CHAPTER I_From Place to Place

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FROM PLACE TO PLACE

The Works of

IRVIN S. COBB

[Illustration: Emblem]

The Review of Reviews Corporation

Publishers New York

Published by Arrangement with George H. Doran Company

by George H. Doran Company

Printed in the United States of America

CHARLES R. FLINT, ESQ.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I THE GALLOWSMITH 11

II THE BROKEN SHOELACE 55

III BOYS WILL BE BOYS 96

IV THE LUCK PIECE 156

V QUALITY FOLKS 206

VI JOHN J. COINCIDENCE 259

VII WHEN AUGUST THE SECOND WAS APRIL THE FIRST 302

VIII HOODWINKED 332

IX THE BULL CALLED EMILY 382

FROM PLACE TO PLACE

CHAPTER I

THE GALLOWSMITH

This man that I have it in mind to write about was, at the time of which

I write, an elderly man, getting well along toward sixty-five. He was

tall and slightly stooped, with long arms, and big, gnarled,

competent-looking hands, which smelled of yellow laundry soap, and had

huge, tarnished nails on the fingers. He had mild, pale eyes, a light

blue as to colour, with heavy sacs under them, and whitish whiskers,

spindly and thin, like some sort of second-growth, which were so cut as

to enclose his lower face in a nappy fringe, extending from ear to ear

under his chin. He suffered from a chronic heart affection, and this

gave to his skin a pronounced and unhealthy pallor. He was neat and prim

in his personal habits, kind to dumb animals, and tolerant of small

children. He was inclined to be miserly; certainly in money matters he

was most prudent and saving. He had the air about him of being lonely.

His name was Tobias Dramm. In the town where he lived he was commonly

known as Uncle Tobe Dramm. By profession he was a public hangman. You

might call him a gallowsmith. He hanged men for hire.

So far as the available records show, this Tobias Dramm was the only man

of his calling on this continent. In himself he constituted a specialty

and a monopoly. The fact that he had no competition did not make him

careless in the pursuit of his calling. On the contrary, it made him

precise and painstaking. As one occupying a unique position, he realized

that he had a reputation to sustain, and capably he sustained it. In the

Western Hemisphere he was, in the trade he followed, the nearest modern

approach to the paid executioners of olden times in France who went,

each of them, by the name of the city or province wherein he was

stationed, to do torturing and maiming and killing in the gracious name

of the king.

A generous government, committed to a belief in the efficacy of capital

punishment, paid Tobias Dramm at the rate of seventy-five dollars a head

for hanging offenders convicted of the hanging crime, which was murder.

He averaged about four hangings every three months or, say, about nine

hundred dollars a year--all clear money.

The manner of Mr. Dramm's having entered upon the practise of this

somewhat grisly trade makes in itself a little tale. He was a lifelong

citizen of the town of Chickaloosa, down in the Southwest, where there

stood a State penitentiary, and where, during the period of which I am

speaking, the Federal authorities sent for confinement and punishment

the criminal sweepings of half a score of States and Territories. This

was before the government put up prisons of its own, and while still it

parcelled out its human liabilities among State-owned institutions,

paying so much apiece for their keep. When the government first began

shipping a share of its felons to Chickaloosa, there came along, in one

clanking caravan of shackled malefactors, a half-breed, part Mexican and

the rest of him Indian, who had robbed a territorial post-office and

incidentally murdered the postmaster thereof. Wherefore this half-breed

was under sentence to expiate his greater misdeed on a given date,

between the hours of sunrise and sunset, and after a duly prescribed

manner, namely: by being hanged by the neck until he was dead.

At once a difficulty and a complication arose. The warden of the

penitentiary at Chickaloosa was perfectly agreeable to the idea of

keeping and caring for those felonious wards of the government who were

put in his custody to serve terms of imprisonment, holding that such

disciplinary measures fell within the scope of his sworn duty. But when

it came to the issue of hanging any one of them, he drew the line most

firmly. As he pointed out, he was not a government agent. He derived

his authority and drew his salary not from Washington, D. C., but from a

State capital several hundreds of miles removed from Washington.

Moreover, he was a zealous believer in the principle of State

sovereignty. As a soldier of the late Southern Confederacy, he had

fought four years to establish that doctrine. Conceded, that the cause

for which he fought had been defeated; nevertheless his views upon the

subject remained fixed and permanent. He had plenty of disagreeable jobs

to do without stringing up bad men for Uncle Sam; such was the attitude

the warden took. The sheriff of the county of which Chickaloosa was the

county-seat, likewise refused to have a hand in the impending affair,

holding it--and perhaps very properly--to be no direct concern of his,

either officially or personally.

Now the government very much wanted the hybrid hanged. The government

had been put to considerable trouble and no small expense to catch him

and try him and convict him and transport him to the place where he was

at present confined. Day and date for the execution of the law's

judgment having been fixed, a scandal and possibly a legal tangle would

ensue were there delay in the premises. It was reported that a full

pardon had been offered to a long-term convict on condition that he

carry out the court's mandate upon the body of the condemned mongrel,

and that he had refused, even though the price were freedom for

himself.

In this serious emergency, a volunteer in the person of Tobias Dramm

came forward. Until then he had been an inconspicuous unit in the life

of the community. He was a live-stock dealer on a small scale, making

his headquarters at one of the town livery stables. He was a person of

steady habits, with a reputation for sobriety and frugality among his

neighbours. The government, so to speak, jumped at the chance. Without

delay, his offer was accepted. There was no prolonged haggling over

terms, either. He himself fixed the cost of the job at seventy-five

dollars; this figure to include supervision of the erection of the

gallows, testing of the apparatus, and the actual operation itself.

