was a man beyond
the pale of human pity. He had deserved a dozen deaths, and the Los
Amigos folk grudged him so gaudy a one as that. He seemed to feel
himself to be unworthy of it, for he made two frenzied attempts at
escape. He was a powerful, muscular man, with a lion head, tangled
black locks, and a sweeping beard which covered his broad chest. When
he was tried, there was no finer head in all the crowded court. It's
no new thing to find the best face looking from the dock. But his good
looks could not balance his bad deeds. His advocate did all he knew,
but the cards lay against him, and Duncan Warner was handed over to the
mercy of the big Los Amigos dynamos.

I was there at the committee meeting when the matter was discussed.
The town council had chosen four experts to look after the
arrangements. Three of them were admirable. There was Joseph
M'Conner, the very man who had designed the dynamos, and there was
Joshua Westmacott, the chairman of the Los Amigos Electrical Supply
Company, Limited. Then there was myself as the chief medical man, and
lastly an old German of the name of Peter Stulpnagel. The Germans were
a strong body at Los Amigos, and they all voted for their man. That
was how he got on the committee. It was said that he had been a
wonderful electrician at home, and he was eternally working with wires
and insulators and Leyden jars; but, as he never seemed to get any
further, or to have any results worth publishing he came at last to be
regarded as a harmless crank, who had made science his hobby. We three
practical men smiled when we heard that he had been elected as our
colleague, and at the meeting we fixed it all up very nicely among
ourselves without much thought of the old fellow who sat with his ears
scooped forward in his hands, for he was a trifle hard of hearing,
taking no more part in the proceedings than the gentlemen of the press
who scribbled their notes on the back benches.

We did not take long to settle it all. In New York a strength of some
two thousand volts had been used, and death had not been instantaneous.
Evidently their shock had been too weak. Los Amigos should not fall
into that error. The charge should be six times greater, and
therefore, of course, it would be six times more effective. Nothing
could possibly be more logical. The whole concentrated force of the
great dynamos should be employed on Duncan Warner.

So we three settled it, and had already