urrent, and kicked the charred door-sheathing,
already fading from incandescence into ashen ruin, with his foot. The
smell of burning leather filled the room, and he laughed a little,
turning on the woman a face crowned with a look of Belial-like triumph,
with dark and sunken circles about the vindictive, deep-set eyes.

Once, in an evening paper, she had pored over the picture of an
electrocution at Sing Sing, a haunting and horrible scene, with the
dangling wires reaching down to the prisoner, strapped and bound in his
chair, the applied sponges at the base of the spine, the buckled thongs
about the helpless ankles, the grim and waiting gaol officials, the
boyish-looking reporters, with watches in their hands, the bald and
ugly chamber, and in the background the dim figure of Retributive
Justice, with uplifted arm, where an implacable finger was about to
touch the fatal button. Time and time again that vision had brought
terror to her midnight dreams, and had left her weak and panting,
catching at her startled husband with feverish and passionate hands and
holding him and drawing him close to her, as though that momentary
guardianship could protect him from some far and undefined danger.

"Oh, Mack," she burst out hysterically, over-wrought by the scene
before her, "for the love of God, don't make him die this way! Give
him a fighting chance! Give him a show! Do what you like with _me_,
but don't blot him out, like a dog, without a word of warning!"

"It's not my doin'!" broke in her tormentor.

"It's inhuman--it's fiendish!" she went on. "I can't stand the thought
of it!"

MacNutt laughed his mirthless laugh once more.

"Oh, I guess you'll stand it!"

"But I can't!" she moaned.

"Oh, yes; you'll stand it, and you'll see it, too! You'll be right
here, where you can take the whole show in, this time! It won't be a
case o' foolin' the old man, like it was last time!"

"I will be here?" she gasped.

"You'll be right on the spot--and you'll see the whole performance!"

She drew her hands down, shudderingly, over her averted face, as though
to shut something even from her imagination.

"And do you know what'll be the end of it all?" MacNutt went on, in his
frenzied mockery. "It'll all end in a little paragraph or two in the
_Morning Journal_, to the effect that some unknown safecracksman or
other accidentally came in contact with a live wire, and was shocked to
death in the very act of breaking into