So, on the appointed day, at a certain hour, to wit, a quarter past six

o'clock in the morning, just outside the prison walls, and in the

presence of the proper and ordained number of witnesses, Uncle Tobe,

with a grave, untroubled face, and hands which neither fumbled nor

trembled, tied up the doomed felon and hooded his head in a black-cloth

bag, and fitted a noose about his neck. The drop fell at eighteen

minutes past the hour. Fourteen minutes later, following brief tests of

heart and pulse, the two attending physicians agreed that the half-breed

was quite satisfactorily defunct. They likewise coincided in the

opinion that the hanging had been conducted with neatness, and with

swiftness, and with the least possible amount of physical suffering for

the deceased. One of the doctors went so far as to congratulate Mr.

Dramm upon the tidiness of his handicraft. He told him that in all his

experience he had never seen a hanging pass off more smoothly, and that

for an amateur, Dramm had done splendidly. To this compliment Uncle Tobe

replied, in his quiet and drawling mode of speech, that he had studied

the whole thing out in advance.

"Ef I should keep on with this way of makin' a livin' I don't 'low ever

to let no slip-ups occur," he added with simple directness. There was no

suggestion of the morbid in his voice or manner as he said this, but

instead merely a deep personal satisfaction.

Others present, having been made sick and faint by the shock of seeing a

human being summarily jerked into the hereafter, went away hurriedly

without saying anything at all. But afterward thinking it over when they

were more composed, they decided among themselves that Uncle Tobe had

carried it off with an assurance and a skill which qualified him most

aptly for future undertakings along the same line; that he was a born

hangman, if ever there was one.

This was the common verdict. So, thereafter, by a tacit understanding,

the ex-cattle-buyer became the regular government hangman. He had no

official title nor any warrant in writing for the place he filled. He

worked by the piece, as one might say, and not by the week or month.

Some years he hanged more men than in other years, but the average per

annum was about twelve. He had been hanging them now for going on ten

years.

It was as though he had been designed and created for the work. He

hanged villainous men singly, sometimes by pairs, and rarely in groups

of threes, always without a fumble or a hitch. Once, on a single

morning, he hanged an even half-dozen, these being the chief fruitage of

a busy term of the Federal court down in the Indian country where the

combination of a crowded docket, an energetic young district attorney

with political ambitions, and a businesslike presiding judge had

produced what all unprejudiced and fair-minded persons agreed were

marvellous results, highly beneficial to the moral atmosphere of the

territory and calculated to make potential evil-doers stop and think.

Four of the six had been members of an especially desperate gang of

train and bank robbers. The remaining two had forfeited their right to

keep on living by slaying deputy marshals. Each, with malice

aforethought and with his own hands, had actually killed some one or had

aided and abetted in killing some one.

This sextuple hanging made a lot of talk, naturally. The size of it

alone commanded the popular interest. Besides, the personnel of the

group of villains was such as to lend an aspect of picturesqueness to

the final proceedings. The sextet included a full-blooded Cherokee; a

consumptive ex-dentist out of Kansas, who from killing nerves in teeth

had progressed to killing men in cold premeditation; a lank West

Virginia mountaineer whose family name was the name of a clan prominent

in one of the long-drawn-out hill-feuds of his native State; a plain bad

man, whose chief claim to distinction was that he hailed originally from

the Bowery in New York City; and one, the worst of them all, who was

said to be the son of a pastor in a New England town. One by one,

unerringly and swiftly, Uncle Tobe launched them through his scaffold

floor to get whatever deserts await those who violate the laws of God

and man by the violent shedding of innocent blood. When the sixth and

last gunman came out of the prison proper into the prison enclosure--it

was the former dentist, and being set, as the phrase runs, upon dying

game, he wore a twisted grin upon his bleached face--there were six

black boxes under the platform, five of them occupied, with their lids

all in place, and one of them yet empty and open. In the act of mounting

the steps the condemned craned his head sidewise, and at the sight of

those coffins stretching along six in a row on the gravelled courtyard,

he made a cheap and sorry gibe. But when he stood beneath the cross-arm

to be pinioned, his legs played him traitor. Those craven knees of his

gave way under him, so that trusties had to hold the weakening ruffian

upright while the executioner snugged the halter about his throat.

On this occasion Uncle Tobe elucidated the creed and the code of his

profession for a reporter who had come all the way down from St. Louis

to report the big hanging for his paper. Having covered the hanging at

length, the reporter stayed over one more day at the Palace Hotel in

Chickaloosa to do a special article, which would be in part a character

sketch and in part a straight interview, on the subject of the hangman.

The article made a full page spread in the Sunday edition of the young

man's paper, and thereby a reputation, which until this time had been

more or less local, was given what approximated a national notoriety.

Through a somewhat general reprinting of what the young man had written,

and what his paper had published, the country at large eventually became

acquainted with an ethical view-point which was already fairly familiar

to nearly every resident in and about Chickaloosa. Reading the

narrative, one living at a distance got an accurate picture of a

personality elevated above the commonplace solely by the role which its

owner filled; a picture of an old man thoroughly sincere and thoroughly

conscientious; a man dull, earnest, and capable to his limits; a man who

was neither morbid nor imaginative, but filled with rather a stupid

gravity; a man canny about the pennies and affectionately inclined

toward the dollars; a man honestly imbued with the idea that he was a

public servant performing a necessary public service; a man without

nerves, but in all other essentials a small-town man with a small-town

mind; in short, saw Uncle Tobe as he really was. The reporter did

something else which marked him as a craftsman. Without stating the fact

in words, he nevertheless contrived to create in the lines which he

wrote an atmosphere of self-defence enveloping the old man--or perhaps

the better phrase would be self-extenuation. The reader was made to

perceive that Dramm, being cognizant and mildly resentful of the

attitude in which his own little world held him, by reason of the fatal

work of his hands, sought after a semiapologetic fashion to offer a plea

in abatement of public judgment, to set up a weight of moral evidence in

his own behalf, and behind this in turn, and showing through it, might

be sensed the shy pride of a shy man for labour undertaken with good

motives and creditably performed. With no more than a pardonable

broadening and exaggeration of the other's mode of speech, the reporter

succeeded likewise in reproducing not only the language, but the wistful

intent of what Uncle Tobe said to him. From this interview I propose now

to quote to the extent of a few paragraphs. This is Uncle Tobe

addressing the visiting correspondent:

