CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE.
THE LAST APPEAL One raw morning late in April, Mark Leanard, who worked at Kirby's lumber-yard, drove his team of big grade Percherons up to Kirby's office by the railroad tracks.
"What's doing ?" he asked of Kirby's clerk.
The clerk handed him a slip of paper.
"Go round and tell Mitchell to get you out this load!" he said.
Leanard went off whistling, with the order slip tucked back of his hatband.

In the yard, Mitchell the foreman, gave him a load "of sixteen-foot" pine boards and "two by fours".
"Where to ?" the driver asked, as he took his seat on top the load.
"To the jail, they're going to fence the yard." "You mean young John North ?" "That's what,--did you think you'd get a day off and take the old woman and the kids ?" asked Mitchell.
It was a little past eight when the teamster entered the alley back of the jail and began to unload.

The fall of the first heavy plank took John North to his cell window.

For a long breathless moment he stood there peering down into the alley, then he turned away.
All that day the teams from Kirby's continued to bring lumber for the fence, and at intervals North heard the thud of the heavy planks as they were thrown from the wagons, or the voices of the drivers as they urged their horses up the steep grade from the street.

Darkness came at last and with it unbroken quiet, but in his troubled slumbers that night the condemned man saw the teams come and go, and heard the fall of the planks.