under that deadly pressure. The cold sweat stood in
clammy clusters upon his forehead; his head thrown back, the eyes
turned toward the ceiling no longer pleaded into mine. I sickened
almost at sight of the tongue swelling black, which seemed to consume
all the fleeing color from lips and face. Oh God, how he struggled!
His hands closed over mine as bars of steel to tear them from his
throat.

Even in our mortal strife I marked the eternal harmony of the scene.
Truly death had never stage more fitting whereon to play its last stern
drama of dissolution. Hemmed in by four massive walls of granite,
ghastly grim and desolately gray, we wrestled in a stifling stillness,
while hell stood umpire at the game. No sound of trumpet, no warlike
cry, no strains of martial music were there to thrill the nerves and
taunt men on to glory. We fought to the scrape and scratch of
shuffling feet, the labored gasp, the rattle in the throat, while echo
hushed in silence and in fright.

He grew more quiet, his muscles stiffened and relaxed--he was no longer
conscious. A few more convulsive quivers, as a serpent might writhe
and jerk, then he hung, a limp dead thing, in my hands. My
outstretched arms seemed made as a gibbet, feeling no fatigue, so
lightly did they sustain him. Cords of brass could be no more tense
than mine; his weight was as nothing. Softly I eased him down, and
composed his limbs in decent order upon the stones.

Then I rose, and gazed complacently at my work. Yes, it _was_ well
done, excellently done, in fact. The most expert strangler of the
Choctows could have done no better. Those purpling lines about the
throat, those darker clots where my thumbs had left their signs, could
not have been more intelligently placed. I smiled my satisfaction at
the job, then--then--my own overstrung nerves gave way, and I fell
unconscious across the corpse of my hands' creation.

When I came to myself I was weeping, weeping as a child might weep,
over the dead, distorted face of him I had loved. How long this lasted
I had no means of knowing. Uncompromising necessity forced me to
action; forbade me time to dream.

The body being in my way where it lay--for I proposed now to work in
earnest at the window--I moved it tenderly as possible across the floor
and stretched him out near the door sill. Springing up then I attacked
the bars at the window. Hours and hours I labored, impelled to greater
effort by the dread of