A Five-minute Story
The Gallows
By I. W. D. PETERS
TOMORROW morning, at sunrise, I am to hang for the murder of a man.
At sunrise on the ninth of June, the anniversary of my wedding day, I am to be hanged by the neck until I am dead.
I am glad this state has not yet adopted the use of electricity in executions. I prefer to spend my last moments out in the open under the sky.
The building of the gallows is finished; the workmen are gone, and it seems that the execution at sunrise is certain to take place; but every step along the corridor sends my heart into my mouth. Gladys is working for a reprieve. I am praying she will not succeed.
The Governor is off on a fishing trip, away from railroad and telegraph. If they do not locate him in the next few hours I shall be hanged. God grant they fail to find him!
It is Glady's will against mine. She usually wins, but every passing minute lessens her chance to have her way in this. It is now ten minutes to midnight. Dr. Brander, the prison chaplain, has just left me, gratified, poor fellow, that he has succeeded in reconciling me to my fate. If he had known that the tall skeleton of wood outside, with its lank line of rope, was in my mind a refuge, he would have turned from me in horror.
The next five hours will be the longest of my life. Every step in the corridor strikes fear to my heart. It is not because I am guilty of the crime, for which I was sentenced, that I am glad to die. I am guilty, but that doesn't mean that I deserve to die.
I am going to hang tomorrow at sunrise because I want to be hung!
I could have saved myself, but refused to do so, solely because life had lost its savor, a great wave of disgust with living possessed and still possesses me. I am writing these words now that Gladys may know the truth. She has tried to see me, ever since I was brought here, and I have refused to be seen. That is one right a condemned man has—to refuse to see visitors.
FROM the day we were married, Gladys demanded to know my every thought, my every act every hour of the day.
If every one of them was not concerned with her she criticised, condemned or cried. She resented, in bitterly-spoken words and equally bitter acts, the small recesses of my soul that I, for the sake of my own self-respect, kept to myself.
Finally she determined to show me that there were other men who appreciated her, if I did not. For a while, after that, all hours of the day and evening my home was infested with lounge lizards. I endured it without a word, which infuriated her.
Lester Caine, a young fellow, honest and simple, was her first victim. The first time I found him seated close beside her on the dimly lit porch I wel-
