rows when they read of the
puny shocks by which these men had perished, and they vowed in Los
Amigos that when an irreclaimable came their way he should be dealt
handsomely by, and have the run of all the big dynamos. There should be
no reserve, said the engineers, but he should have all that they had
got. And what the result of that would be none could predict, save that
it must be absolutely blasting and deadly. Never before had a man been
so charged with electricity as they would charge him. He was to be
smitten by the essence of ten thunderbolts. Some prophesied combustion,
and some disintegration and disappearance. They were waiting eagerly to
settle the question by actual demonstration, and it was just at that
moment that Duncan Warner came that way.

Warner had been wanted by the law, and by nobody else, for many years.
Desperado, murderer, train robber, and road agent, he was a man beyond
the pale of human pity. He had deserved a dozen deaths, and the Los
Amigos folk grudged him so gaudy a one as that. He seemed to feel
himself to be unworthy of it, for he made two frenzied attempts at
escape. He was a powerful, muscular man, with a lion heart, tangled
black locks, and a sweeping beard which covered his broad chest. When he
was tried, there was no finer head in all the crowded court. It's no new
thing to find the best face looking from the dock. But his good looks
could not balance his bad deeds. His advocate did all he knew, but the
cards lay against him, and Duncan Warner was handed over to the mercy of
the big Los Amigos dynamos.

I was there at the committee meeting when the matter was discussed. The
town council had chosen four experts to look after the arrangements.
Three of them were admirable. There was Joseph M'Connor, the very man
who had designed the dynamos, and there was Joshua Westmacott, the
chairman of the Los Amigos Electrical Supply Company, Limited. Then
there was myself as the chief medical man, and lastly an old German of
the name of Peter Stulpnagel. The Germans were a strong body at Los
Amigos, and they all voted for their man. That was how he got on the
committee. It was said that he had been a wonderful electrician at
home, and he was eternally working with wires and insulators and Leyden
jars; but, as he never seemed to get any further, or to have any results
worth publishing, he came at last to be regarded as a harmless crank,
who had made science his hobby. We three practical men smi