"It stands to reason--don't it?--that these here

sinful men have got to be hung, an' that somebody

has got to hang 'em. The Good Book says an eye fur

an eye an' a tooth fur a tooth an' a life fur a

life. That's perzactly whut it says, an' I'm one

whut believes the Bible frum kiver to kiver. These

here boys that they bring in here have broke the

law of Gawd an' the law of the land, an' they jest

natchelly got to pay fur their devilment. That's

so, ain't it? Well, then, that bein' so, I step

forward an' do the job. Ef they was free men,

walkin' around like you an' me, I wouldn't lay the

weight of my little finger on 'em to harm a single

hair in their haids. Ef they hadn't done nothin'

ag'in' the law, I'd be the last one to do 'em a

hurt. I wisht you could make that p'int plain in

the piece you aim to write, so's folks would

understand jest how I feel--so's they'd understand

that I don't bear no gredge ag'inst any livin'

creature.

"Ef the job was left to some greenhawn he'd mebbe

botch it up an' make them boys suffer more'n

there's any call fur. Sech things have happened, a

plenty times before now ez you yourself doubtless

know full well. But I don't botch it up. I ain't

braggin' none whilst I'm sayin' this to you; I'm

jest tellin' you. I kin take an oath that I ain't

never botched up one of these jobs yit, not frum

the very fust. The warden or Dr. Slattery, the

prison physician, or anybody round this town that

knows the full circumstances kin tell you the

same, ef you ast 'em. You see, son, I ain't never

nervoused up like some men would be in my place.

I'm always jest ez ca'm like ez whut you are this

minute. The way I look at it, I'm jest a chosen

instrument of the law. I regard it ez a trust that

I'm called on to perform, on account of me havin' a

natchel knack in that 'special direction. Some men

have gifts fur one thing an' some men have gifts

fur another thing. It would seem this is the

perticular thing--hangin' men--that I've got a gift

fur. So, sech bein' the case, I don't worry none

about it beforehand, nor I don't worry none after

it's all over with, neither. With me handlin' the

details the whole thing is over an' done with

accordin' to the law an' the statutes an' the

jedgment of the high court in less time than some

people would take fussin' round, gittin' ready. The

way I look at it, it's a mercy an' a blessin' to

all concerned to have somebody in charge that knows

how to hang a man.

"Why, it's come to sech a pass that when there's a

hangin' comin' off anywhere in this part of the

country they send fur me to be present ez a kind of

an expert. I've been to hangin's all over this

State, an' down into Louisiana, an' wunst over into

Texas in order to give the sheriffs the benefit of

my experience an' my advice. I make it a rule not

never to take no money fur doin' sech ez that--only

my travelin' expenses an' my tavern bills; that's

all I ever charge 'em. But here in Chickaloosa the

conditions is different, an' the gover'mint pays me

seventy-five dollars a hangin'. I figger that it's

wuth it, too. The Bible says the labourer is worthy

of his hire. I try to be worthy of the hire I git.

I certainly aim to earn it--an' I reckin I do earn

it, takin' everything into consideration--the

responsibility an' all. Ef there's any folks that

think I earn my money easy--seventy-five dollars

fur whut looks like jest a few minutes' work--I'd

like fur 'em to stop an' think ef they'd consider

themselves qualified to hang ez many men ez I have

without never botchin' up a single job."

That was his chief boast, if boasting it might be called--that he never

botched the job. It is the common history of common hangmen, so I've

been told, that they come after a while to be possessed of the devils of

cruelty, and to take pleasure in the exercise of their most grim

calling. If this be true, then surely Uncle Tobe was to all outward

appearances an exception to the rule. Never by word or look or act was

he caught gloating over his victims; always he exhibited a merciful

swiftness in the dread preliminaries and in the act of execution itself.

At the outset he had shown deftness. With frequent practise he grew

defter still. He contrived various devices for expediting the

proceeding. For instance, after prolonged experiments, conducted in

privacy, he evolved a harnesslike arrangement of leather belts and

straps, made all in one piece, and fitted with buckles and snaffles.

With this, in a marvellously brief space, he could bind his man at

elbows and wrists, at knees and ankles, so that in less time almost than

it would take to describe the process, the latter stood upon the trap,

as a shape deprived of motion, fully caparisoned for the end. He fitted

the inner side of the crosspiece of the gallows with pegs upon which the

rope rested, entirely out of sight of him upon whom it was presently to

be used, until the moment when Uncle Tobe, stretching a long arm upward,

brought it down, all reeved and ready. He hit upon the expedient of

slickening the noose parts with yellow bar soap so that it would run

smoothly in the loop and tighten smartly, without undue tugging. He

might have used grease or lard, but soap was tidier, and Uncle Tobe, as

has been set forth, was a tidy man.

