THE DEATH HOUSE

In the early forenoon, we were on our way by train "up the river" to Sing Sing, where, at the station, a line of old-fashioned cabs and red-faced cabbies greeted us, for the town itself is hilly.

The house to which we had been directed was on the hill, and from its windows one could look down on the barracks-like pile of stone with the evil little black-barred slits of windows, below and perhaps a quarter of a mile away.

There was no need to be told what it was. Its very atmosphere breathed the word "prison." Even the ugly clutter of tall-chimneyed workshops did not destroy it. Every stone, every grill, every glint of a sentry's rifle spelt "prison."

Mrs. G.o.dwin was a pale, slight little woman, in whose face shone an indomitable spirit, unconquered even by the slow torture of her lonely vigil. Except for such few hours that she had to engage in her simple household duties, with now and then a short walk in the country, she was always watching that bleak stone house of atonement.

Yet, though her spirit was unconquered, it needed no physician to tell one that the dimming of the lights at the prison on the morning set for the execution would fill two graves instead of one. For she had come to know that this sudden dimming of the corridor lights, and then their almost as sudden flaring-up, had a terrible meaning, well known to the men inside. Hers was no less an agony than that of the men in the curtained cells, since she had learned that when the lights grow dim at dawn at Sing Sing, it means that the electric power has been borrowed for just that little while to send a body straining against the straps of the electric chair, snuffing out the life of a man.

To-day she had evidently been watching in both directions, watching eagerly the carriages as they climbed the hill, as well as in the direction of the prison.

"How can I ever thank you, Professor Kennedy," she greeted us at the door, keeping back with difficulty the tears that showed how much it meant to have any one interest himself in her husband's case.

There was that gentleness about Mrs. G.o.dwin that comes only to those who have suffered much.

"It has been a long fight," she began, as we talked in her modest little sitting-room, into which the sun streamed brightly with no thought of the cold shadows in the grim building below. "Oh, and such a hard, heartbreaking fight! Often it seems as if we had exhausted every means at our disposal, and yet we shall never give up. Why cannot we make the world see our case as we see it? Everything seems to have conspired against us--and yet I cannot, I will not believe that the law and the science that have condemned him are the last words in law and science."

"You said in your letter that the courts were so slow and the lawyers so--"

"Yes, so cold, so technical. They do not seem to realise that a human life is at stake. With them it is almost like a game in which we are the p.a.w.ns. And sometimes I fear, in spite of what the lawyers say, that without some new evidence, it--it will go hard with him."

"You have not given up hope in the appeal?" asked Kennedy gently.

"It is merely on technicalities of the law," she replied with quiet fort.i.tude, "that is, as nearly as I can make out from the language of the papers. Our lawyer is Salo Kahn, of the big firm of criminal lawyers, Smith, Kahn."

"Conine," mused Kennedy, half to himself. I could not tell whether he was thinking of what he repeated or of the little woman.

"Yes, the active principle of hemlock," she went on. "That was what the experts discovered, they swore. In the pure state, I believe, it is more poisonous than anything except the cyanides. And it was absolutely scientific evidence. They repeated the tests in court. There was no doubt of it. But, oh, he did not do it. Some one else did it. He did not--he could not."

Kennedy said nothing for a few minutes, but from his tone when he did speak it was evident that he was deeply touched.

"Since our marriage we lived with old Mr. G.o.dwin in the historic G.o.dwin House at East Point," she resumed, as he renewed his questioning.

"Sanford--that was my husband's real last name until he came as a boy to work for Mr. G.o.dwin in the office of the factory and was adopted by his employer--Sanford and I kept house for him.

"About a year ago he began to grow feeble and seldom went to the factory, which Sanford managed for him. One night Mr. G.o.dwin was taken suddenly ill. I don't know how long he had been ill before we heard him groaning, but he died almost before we could summon a doctor. There was really nothing suspicious about it, but there had always been a great deal of jealousy of my husband in the town and especially among the few distant relatives of Mr. G.o.dwin. What must have started as an idle, gossipy rumour developed into a serious charge that my husband had hastened his old guardian's death.

"The original will--THE will, I call it--had been placed in the safe of the factory several years ago. But when the gossip in the town grew bitter, one day when we were out, some private detectives entered the house with a warrant--and they did actually find a will, another will about which we knew nothing, dated later than the first and hidden with some papers in the back of a closet, or sort of fire proof box, built into the wall of the library. The second will was identical with the first in language except that its terms were reversed and instead of being the residuary legatee, Sanford was given a comparatively small annuity, and the Elmores were made residuary legatees instead of annuitants."

"And who are these Elmores?" asked Kennedy curiously.

"There are three, two grandnephews and a grandniece, Bradford, Lambert, and their sister Miriam."

"And they live--"

"In East Point, also. Old Mr. G.o.dwin was not very friendly with his sister, whose grandchildren they were. They were the only other heirs living, and although Sanford never had anything to do with it, I think they always imagined that he tried to prejudice the old man against them."

"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. G.o.dwin 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 pa.s.s 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.

Meanwhile Kennedy sat in the little cage and talked with the convicted man across the three-foot distance between cell and screen. I did not see him at that time, but Kennedy repeated afterward what pa.s.sed, and it so impressed me that I will set it down as if I had been present.

Sanford G.o.dwin was a tall, ashen-faced man, in the prison pallor of whose face was written the determination of despair, a man in whose blue eyes was a queer, half-insane light of hope. One knew that if it had not been for the little woman at the window at the top of the hill, the hope would probably long ago have faded. But this man knew she was always there, thinking, watching, eagerly planning in aid of any new scheme in the long fight for freedom.

"The alkaloid was present, that is certain," he told Kennedy. "My wife has told you that. It was scientifically proved. There is no use in attacking that."

Later on he remarked: "Perhaps you think it strange that one in the very shadow of the death chair"--the word stuck in his throat--"can talk so impersonally of his own case. Sometimes I think it is not my case, but some one else's. And then--that door."

He shuddered and turned away from it. On one side was life, such as it was; on the other, instant death. No wonder he pleaded with Kennedy.

"Why, Walter," exclaimed Craig, as we walked back to the warden's office to telephone to town for a car to take us up to East Point, "whenever he looks out of that cage he sees it. He may close his eyes--and still see it. When he exercises, he sees it. Thinking by day and dreaming by night, it is always there. Think of the terrible hours that man must pa.s.s, knowing of the little woman eating her heart out.

Is he really guilty? I must find out. If he is not, I never saw a greater tragedy than this slow, remorseless approach of death, in that daily, hourly shadow of the little green door."

East Point was a queer old town on the upper Hudson, with a varying a.s.sortment of industries. Just outside, the old house of the G.o.dwins stood on a bluff overlooking the majestic river. Kennedy had wanted to see it before any one suspected his mission, and a note from Mrs.

G.o.dwin to a friend had been sufficient.

Carefully he went over the deserted and now half-wrecked house, for the authorities had spared nothing in their search for poison, even going over the garden and the lawns in the hope of finding some of the poisonous shrub, hemlock, which it was contended had been used to put an end to Mr. G.o.dwin.

As yet nothing had been done to put the house in order again and, as we walked about, we noticed a pile of old tins in the yard which had not been removed.

Kennedy turned them over with his stick. Then he picked one up and examined it attentively.

"H-m--a blown can," he remarked.

"Blown?" I repeated.

"Yes. When the contents of a tin begin to deteriorate they sometimes give off gases which press out the ends of the tin. You can see how these ends bulge."