“I shall want to see the Elmores, or at least some one who represents them, as well as the district attorney up there who conducted the case.  But now that I am here, I wonder if it is possible that I could bring any influence to bear to see your husband?”

Mrs. Godwin sighed.

“Once a month,” she replied, “I leave this window, walk to the prison, where the warden is very kind to me, and then I can see Sanford.  Of course there are bars between us besides the regular screen.  But I can have an hour’s talk, and in those talks he has described to me exactly every detail of his life in the—­the prison.  We have even agreed on certain hours when we think of each other.  In those hours I know almost what he is thinking.”  She paused to collect herself.  “Perhaps there may be some way if I plead with the warden.  Perhaps—­you may be considered his counsel now—­you may see him.”

A half hour later we sat in the big registry room of the prison and talked with the big-hearted, big-handed warden.  Every argument that Kennedy could summon was brought to bear.  He even talked over long distance with the lawyers in New York.  At last the rules were relaxed and Kennedy was admitted on some technicality as counsel.  Counsel can see the condemned as often as necessary.

We were conducted down a flight of steps and past huge steel-barred doors, along corridors and through the regular prison until at last we were in what the prison officials called the section for the condemned.  Every one else calls this secret heart of the grim place, the death house.

It is made up of two rows of cells, some eighteen or twenty in all, a little more modern in construction than the twelve hundred archaic caverns that pass for cells in the main prison.

At each end of the corridor sat a guard, armed, with eyes never off the rows of cells day or night.

In the wall, on one side, was a door—­the little green door—­the door from the death house to the death chamber.

While Kennedy was talking to the prisoner, a guard volunteered to show me the death chamber and the “chair.”  No other furniture was there in the little brick house of one room except this awful chair, of yellow oak with broad, leather straps.  There it stood, the sole article in the brightly varnished room of about twenty-five feet square with walls of clean blue, this grim acolyte of modern scientific death.  There were the wet electrodes that are fastened to the legs through slits in the trousers at the calves; above was the pipe-like fixture, like a gruesome helmet of leather that fits over the head, carrying the other electrode.

Back of the condemned was the switch which lets loose a lethal store of energy, and back of that the prison morgue where the bodies are taken.  I looked about.  In the wall to the left toward the death house was also a door, on this side yellow.  Somehow I could not get from my mind the fascination of that door—­the threshold of the grave.