I, Darrell Standing, was so strongly disinclined to die that I refused to let Warden Atherton and Captain Jamie kill me.

I was always so innately urged to live that sometimes I think that is why I am still here, eating and sleeping, thinking and dreaming, writing this narrative of my various me's, and awaiting the incontestable rope that will put an ephemeral period in my long-linked existence.
And then came death in life.

I learned the trick, Ed Morrell taught it me, as you shall see.

It began through Warden Atherton and Captain Jamie.

They must have experienced a recrudescence of panic at thought of the dynamite they believed hidden.