After the first few hangings his system began to follow a regular

routine. From somewhere to the west or southwest of Chickaloosa the

deputy marshals would bring in a man consigned to die. The prison

people, taking their charge over from them, would house him in a cell of

a row of cells made doubly tight and doubly strong for such as he; in

due season the warden would notify Uncle Tobe of the date fixed for the

inflicting of the penalty. Four or five days preceding the day, Uncle

Tobe would pay a visit to the prison, timing his arrival so that he

reached there just before the exercise hour for the inmates of a certain

cell-tier. Being admitted, he would climb sundry flights of narrow iron

stairs and pause just outside a crisscrossed door of iron slats while a

turnkey, entering that door and locking it behind him, would open a

smaller door set flat in the wall of damp-looking grey stones and invite

the man caged up inside to come forth for his daily walk. Then, while

the captive paced the length and breadth of the narrow corridor back and

across, to and fro, up and down, with the futile restlessness of a cat

animal in a zoo, his feet clumping on the flagged flooring, and the

watchful turnkey standing by, Uncle Tobe, having flattened his lean form

in a niche behind the outer lattice, with an appraising eye would

consider the shifting figure through a convenient cranny of the wattled

metal strips. He took care to keep himself well back out of view, but

since he stood in shadow while the one he marked so keenly moved in a

flood of daylight filtering down through a skylight in the ceiling of

the cell block, the chances were the prisoner could not have made out

the indistinct form of the stranger anyhow. Five or ten minutes of such

scrutiny of his man was all Uncle Tobe ever desired. In his earlier days

before he took up this present employment, he had been an adept at

guessing the hoof-weight of the beeves and swine in which he dealt.

That early experience stood him in good stead now; he took no credit to

himself for his accuracy in estimating the bulk of a living human being.

Downstairs, on the way out of the place, if by chance he encountered the

warden in his office, the warden, in all likelihood, would say: "Well,

how about it this time, Uncle Tobe?"

And Uncle Tobe would make some such answer as this:

"Well, suh, accordin' to my reckonin' this here one will heft about a

hund'ed an' sixty-five pound, ez he stands now. How's he takin' it,

warden?"

"Oh, so-so."

"He looks to me like he was broodin' a right smart," the expert might

say. "I jedge he ain't relishin' his vittles much, neither. Likely he'll

worry three or four pound more off'n his bones 'twixt now an' Friday

mornin'. He oughter run about one hund'ed an' sixty or mebbe

one-sixty-one by then."

"How much drop do you allow to give him?"

"Don't worry about that, suh," would be the answer given with a

contemplative squint of the placid, pale eye. "I reckin my calculations

won't be very fur out of the way, ef any."

They never were, either.

On the day before the day, he would be a busy man, what with

superintending the fitting together and setting up of the painted

lumber pieces upon which tomorrow's capital tragedy would be played;

and, when this was done to his liking, trying the drop to see that the

boards had not warped, and trying the rope for possible flaws in its

fabric or weave, and proving to his own satisfaction that the mechanism

of the wooden lever which operated to spring the trap worked with an

instantaneous smoothness. To every detail he gave a painstaking

supervision, guarding against all possible contingencies. Regarding the

trustworthiness of the rope he was especially careful. When this

particular hanging was concluded, the scaffold would be taken apart and

stored away for subsequent use, but for each hanging the government

furnished a brand new rope, especially made at a factory in New Orleans

at a cost of eight dollars. The spectators generally cut the rope up

into short lengths after it had fulfilled its ordained purpose, and

carried the pieces away for souvenirs. So always there was a new rope

provided, and its dependability must be ascertained by prolonged and

exhaustive tests before Uncle Tobe would approve of it. Seeing him at

his task, with his coat and waistcoat off, his sleeves rolled back, and

his intent mien, one realised why, as a hangman, he had been a success.

He left absolutely nothing to chance. When he was through with his

experimenting, the possibility of an exhibition of the proneness of

inanimate objects to misbehave in emergencies had been reduced to a

minimum.

Before daylight next morning Uncle Tobe, dressed in sober black, like a

country undertaker, and with his mid-Victorian whiskers all cleansed and

combed, would present himself at his post of duty. He would linger in

the background, an unobtrusive bystander, until the condemned sinner had

gone through the mockery of eating his last breakfast; and, still making

himself inconspicuous during the march to the gallows, would trail at

the very tail of the line, while the short, straggling procession was

winding out through gas-lit murky hallways into the pale dawn-light

slanting over the walls of the gravel-paved, high-fenced compound built

against the outer side of the prison close. He would wait on, always

holding himself discreetly aloof from the middle breadth of the picture,

until the officiating clergyman had done with his sacred offices; would

wait until the white-faced wretch on whose account the government was

making all this pother and taking all this trouble, had mumbled his

farewell words this side of eternity; would continue to wait, very

patiently, indeed, until the warden nodded to him. Then, with his

trussing harness tucked under his arm, and the black cap neatly folded

and bestowed in a handy side-pocket of his coat, Uncle Tobe would

advance forward, and laying a kindly, almost a paternal hand upon the

shoulder of the man who must die, would steer him to a certain spot in

the centre of the platform, just beneath a heavy cross-beam. There

would follow a quick shifting of the big, gnarled hands over the

unresisting body of the doomed man, and almost instantly, so it seemed

to those who watched, all was in order: the arms of the murderer drawn

rearward and pressed in close against his ribs by a broad girth

encircling his trunk at the elbows, his wrists caught together in

buckled leather cuffs behind his back; his knees and his ankles fast in

leathern loops which joined to the rest of the apparatus by means of a

transverse strap drawn tautly down the length of his legs, at the back;

the black-cloth head-bag with its peaked crown in place; the noose

fitted; the hobbled and hooded shape perhaps swaying a trifle this way

and that; and Uncle Tobe on his tiptoes stepping swiftly over to a

tilted wooden lever which projected out and upward through the planked

floor, like the handle of a steering oar.

It was at this point that the timorous-hearted among the witnesses

turned their heads away. Those who were more resolute--or as the case

might be, more morbid--and who continued to look, were made aware of a

freak of physics which in accord, I suppose, with the laws of

horizontals and parallels decrees that a man cut off short from life by

quick and violent means and fallen prone upon the earth, seems to shrink

up within himself and to grow shorter in body and in sprawling limb,

whereas one hanged with a rope by the neck has the semblance of

stretching out to unseemly and unhuman lengths all the while that he

dangles.

