NEWS THAT SON IS TO HANG BROKEN TO AGED WOMAN BY HER DAUGHTER AND CAUSES COLLAPSE.
Sitting and staring with a blank look into space, at intervals relieving the tension of her misery by low moans, and then again ejaculating pitifully, "Oh, my boy! My poor, poor boy! Can I live and know that you died upon the gallows?" Mrs. J. A. is now hovering on the borderland of life at the home of her daughter in Denver.
It was not until noon yesterday that Mrs. A. was told that the pardons board had refused to grant her son, N. A., a commutation of sentence from death to life imprisonment. Up to that moment when the terrible knowledge became hers she had a mother's hope that the pardons board must save her boy. From the moment she heard from her daughter's lips that the son and brother must die, Mrs. A. has been verging upon a semi-comatose condition, and under the constant care of a physician.
She was illy prepared to hear the news yesterday, for she had spent the night previous without closing her eyes in sleep. It was not until 5 o'clock that slumber came to her mercifully, and even then she merely slept in a fitful doze until 8 o'clock.
SUPPRESSED EMOTION.
The serious phase of Mrs. A.'s condition, her physician regards, is that with her it is all suppressed emotion. She does not cry out or rave, but endures her intense suffering in quiet. It is but seldom that tears come to her relief, and the only vent her emotion has is in her low moans for her "poor boy."
After the news was broken to her, Mrs. A. spent most of the day in bed. Late last night she was still in the same condition, and the gravest anxiety is felt by her relatives.
Mrs. A. is 70 years old. She lives in Buffalo, N. Y., and made the long trip of 1,500 miles to personally plead with the State Board of Pardons for the life of her son.
TO TEST GALLOWS.
Warden C. will today test the automatic scaffold upon which N. A. and F. A. will be executed next week. He will see that everything about the device is in perfect order and will make a final test just prior to taking the first of the two to his death. The execution house, where the men will be confined until the final summons, is 28x30 feet. It contains three condemned cells and across the hall from these are two large rooms. In the center of one is a large iron plate and on this the condemned is asked to stand after the noose and cap have been adjusted. The weight of the man causes the plate to drop about an inch. This closes the circuit of a current connecting with a bucket of water which stands on a shelf in a closet in an adjoining room. By a magnet arrangement a plug in the bottom of the bucket is pulled and the water begins to flow out. As soon as the vessel is empty an automatic connection releases a catch holding a bag of sand on the end of the noose.
The sand, being heavier than the man, falls, causing the body at the other extremity of the rope to be jerked off the floor to the height of three feet. The sandbag is in the room containing the closet where the bucket is and the rope from the noose reaches that room over a pulley and through a hole in the wall.
The condemned man does not see any of the details of the execution when he enters the death cell. The iron plate in the floor and the noose around his neck are the only parts he can see. He does not hear the dropping of the water nor the working of any of the mechanism.
The instant the man is jerked off his feet and suspended at the end of the rope his neck is broken. The time intervening between the pulling of the plug in the bucket and the falling of the sand is usually about a minute. The suspense to the prisoner, however, is not regarded as any more cruel than that experienced by a man in the electrical chair or on the scaffold while he awaits the fatal current or the springing of the trap.
The hanging apparatus was invented by a convict fifteen years ago.—News, May 20.
As shown by foregoing letters these cases were continued till June 16. Such is the suspense, sorrow of heart and grief through which many are constantly passing in this world, all on account of sin. What are we trying to do to lend a hand of relief?
Such, dear reader, are a few of the many, many cases of this class with which I have had to do in these more than twenty years of ministry to those that are bound. Some were hardened criminals, others innocent of the crime for which they were condemned and others no more guilty than thousands that the world honors. For all, Christ died; and many others beside these I have mentioned have given evidence of saving faith in the blood that is able to cleanse the deepest stain that sin has made.
One case is just as near and dear to my mother heart as another and yet how different in many respects are these condemned men—different in their natural inclinations and unlike because of their different circumstances in life. Among them are found the refined, the educated, the gifted, the beautiful as well as the low, the ignorant, the degraded. All must share the same fate. All are shown in the worst possible light to a gaping, sensation-loving, curious world. Let us, dear reader, take these cases home to our hearts as if they were our very own and so learn to have that charity that suffereth long and is kind. Even Moses and David took life, yet they were forgiven, and Moses who in haste slew the Egyptian, became the prophet so wonderfully used of God because of his meekness of spirit; and David in his thankfulness declared, "This poor man cried and the Lord heard him and delivered him out of all his troubles."