My dread is not from fear of the physical pain of hanging, for, after all, the life of every man and every woman ends in a strangle. It is that these men will lay their hands on me and bind me with a rope and that I may not forbid them. The indignity of it is unbearable. The prison stripes, the handcuffs, the black cap—these are from the devil's wardrobe.
It fills me with mute stupefaction, the mental picture I draw of myself when I am swung out on a rope, a grisly limp nothing of humanity; I who this minute am young and full of sap and sinew. I cannot endure that men should look upon my countenance twisted into an inhuman grimace; on my horribly bulging eyes, and on my tongue hanging out like the purple petal of the wild flag. It is not decent so to mutilate a man.
And when they have thus distorted my face, then will they blot out its hideousness with quick-lime like one would rub an ugly picture off a slate.
This malign system of burying murderers in lime, and refusing the body to friends, doubtless has its origin in the Roman custom whereby the remains of the Christians were burned to ashes and cast into the river so that not a vestige would remain. The Romans thought in this way they would deprive their victims of all hope of the resurrection.
The guard keeps a light burning at night that he may watch me the better. It is his duty to deliver me alive to the executioner. If I were so minded, I could sever the radial arteries in my wrists with my teeth and he would not know. This is why I laugh out loud and will not tell why I laugh.
The wind blows bleak across the prairies and the brittle snow-flakes that beat on the glass outside the iron-bars have a sound like the whirr of swords. I wish the wind would blow always, for it lays a salve on my soul.
On the third day.
My muscles ache for use in this two-by-nothing cell, and, now and then, a close-shut but invisible fist hits me under the heart so that I feel I must fall from numbness. It is stupid and super-brutal to refuse me space wherein to walk. To-day, I went through some gymnastic exercises and forgot long enough to hum an air that Margaret and I danced to at the military-ball at Edmonton less than a year ago. I am not sure of the words, but they concern "an old grey bonnet with a blue-ribbon on it."
My God! but I have been a bungler at living. I have wagered with life and lost. I know it while I wait here to pay the reckoning and the knowledge confounds me.