Tensas gazette. [volume] (St. Joseph, La.) 1886-current, 1913-01-03


MW is a house whose bow window
II looks almost directly down
ward at the little, evil, black
barred apertures that make the win
dows of Sing Sing prison, an ugly
clutter of tall-chimneyed buildings
halfway up the hill In that window
a slender, middle-aged woman has
kept tireless vigil for years-her
eyes forever directed toward the
prison below. Save for such few
hours as she may have to engage her
self in household duties and now and
then walk on the country roads she
is always watching the prison, writes
Stuart Clyde in the New York World.
When the long drawn morning
whistle shrieks above the prison walls
her watch begins and her minds eye
faithfully pictures big, pallidfaced
man walking through the steel CORR
doris on his way with long line of
companions to the WORKSHOP benches, a
man in whose blue eyes Is queer.
half-insane light of hope. II it were
not for the woman at the window at
the top of the hill the hope would
probably have long ago gone out OF his
eyes.
But he knows that she is always
faithfully there, thinking of him.
ready eagerly to further any new plan
they may be able to devise in long
continued, always baffied quest for pre-
cious freedom. Once month she
leaves her window and walks to the
gloomy prison and enters at the gate.
She can see him then with bars be-
tween them. She can have an hours
talk. And in these talks he has de.
scribed to her infinitely every detail
Of his prison life and they have agreed
on certain hours when they would en-
gage in common thoughts.
She watches the carriages that come
daily winding up the hill and wonders
what nature Of man may be sitting
shackled to a deputy sheriff within,
what his crime has been, what pun
ishment he faces. Sometimes she can
see in far corners of the prison
grounds men digging holes in the
ground that mean that some wretch
has secured freedom by way of the
grave.
One Woman's Vigil Made Easier.
But her vigil now is not as hideous
as it once was. for this woman is the
wife of Albert s. Morris, and for a
time he was condemned to death
Then she lived in heart-rending hor-
TOR of some mornings dawn when she
would see from her window the sud
den dimming Of the corridor lights
through the ugly-barred windows OF
the prison down the hill. She had
learned that this sudden dimming OF
the lights and then almost as suddenly
their fiaring up again held a terrible
meaning-a meaning well known also
to the men inside. When they see II
some moan and others scream. And
In the death house the men behind
the black curtains OF their cells car
only try to scream and choke on the
utterance. They wiring cold sweat
from the fingers of their twisting
hands. The darkness of their cur
tanned cells has grown suddenly black
er, and only a little while before
scarcely a minute, they have heard
the cruelty distinct shufle of the slip
pered feet of the man who was lee
away. When the lights grow dim al
the dawn in Sing Sing it means thai
the electric power has been borrowed
for just that little while to send muir
derer's body straining against the
straps of the electric chair, swapping
/ the life out of him.
1t was a queer marriage that thii
: woman made with the murderer o.
stephen Brice, the millionaire re
cluse. II was after he had been con
victed of the crime that she had drawn
up contract of marriage which the,
both signed but which they might no
seal with 90 much as single kiss
But It was legal It gave her the priv
ilege of visiting him more often II
the death house and gives her now th'