The Los Amigos Fiasco

I used to be the leading practitioner of Los
Amigos. Of course, everyone has heard of the great
electrical generating gear there. The town is wide
spread, and there are dozens of little townlets and
villages all round, which receive their supply from
the same centre, so that the works are on a very
large scale. The Los Amigos folk say that they are
the largest upon earth, but then we claim that for
everything in Los Amigos except the gaol and the
death-rate. Those are said to be the smallest.

Now, with so fine an electrical supply, it seemed
to be a sinful waste of hemp that the Los Amigos
criminals should perish in the old-fashioned manner.
And then came the news of the eleotrocutions in the
East, and how the results had not after all been so
instantaneous as had been hoped. The Western
Engineers raised their eyebrows 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 head,
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'Conner,
the very man who had designed the dynamos, and there
was Joshua