welve times the clerk of the court, calling each man by name, asked
this question, and one by one the jurors stood up and answered:

"I do."

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

THE LAST APPEAL

One raw morning late in April, Mark Leanard, who worked at Kirby's
lumber-yard, drove his team of big grade Percherons up to Kirby's office
by the railroad tracks.

"What's doing?" he asked of Kirby's clerk.

The clerk handed him a slip of paper.

"Go round and tell Mitchell to get you out this load!" he said.

Leanard went off whistling, with the order slip tucked back of his
hatband. In the yard, Mitchell the foreman, gave him a load "of
sixteen-foot" pine boards and "two by fours".

"Where to?" the driver asked, as he took his seat on top the load.

"To the jail, they're going to fence the yard."

"You mean young John North?"

"That's what,--did you think you'd get a day off and take the old woman
and the kids?" asked Mitchell.

It was a little past eight when the teamster entered the alley back of
the jail and began to unload. The fall of the first heavy plank took
John North to his cell window. For a long breathless moment he stood
there peering down into the alley, then he turned away.

All that day the teams from Kirby's continued to bring lumber for the
fence, and at intervals North heard the thud of the heavy planks as they
were thrown from the wagons, or the voices of the drivers as they urged
their horses up the steep grade from the street. Darkness came at last
and with it unbroken quiet, but in his troubled slumbers that night the
condemned man saw the teams come and go, and heard the fall of the
planks. It was only when the dawn's first uncertain light stole into the
cell that a dreamless sleep gave him complete forgetfulness.

From this he was presently roused by hearing the sound of voices in the
yard, and then the sharp ringing blows of a hammer. He quitted his bed
and slipped to the window; two carpenters had already begun building the
frame work that was to carry the temporary fence which would inclose the
place of execution. It was _his_ fence; it would surround his gallows
that his death should not become a public spectacle.

As they went about their task, the two carpenters stole covert glances
up in the direction of his window, but North stood well back in the
gloom of his cell and was unseen. Horror could add nothing to the prison
pallor, which had driven every particle of color from his chee