* * * * *

Having repossessed himself of his leather cinches, Uncle Tobe would

presently depart for his home, stopping _en route_ at the Chickaloosa

National Bank to deposit the greater part of the seventy-five dollars

which the warden, as representative of a satisfied Federal government,

had paid him, cash down on the spot. To his credit in the bank the old

man had a considerable sum, all earned after this mode, and all drawing

interest at the legal rate. On his arrival at his home, Mr. Dramm would

first of all have his breakfast. This over, he would open the second

drawer of an old black-walnut bureau, and from under a carefully folded

pile of spare undergarments would withdraw a small, cheap book, bound in

imitation red leather, and bearing the word "Accounts" in faded script

upon the cover. On a clean, blue-lined page of the book, in a cramped

handwriting, he would write in ink, the name, age, height, and weight of

the man he had just despatched out of life; also the hour and minute

when the drop fell, the time elapsing before the surgeons pronounced the

man dead; the disposition which had been made of the body, and any other

data which seemed to him pertinent to the record. Invariably he

concluded the entry thus: "Neck was broke by the fall. Everything passed

off smooth." From his first time of service he had never failed to make

such notations following a hanging, he being in this, as in all things,

methodical and exact.

The rest of the day, in all probabilities, would be given to small

devices of his own. If the season suited he might work in his little

truck garden at the back of the house, or if it were the fall of the

year he might go rabbit hunting; then again he might go for a walk. When

the evening paper came--Chickaloosa had two papers, a morning paper and

an evening paper--he would read through the account given of the event

at the prison, and would pencil any material errors which had crept into

the reporter's story, and then he would clip out the article and file it

away with a sheaf of similar clippings in the same bureau drawer where

he kept his account-book and his underclothing. This done he would eat

his supper, afterward washing and wiping the supper dishes and,

presently bedtime for him having arrived, he would go to bed and sleep

very soundly and very peacefully all night. Sometimes his heart trouble

brought on smothering spells which woke him up. He rarely had dreams,

and never any dreams unpleasantly associated with his avocation.

Probably never was there a man blessed with less of an imagination than

this same Tobias Dramm. It seemed almost providential, considering the

calling he followed, that he altogether lacked the faculty of

introspection, so that neither his memory nor his conscience ever

troubled him.

Thus far I have made no mention of his household, and for the very good

reason that he had none. In his youth he had not married. The forked

tongue of town slander had it that he was too stingy to support a wife,

and on top of that expense, to run the risk of having children to rear.

He had no close kindred excepting a distant cousin or two in

Chickaloosa. He kept no servant, and for this there was a double cause.

First, his parsimonious instincts; second, the fact that for love or

money no negro would minister to him, and in this community negroes were

the only household servants to be had. Among the darkies there was

current a belief that at dead of night he dug up the bodies of those he

had hanged and peddled the cadavers to the "student doctors." They said

he was in active partnership with the devil; they said the devil took

over the souls of his victims, paying therefor in red-hot dollars, after

the hangman was done with their bodies. The belief of the negroes that

this unholy traffic existed amounted with them to a profound conviction.

They held Mr. Dramm in an awesome and horrified veneration, bowing to

him most respectfully when they met him, and then sidling off hurriedly.

It would have taken strong horses to drag any black-skinned resident of

Chickaloosa to the portals of the little three-roomed frame cottage in

the outskirts of the town which Uncle Tobe tenanted. Therefore he lived

by himself, doing his own skimpy marketing and his own simple

housekeeping. Loneliness was a part of the penalty he paid for following

the calling of a gallowsmith.

Among members of his own race he had no close friends. For the most part

the white people did not exactly shun him, but, as the saying goes in

the Southwest, they let him be. They were well content to enshrine him

as a local celebrity, and ready enough to point him out to visitors, but

by an unwritten communal law the line was drawn there. He was as one set

apart for certain necessary undertakings, and yet denied the intimacy of

his kind because he performed them acceptably. If his aloof and solitary

state ever distressed him, at least he gave no outward sign of it, but

went his uncomplaining way, bearing himself with a homely, silent

dignity, and enveloped in those invisible garments of superstition which

local prejudice and local ignorance had conjured up.

Ready as he was when occasion suited, to justify his avocation in the

terms of that same explanation which he had given to the young reporter

from St. Louis that time, and greatly though he may have craved to gain

the good-will of his fellow citizens, he was never known openly to rebel

against his lot. The nearest he ever came to doing this was once when he

met upon the street a woman of his acquaintance who had suffered a

recent bereavement in the death of her only daughter. He approached her,

offering awkward condolences, and at once was moved to a further

expression of his sympathy for her in her great loss by trying to shake

her hand. At the touch of his fingers to hers the woman, already in a

mood of grief bordering on hysteria, shrank back screaming out that his

hand smelled of the soap with which he coated his gallows-nooses. She

ran away from him, crying out as she ran, that he was accursed; that he

was marked with that awful smell and could not rid himself of it. To

those who had witnessed this scene the hangman, with rather an injured

and bewildered air, made explanation. The poor woman, he said, was

wrong; although in a way of speaking she was right, too. He did, indeed,

use the same yellow bar soap for washing his hands that he used for

anointing his ropes. It was a good soap, and cheap; he had used the same

brand regularly for years in cleansing his hands. Since it answered the

first purpose so well, what possible harm could there be in slicking the

noose of the rope with it when he was called upon to conduct one of his

jobs over up at the prison? Apparently he was at a loss to fathom the

looks they cast at him when he had finished with this statement and had

asked this question. He began a protest, but broke off quickly and went

away shaking his head as though puzzled that ordinarily sane folks

should be so squeamish and so unreasonable. But he kept on using the

soap as before.

* * * * *

Until now this narrative has been largely preamble. The real story

follows. It concerns itself with the birth of an imagination.

