In the room outside, Archie recognized the reporters standing in the sawdust. What they were to write that night would be in the newspapers the next morning, but he would not read it. He heard Beck lock the door of the death chamber, locking it hurriedly, so that he could be in time to look on. Archie had no friend in the group of men that waited in silence, glancing curiously at him, their faces white as the whitewashed wall. The doctors held their watches in their hands. And there before him was the chair, its oil-cloth cover now removed, its cane bottom exposed. But he would have to step up on the little platform to get to it. "No--yes, there you are, Archie, my boy!" whispered Ball. "There!" He was in it, at last. He leaned back; then, as his back touched the back of the chair, he started violently. But there were hands on his shoulders pressing him down, until he could feel his back touch the chair from his shoulders down to the very end of his spine. Some one had seized his legs, turned back the slit trousers from his calves. "Be quick!" he heard the warden say in a scared voice. He was at his right where the switch and the indicator were. There were hands, too, at his head, at his arms--hands all over him. He took one last look. Had the governor--? Then the leather mask was strapped over his eyes and it was dark. He could only feel and hear now--feel the cold metal on his legs, feel the moist sponge on the top of his head where the barber had shaved him, feel the leather straps binding his legs and arms to the legs and the arms of the chair, binding them tightly, so that they gave him pain, and he could not move. Helpless he lay there, and waited. He heard the loud ticking of a watch; then on the other side of him the loud ticking of another watch; fingers were at his wrists. There was no sound but the mumble of Mr. Hoerr's voice. Then some one said: "All ready." He waited a second, or an age, then, suddenly, it seemed as if he must leap from the chair, his body was swelling to some monstrous, impossible, unhuman shape; his muscles were stretched, millions of hot and dreadful needles were piercing and pricking him, a stupendous roaring was in his ears, then a million colors, colors he had never seen or imagined before, colors beyond the range of the spectra, new, undiscovered, summoned by some mysterious agency from distant corners of the universe, played before his eyes. Suddenly they were shattered by a terrific explosion in his brain--then darkness.