"But first I'm going to ask you a few questions. Your answers won't signify much one way or the other, but I'm curious. Why did you make such a fight—just to live? It must have been a devil of a game."
Farwell leaned against the table and so came nearer to his inquisitor.
"It was," he said quietly, "and I wonder if you can understand why it is that I'm glad to tell—even you about it? I don't expect sympathy, pity, or—even justice, but when a man's been on a desert isle for years it's a relief to speak his own tongue again to any one who can comprehend and who will listen."
"I'm prepared to listen," Ledyard muttered, and shrugged his heavy shoulders; "it will pass the time."
"After the thing was done," Farwell plunged in, "the thing I—had to do—I was dazed; I couldn't think clear. I'd been driven by drink and—and other things into a state bordering on delirium. Afterward, when they had me and I was forced to live normally, simply, I began to think clearly and suffer. God! how I suffered! I faced death with the horror that only an intelligent person can know. I saw no escape. The trial, the verdict, brought me closer and closer to the hideous reality. At first I thought it could not happen to me—to me! But it could! I sat day in and day out, looking at the electric chair! That was all I could see: it stood like a symbol of all the torture. I wondered how I would approach it. Would I falter, or go as most poor devils do—steadily? I saw myself—afterward—all that was left of me to give back to the world. Oh! I suffered, I suffered!"
The white, haggard face held Ledyard's fascinated gaze, but drew no word from him.
Farwell loosened the neck of his shirt—he was stifling, yet feeling relief as the past dreams of his lonely life formed themselves into words.
"At night I was haunted by visions," the low, vibrant voice rushed on. "It was worse at night when semi-unconsciousness made me helpless. I'd wake up yelling, not with fright, but pain, actual pain—the hot, knifing pain of an electric current trying to find my heart and brain.
"Then they said I was mad. Well, so I was; and the fight was on! At first there was a gleam—the chair faded from sight. If I lived—there was hope; but I was mistaken. You know the rest. The legal struggle, the escapes and captures. One friend and much money did what they could; it wasn't much.
"You've seen a cat play with a mouse? The mouse always runs, doesn't it? Well, so did I, though I didn't know where in God's world I was running, nor to what."