Rolling Stones | Page 7

and
everything goes smooth as silk."
They stepped into the corridor, and each one of the doomed seven knew.
Limbo Lane is a world on the outside of the world; but it had learned,
when deprived of one or more of the five senses, to make another sense
supply the deficiency. Each one knew that it was nearly eight, and that
Murray was to go to the chair at eight. There is also in the many Limbo
Lanes an aristocracy of crime. The man who kills in the open, who
beats his enemy or pursuer down, flushed by the primitive emotions
and the ardor of combat, holds in contempt the human rat, the spider,
and the snake.
So, of the seven condemned only three called their farewells to Murray
as he marched down the corridor between the two guards--Bonifacio,
Marvin, who had killed a guard while trying to escape from the prison,
and Bassett, the train-robber, who was driven to it because the
express-messenger wouldn't raise his hands when ordered to do so. The
remaining four smoldered, silent, in their cells, no doubt feeling their
social ostracism in Limbo Lane society more keenly than they did the

memory of their less picturesque offences against the law.
Murray wondered at his own calmness and nearly indifference. In the
execution room were about twenty men, a congregation made up of
prison officers, newspaper reporters, and lookers-on who had
succeeded
Here, in the very middle of a sentence, the hand of Death interrupted
the telling of O. Henry's last story. He had planned to make this story
different from his others, the beginning of a new series in a style he had
not previously attempted. "I want to show the public," he said, "that I
can write something new--new for me, I mean--a story without slang, a
straightforward dramatic plot treated in a way that will come nearer my
idea of real story-writing." Before starting to write the present story, he
outlined briefly how he intended to develop it: Murray, the criminal
accused and convicted of the brutal murder of his sweetheart--a murder
prompted by jealous rage--at first faces the death penalty, calm, and, to
all outward appearances, indifferent to his fate. As he nears the electric
chair he is overcome by a revulsion of feeling. He is left dazed,
stupefied, stunned. The entire scene in the death-chamber--the
witnesses, the spectators, the preparations for execution--become unreal
to him. The thought flashes through his brain that a terrible mistake is
being made. Why is he being strapped to the chair? What has he done?
What crime has he committed? In the few moments while the straps are
being adjusted a vision comes to him. He dreams a dream. He sees a
little country cottage, bright, sun-lit, nestling in a bower of flowers. A
woman is there, and a little child. He speaks with them and finds that
they are his wife, his child--and the cottage their home. So, after all, it
is a mistake. Some one has frightfully, irretrievably blundered. The
accusation, the trial, the conviction, the sentence to death in the electric
chair--all a dream. He takes his wife in his arms and kisses the child.
Yes, here is happiness. It was a dream. Then--at a sign from the prison
warden the fatal current is turned on.
Murray had dreamed the wrong dream.

A RULER of MEN
[Written at the prime of his popularity and power, this characteristic
and amusing story was published in Everybody's Magazine in August,
1906.]
I walked the streets of the City of Insolence, thirsting for the sight of a
stranger face. For the City is a desert of familiar types as thick and alike
as the grains in a sand-storm; and you grow to hate them as you do a
friend who is always by you, or one of your own kin.
And my desire was granted, for I saw near a corner of Broadway and
Twenty-ninth Street, a little flaxen-haired man with a face like a
scaly-bark hickory-nut, selling to a fast-gathering crowd a tool that
omnigeneously proclaimed itself a can-opener, a screw-driver, a
button-hook, a nail-file, a shoe-horn, a watch-guard, a potato-peeler;
and an ornament to any gentleman's key-ring.
And then a stall-fed cop shoved himself through the congregation of
customers. The vender, plainly used to having his seasons of trade thus
abruptly curtailed, closed his satchel and slipped like a weasel through
the opposite segment of the circle. The crowd scurried aimlessly away
like ants from a disturbed crumb. The cop, suddenly becoming
oblivious of the earth and its inhabitants, stood still, swelling his bulk
and putting his club through an intricate drill of twirls. I hurried after
Kansas Bill Bowers, and caught him by an arm.
Without his looking at me or slowing his pace, I