In his day Uncle Tobe hanged all sorts and conditions of men--men who

kept on vainly hoping against hope for an eleventh-hour reprieve long

after the last chance of reprieve had vanished, and who on the gallows

begged piteously for five minutes, for two minutes, for one minute more

of precious grace; negroes gone drunk on religious exhortation who died

in a frenzy, sure of salvation, and shouting out halleluiahs; Indians

upborne and stayed by a racial stoicism; Chinamen casting stolid,

slant-eyed glances over the rim of the void before them and filled with

the calmness of the fatalist who believes that whatever is to be, is to

be; white men upon whom at the last, when all prospect of intervention

was gone, a mental numbness mercifully descended with the result that

they came to the rope's embrace like men in a walking coma, with glazed,

unseeing eyes, and dragging feet; other white men who summoned up a

mockery of bravado and uttered poor jests from between lips drawn back

in defiant sneering as they gave themselves over to the hangman, so that

only Uncle Tobe, feeling their flesh crawling under their grave-clothes

as he tied them up, knew a hideous terror berode their bodies. At

length, in the tenth year of his career as a paid executioner he was

called upon to visit his professional attentions upon a man different

from any of those who had gone down the same dread chute.

The man in question was a train-bandit popularly known as the Lone-Hand

Kid, because always he conducted his nefarious operations without

confederates. He was a squat, dark ruffian, as malignant as a moccasin

snake, and as dangerous as one. He was filthy in speech and vile in

habit, being in his person most unpicturesque and most unwholesome, and

altogether seemed a creature more viper than he was man. The sheriffs of

two border States and the officials of a contiguous reservation sought

for him many times, long and diligently, before a posse overcame him in

the hills by over-powering odds and took him alive at the cost of two of

its members killed outright and a third badly crippled. So soon as

surgeons plugged up the holes in his hide which members of the vengeful

posse shot into him after they had him surrounded and before his

ammunition gave out, he was brought to bar to answer for the unprovoked

murder of a postal clerk on a transcontinental limited. No time was

wasted in hurrying his trial through to its conclusion; it was felt that

there was crying need to make an example of this red-handed desperado.

Having been convicted with commendable celerity, the Lone-Hand Kid was

transferred to Chickaloosa and strongly confined there against the day

of Uncle Tobe's ministrations upon him.

From the very hour that the prosecution was started, the Lone-Hand Kid,

whose real name was the prosaic name of Smith, objected strongly to this

procedure which in certain circles is known as "railroading." He

insisted that he was being legally expedited out of life on his record

and not on the evidence. There were plenty of killings for any one of

which he might have been tried and very probably found guilty, but he

reckoned it a profound injustice that he should be indicted, tried, and

condemned for a killing he had not committed. By his code he would not

have rebelled strongly against being punished for the evil things he

himself had done; he did dislike, though, being hanged for something

some rival hold-up man had done. Such was his contention, and he

reiterated it with a persistence which went far toward convincing some

people that after all there might be something in what he said, although

among honest men there was no doubt whatsoever that the world would be a

sweeter and a healthier place to live in with the Lone-Hand Kid entirely

translated out of it.

Having been dealt with, as he viewed the matter, most unfairly, the

condemned killer sullenly refused to make submission to his appointed

destiny. On the car journey up to Chickaloosa, although still weak from

his wounds and securely ironed besides, he made two separate efforts to

assault his guards. In his cell, a few days later, he attacked a turnkey

in pure wantonness seemingly, since even with the turnkey eliminated,

there still was no earthly prospect for him to escape from the steel

strong-box which enclosed him. That was what it truly was, too, a

strong-box, for the storing of many living pledges held as surety for

the peace and good order of the land. Of all these human collaterals who

were penned up there with him, he, for the time being, was most precious

in the eyes of the law. Therefore the law took no chance of losing him,

and this he must have known when he maimed his keeper.

After this outbreak he was treated as a vicious wild beast, which,

undoubtedly, was exactly what he was. He was chained by his ankles to

his bed, and his food was shoved in to him through the bars by a man who

kept himself at all times well out of reach of the tethered prisoner.

Having been rendered helpless, he swore then that when finally they

unbarred his cell door and sought to fetch him forth to garb him for his

journey to the gallows, he would fight them with his teeth and his bare

hands for so long as he had left an ounce of strength with which to

fight. Bodily force would then be the only argument remaining to him by

means of which he might express his protest, and he told all who cared

to listen that most certainly he meant to invoke it.

There was a code of decorum which governed the hangings at Chickaloosa,

and the resident authorities dreaded mightily the prospect of having it

profaned by spiteful and unmannerly behaviour on the part of the

Lone-Hand Kid. There was said to be in all the world just one living

creature for whom the rebellious captive entertained love and respect,

and this person was his half-sister. With the good name of his prison at

heart, the warden put up the money that paid her fare from her home down

in the Indian Territory. Two days before the execution she arrived, a

slab-sided, shabby drudge of a woman. Having first been primed and

prompted for her part, she was sent to him, and in his cell she wept

over the fettered prisoner, and with him she pleaded until he promised

her, reluctantly, he would make no physical struggle on being led out to

die.

