I was feeling for the laces on my other shoe when another guard came to re-enforce the first, and he watched me so closely that I knew that chance was gone.
"After a while, strange as it seems, all the fear and all the horror of death left me.

My chief regret now was, not that I had to die, but that my people at home would never know how I died or where.

I put my head down on the table and actually dozed off.

But there was a clock in the room and whenever it struck I would rouse up and say to myself, almost impersonally, that I now had four hours to live, or three, or two, as the case might be.

Then I would go to sleep again.