wistar.
And farm management! I know the waste of superfluous motion without studying a moving picture record of it, whether it be farm or farmhand, the layout of buildings or the layout of the farmhands' labour. There is my handbook and tables on the subject. Beyond the shadow of any doubt, at this present moment, a hundred thousand farmers are knotting their brows over its spread pages ere they tap out their final pipe and go to bed. And yet, so far was I beyond my tables, that all I needed was a mere look at a man to know his predispositions, his coordinations, and the index fraction of his motionwastage.
And here I must close this first chapter of my narrative. It is nine o'clock, and in Murderers' Row that means lights out. Even now, I hear the soft tread of the gumshoed guard as he comes to censure me for my coaloil lamp still burning. As if the mere living could censure the doomed to die!