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By Root 395 0

postcard on the patient's bedside table, the rebuffed visitor departed. That night Perry looked at the card. It was addressed to the warden, and postmarked Blue Lake, California; the message, written in a familiar stubby script, said: "Dear Sir, I understand you have my boy Perry back in custody. Write me please what did he do wrong and if I come there could I see him. Alls well with me and trust the same with you. Tex J. Smith." Perry destroyed the card, but his mind preserved it, for the few crude words had resurrected him emotionally, revived love and hate, and reminded him that he was still what he had tried not to be - alive. "And I just decided," he later informed a friend, "that I ought to stay that way. Anybody wanted my life wasn't going to get any more help from me. They'd have to fight for it." The next morning he asked for a glass of milk, the first sustenance he had volunteered to accept in fourteen weeks. Gradually, on a diet of eggnogs and orange juice, he regained weight; by October the prison physician, Dr. Robert Moore, considered him strong enough to be returned to the Row. When he arrived there, Dick laughed and said, "Welcome home, honey."

Two years passed. The departures of Wilson and Spencer left Smith and Hickock and Andrews alone with the Row's burning lights and veiled windows. The privileges granted ordinary prisoners were denied them; no radios or card games, not even an exercise period - indeed, they were never allowed out of their cells, except each Saturday when they were taken to a shower room, then given a once weekly change of clothing; the only other occasions for momentary release were the far between visits of lawyers or relatives. Mrs. Hickock came once a month; her husband had died, she had lost the farm, and, as she told Dick, lived now with one relative, now another. It seemed to Perry as though he existed "deep underwater" - perhaps because the Row usually was as gray and quiet as ocean depths, soundless except for snores, coughs, the whisper of slippered feet, the feathery racket of the pigeons nesting in the prison walls. But not always. "Sometimes," Dick wrote in a letter to his mother, "you can't hear yourself think. They throw men in the cells downstairs, what they call the hole, and plenty of them are fighting mad and crazy to boot. Curse and scream the whole time. It's intolerable, so everybody starts yelling shut up. I wish you'd send me earplugs. Only they wouldn't allow me to have them. No rest for the wicked, I guess." The little building had been standing for more than a century, and seasonal changes provoked different symptoms of its antiquity: winter cold saturated the stone-and-iron fixtures, and in summer, when temperatures often hurtled over the hundred mark, the old cells were malodorous cauldrons. "So hot my skin stings," Dick wrote in a letter dated July 5, 1961. "I try not to move much. I just sit on the floor. My bed's too sweaty to lie down, and the smell makes me sick because of only the one bath a week and always wearing the same clothes. No ventilation whatever and the light bulbs make everything hotter. Bugs keep bumping on the walls." Unlike conventional prisoners, the condemned are not subjected to a work routine; they can do with their time what they like - sleep all day, as Perry frequently did ("I pretend I'm a tiny little baby that can't keep its eyes open"); or, as was Andrews' habit, read all night. Andrews averaged fifteen to twenty books a week; his taste encompassed both trash and belle-lettres, and he liked poetry, Robert Frost's particularly, but he also admired Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and the comic poems of Ogden Nash. Though the quenchless quality of his literary thirst had soon depleted the shelves of the prison library, the prison chaplain and others sympathetic to Andrews kept him supplied with parcels from the Kansas City public library. Dick was rather a bookworm, too; but his interest was restricted to two themes - sex, as represented in the novels of Harold Robbins and Irving Wallace (Perry, after being lent one of these by Dick,