startled soul as to the rightfulness of all his previous hangings. Had he been in the habit of doing innocent men to death for years? Was the law, then, always so painfully fallible? Could it go wrong in all the dignity of its unsullied ermine? Jerry could hang the guilty without one pang of remorse. But to hang the innocent!—he drew himself up; that was altogether a different matter.
Yet what could he do? A petition? Impossible! Never within his memory could Jerry recollect so perfect a unanimity of public opinion in favour of a sentence. A petition was useless. Not a soul would sign it. Everybody was satisfied. Let Ogilvy swing! The very women would have lynched the man if they could have caught him at the first. And now that he was to be hanged, they were heartily glad of it.
Still, there is nothing to spur a man on in a hopeless cause like the feeling that you stand alone and unaided. Jerry Stokes saw all the world was for hanging Ogilvy with the strange and solitary exception of the public hangman: And what did the public hangman's opinion count in such a case? As Jerry Stokes well knew, rather less than nothing.
Day after day wore away, and the papers were full of "the convict Ogilvy." Would he confess, or would he not? that was now the question. Every second night the Toronto papers had a special edition with a "Rumoured Confession of the Napanee Murderer," and every second morning they had a telegram direct from Kingston jail to contradict it. Not a doubt seemed to remain with anybody as to the convict's guilt. But the papers reiterated daily the same familiar phrase, "Ogilvy persists to the end in maintaining his innocence."
Jerry had read these words a hundred times before, about other prisoners, with a gentle smile of cynical incredulity; he read them now with blank amazement and horror at the callousness of a world which could hang an innocent man without appeal or inquiry.
"It cost him dear, that epistle."
Time ran on, and the eve of the execution arrived at last. Something must be done: and Jerry did it. That night he sat long in his room by himself, in the unwonted throes of literary composition. He was writing a letter—a letter of unusual length and surprising earnestness. It cost him dear, that epistle; with his dictionary by his side, he stopped many times to think, and bit his penholder to fibre. But he wrote none the less with fiery indignation, and in a fever of moral zeal that positively astonished himself. Then he copied it out clean on a separate sheet, and folded the letter when done, with a prayer in his heart. It was a prayer for mercy on a condemned criminal—by the public hangman.
After that he stuck a stamp on with trembling fingers, and posted it himself at the main office.
All that night long Jerry lay awake and thought about the execution. As a rule, executions troubled his rest very little. But then, he had never before had to hang an innocent man—at least he hoped not—though his faith in the law had received a severe shock, and he trembled to think now what judicial murders he might have helped in his time unconsciously to consummate.
Next morning early, at the appointed hour, Jerry Stokes presented himself at Kingston jail. The sheriff was there, and the chaplain, and the prisoner. Ogilvy looked at him hard with a shrinking look of horror. Jerry had seen that look, too, a hundred times before, and disregarded it utterly: it was only the natural objection
