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.

[Illustration:  The “Hill City Quartet,” to which O. Henry belonged as a young man in Austin]

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.