He kept his word, too; but it was to develop that the pledge of

non-resistance, making his body passive to the will of his jailers, did

not, according to the Lone-Hand Kid's sense of honour, include the

muscles of his tongue. His hour came at sunup of a clear, crisp, October

morning, when a rime of frost made a silver carpet upon the boarded

floor of the scaffold, and in the east the heavens glowed an irate red,

like the reflections of a distant bale-fire. From his cell door before

the head warder summoned him forth, he drove away with terrible oaths

the clergyman who had come to offer him religious consolation. At

daylight, when the first beams of young sunlight were stealing in at the

slitted windows to streak the whitewashed wall behind him with a barred

pattern of red, like brush strokes of fresh paint, he ate his last

breakfast with foul words between bites, and outside, a little later, in

the shadow of the crosstree from which shortly he would dangle in the

article of death, a stark offence before the sight of mortal eyes, he

halted and stood reviling all who had a hand in furthering and

compassing his condemnation. Profaning the name of his Maker with every

breath, he cursed the President of the United States who had declined to

reprieve him, the justices of the high court who had denied his appeal

from the verdict of the lower, the judge who had tried him, the district

attorney who had prosecuted him, the grand jurors who had indicted him,

the petit jurors who had voted to convict him, the witnesses who had

testified against him, the posse men who had trapped him, consigning

them all and singly to everlasting damnation. Before this pouring flood

of blasphemy the minister, who had followed him up the gallows steps in

the vain hope that when the end came some faint sign of contrition might

be vouchsafed by this poor lost soul, hid his face in his hands as

though fearing an offended Deity would send a bolt from on high to

blast all who had been witnesses to such impiety and such impenitence.

The indignant warden moved to cut short this lamentable spectacle. He

signed with his hand for Uncle Tobe to make haste, and Uncle Tobe,

obeying, stepped forward from where he had been waiting in the rear rank

of the shocked spectators. Upon him the defiant ruffian turned the

forces of his sulfurous hate, full-gush. First over one shoulder and

then over the other as the executioner worked with swift fingers to bind

him into a rigid parcel of a man, he uttered what was both a dreadful

threat and a yet more dreadful promise.

"I ain't blamin' these other folks here," he proclaimed. "Some of 'em

are here because it's their duty to be here, an' ef these others kin git

pleasure out of seem' a man croaked that ain't afeared of bein' croaked,

they're welcome to enjoy the free show, so fur ez I'm concerned. But

you--you stingy, white-whiskered old snake!--you're doin' this fur the

little piece of dirty money that's in it fur you.

"Listen to me, you dog: I know I'm headin' straight fur hell, an' I

ain't skeered to go, neither. But I ain't goin' to stay there. I'm

comin' back fur you! I'm comin' back this very night to git you an' take

your old, withered, black soul back down to hell with me. No need fur

you to try to hide. Wharever you hide I'll seek you out. You can't git

away frum me. You kin lock your door an' you kin lock your winder, an'

you kin hide your head under the bedclothes, but I'll find you wharever

you are, remember that! An' you're goin' back down there with me!

"Now go ahead an' hang me--I'm all set fur it ef you are!"

Through this harangue Uncle Tobe worked on, outwardly composed. Whatever

his innermost emotions may have been, his expression gave no hint that

the mouthings of the Lone-Hand Kid had sunk in. He drew the peaked black

sack down across the swollen face, hiding the glaring eyes and the lips

that snarled. He brought the rope forward over the cloaked head and drew

the noose in tautly, with the knot adjusted to fit snugly just under the

left ear, so that the hood took on the semblance of a well-filled,

inverted bag with its puckered end fluting out in the effect of a dark

ruff upon the hunched shoulders of its wearer. Stepping back, he gripped

the handle of the lever-bar, and with all his strength jerked it toward

him. A square in the floor opened as the trap was flapped back upon its

hinges, and through the opening the haltered form shot straight downward

to bring up with a great jerk, and after that to dangle like a plumb-bob

on a string. Under the quick strain the gallows-arm creaked and whined;

in the silence which followed the hangman was heard to exhale his breath

in a vast puff of relief. His hand went up to his forehead to wipe

beads of sweat which for all that the morning was cool almost to

coldness, had suddenly popped out through his skin. He for one was

mighty glad the thing was done, and, as he in this moment figured, well

done.

But for once and once only as those saw who had the hardihood to look,

Uncle Tobe had botched up a job. Perhaps it was because of his great

haste to make an end of a scandalous scene; perhaps because the tirade

of the bound malefactor had discomfited him and made his fingers fumble

this one time at their familiar task. Whatever the cause, it was plainly

enough to be seen that the heavy knot had not cracked the Lone-Hand

Kid's spine. The noose, as was ascertained later, had caught on the edge

of the broad jawbone, and the man, instead of dying instantly, was

strangling to death by degrees and with much struggling.

In the next half minute a thing even more grievous befell. The broad

strap which girthed the murderer's trunk just above the bend of the

elbows, held fast, but the rest of the harness, having been improperly

snaffled on, loosened and fell away from the twitching limbs so that as

the elongated body twisted to and fro in half circles, the lower arms

winnowed the air in foreshortened and contorted flappings, and the freed

legs drew up and down convulsively.

Very naturally, Uncle Tobe was chagrined; perhaps he had hidden within

him emotions deeper than those bred of a personal mortification. At any

rate, after a quick, distressed glance through the trap at the writhing

shape of agony below, he turned his eyes from it and looked steadfastly

at the high wall facing him. It chanced to be the western wall, which

was bathed in a ruddy glare where the shafts of the upcoming sun,

lifting over the panels at the opposite side of the fenced enclosure,

began to fall diagonally upon the whitewashed surface just across. And

now, against that glowing plane of background opposite him, there

appeared as he looked the slanted shadow of a swaying rope framed in at

right and at left by two broader, deeper lines which were the shadows

marking the timber uprights that supported the scaffold at its nearer

corners; and also there appeared, midway between the framing shadows,

down at the lower end of the slender line of the cord, an exaggerated,

wriggling manifestation like the reflection of a huge and misshapen

jumping-jack, which first would lengthen itself grotesquely, and then

abruptly would shorten up, as the tremors running through the dying

man's frame altered the silhouette cast by the oblique sunbeams; and

along with this stencilled vision, as a part of it, occurred shifting

shadow movements of two legs dancing busily on nothing, and of two

foreshortened arms, flapping up and down. It was no pretty picture to

look upon, yet Uncle Tobe, plucking with a tremulous hand at the ends of

his beard, continued to stare at the apparition, daunted and

fascinated. To him it must have seemed as though the Lone-Hand Kid, with

a malignant pertinacity which lingered on in him after by rights the

last breath should have been squeezed out of his wretched carcass, was

painting upon those tall planks the picture and the presentiment of his

farewell threat.

