The cell-dwellers heard the familiar, loud click of the steel bolts as the door at the end of the corridor was opened.  Three men came to Murray’s cell and unlocked it.  Two were prison guards; the other was “Len”—­no; that was in the old days; now the Reverend Leonard Winston, a friend and neighbor from their barefoot days.

“I got them to let me take the prison chaplain’s place,” he said, as he gave Murray’s hand one short, strong grip.  In his left hand he held a small Bible, with his forefinger marking a page.

Murray smiled slightly and arranged two or three books and some penholders orderly on his small table.  He would have spoken, but no appropriate words seemed to present themselves to his mind.

The prisoners had christened this cellhouse, eighty feet long, twenty-eight feet wide, Limbo Lane.  The regular guard of Limbo Lane, an immense, rough, kindly man, drew a pint bottle of whiskey from his pocket and offered it to Murray, saying: 

“It’s the regular thing, you know.  All has it who feel like they need a bracer.  No danger of it becoming a habit with ’em, you see.”

Murray drank deep into the bottle.

“That’s the boy!” said the guard.  “Just a little nerve tonic, 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

* * * * * *