“Where to?” the driver asked, as he took his seat on top the load.

“To the jail, they’re going to fence the yard.”

“You mean young John North?”

“That’s what,—­did you think you’d get a day off and take the old woman and the kids?” asked Mitchell.

It was a little past eight when the teamster entered the alley back of the jail and began to unload.  The fall of the first heavy plank took John North to his cell window.  For a long breathless moment he stood there peering down into the alley, then he turned away.

All that day the teams from Kirby’s continued to bring lumber for the fence, and at intervals North heard the thud of the heavy planks as they were thrown from the wagons, or the voices of the drivers as they urged their horses up the steep grade from the street.  Darkness came at last and with it unbroken quiet, but in his troubled slumbers that night the condemned man saw the teams come and go, and heard the fall of the planks.  It was only when the dawn’s first uncertain light stole into the cell that a dreamless sleep gave him complete forgetfulness.

From this he was presently roused by hearing the sound of voices in the yard, and then the sharp ringing blows of a hammer.  He quitted his bed and slipped to the window; two carpenters had already begun building the frame work that was to carry the temporary fence which would inclose the place of execution.  It was his fence; it would surround his gallows that his death should not become a public spectacle.

As they went about their task, the two carpenters stole covert glances up in the direction of his window, but North stood well back in the gloom of his cell and was unseen.  Horror could add nothing to the prison pallor, which had driven every particle of color from his cheeks.  Out of these commonplace details was to come the final tragedy.  Those men in faded overalls were preparing for his death,—­a limit had been fixed to the very hours that he might live.  On the morning of the tenth of June he would see earth and sky from that window for the last time!

Chance passers-by with no very urgent affairs of their own on hand, drifted up from the street, and soon a little group had assembled in the alley to watch the two carpenters at their work, or to stare up at North’s strongly barred window.  Now and again a man would point out this window to some new-corner not so well informed as himself.

Whenever North looked down into the alley that morning, there was the human grouping with its changing personnel.  Men sprawled on the piles of boards, or lounged about the yard, while the murmur of their idle talk reached him in his cell.  The visible excuse which served to bring them there was commonplace enough, but it was invested with the interest of a coming tragedy, and North’s own thoughts went forward to the time when the fence should be finished, when somewhere within the space it inclosed would stand his gallows.