* * * * *

Nearly half an hour passed before the surgeons consented that the body

should be taken down and boxed. His harness which had failed him having

been returned to its owner, he made it up into a compact bundle and

collected his regular fee and went away very quietly. Ordinarily,

following his habitual routine, he would have gone across town to his

little house; would have washed his hands with a bar of the yellow

laundry soap; would have cooked and eaten his breakfast, and then, after

tidying up the kitchen, would have made the customary entry in his

red-backed account-book. But this morning he seemed to have no appetite,

and besides, he felt an unaccountable distaste for his home, with its

silence and its emptiness. Somehow he much preferred the open air, with

the skies over him and wide reaches of space about him; which was doubly

strange, seeing that he was no lover of nature, but always theretofore

had accepted sky and grass and trees as matters of course--things as

inevitable and commonplace as the weathers and the winds.

Throughout the day and until well on toward night he was beset by a

curious, uncommon restlessness which made it hard for him to linger long

in any one spot. He idled about the streets of the town; twice he

wandered aimlessly miles out along roads beyond the town. All the while,

without cessation, there was a tugging and nagging at his nerve-ends, a

constant inward irritation which laid a hold on his thoughts, twitching

them off into unpleasant channels. It kept him from centering his

interest upon the casual things about him; inevitably it turned his mind

back to inner contemplations. The sensation was mental largely, but it

seemed so nearly akin to the physical that to himself Uncle Tobe

diagnosed it as the after-result of a wrench for his weak heart. You

see, never before having experienced the reactions of a suddenly

quickened imagination, he, naturally, was at a loss to account for it on

any other ground.

Also he was weighted down by an intense depression that his clean record

of ten years should have been marred by a mishap; this regret,

constantly recurring in his thoughts, served to make him unduly

sensitive. He had a feeling that people stared hard at him as they

passed and, after he had gone by, that they turned to stare at him some

more. Under this scrutiny he gave no sign of displeasure, but inwardly

he resented it. Of course these folks had heard of what had happened up

at the prison, and no doubt among themselves would be commenting upon

the tragedy and gossiping about it. Well, any man was liable to make a

slip once; nobody was perfect. It would never happen again; he was sure

of that much.

All day he mooned about, a brooding, uneasy figure, speaking to scarcely

any one at all, but followed wherever he went by curious eyes. It was

late in the afternoon before it occurred to him that he had eaten

nothing all day, and that he had failed to deposit the money he had

earned that morning. It would be too late now to get into the bank; the

bank, which opened early, closed at three o'clock. To-morrow would do as

well. Although he had no zest for food despite his fast, he figured

maybe it was the long abstinence which was filling his head with such

flighty notions, so he entered a small, smelly lunch-room near the

railroad station, and made a pretense of eating an order of ham and

eggs. He tried not to notice that the black waiter who served him shrank

away from his proximity, shying off like a breechy colt, from the table

where Uncle Tobe sat, whenever his business brought him into that part

of the place. What difference did a fool darky's fears make, anyway?

Dusk impended when he found himself approaching his three-room house,

looming up as a black oblong, where it stood aloof from its neighbours,

with vacant lands about it. The house faced north and south. On the

nearer edge of the unfenced common, which extended up to it on the

eastern side, he noted as he drew close that somebody--perhaps a boy, or

more probably a group of boys--had made a bonfire of fallen autumn

leaves and brushwood. Going away as evening came, they had left their

bonfire to burn itself out. The smouldering pile was almost under his

bedroom window. He regretted rather that the boys had gone; an urgent

longing for human companionship of some sort, however remote--a yearning

he had never before felt with such acuteness--was upon him. Tormented,

as he still was, by strange vagaries, he had almost to force himself to

unlock the front door and cross the threshold into the gloomy interior

of his cottage. But before entering, and while he yet wrestled with a

vague desire to retrace his steps and go back down the street, he

stooped and picked up his copy of the afternoon paper which the carrier,

with true carrierlike accuracy, had flung upon the narrow front porch.

Inside the house, the floor gave off sharp little sounds, the warped

floor squeaking and wheezing under the weight of his tread.

Subconsciously, this irritated him; a lot of causes were combining to

harass him, it seemed; there was a general conspiracy on the part of

objects animate and inanimate to make him--well, suspicious. And Uncle

Tobe was not given to nervousness, which made it worse. He was ashamed

of himself that he should be in such state. Glancing about him in a

furtive, almost in an apprehensive way, he crossed the front room to the

middle room, which was his bed chamber, the kitchen being the room at

the rear. In the middle room he lit a coal-oil lamp which stood upon a

small centre table. Alongside the table he opened out the paper and

glanced at a caption running half-way across the top of the front page;

then, fretfully he crumpled up the printed sheet in his hand and let it

fall upon the floor. He had no desire to read the account of his one

failure. Why should the editor dwell at such length and with so prodigal

a display of black head-line type upon this one bungled job when every

other job of all the jobs that had gone before, had been successful in

every detail? Let's see, now, how many men had he hanged with precision

and with speed and with never an accident to mar the proceedings? A

long, martialed array of names came trooping into his brain, and along

with the names the memories of the faces of all those dead men to whom

the names had belonged. The faces began to pass before him in a mental

procession. This wouldn't do. Since there were no such things as ghosts

or haunts; since, as all sensible men agreed, the dead never came back

from the grave, it was a foolish thing for him to be creating those

unpleasant images in his mind. He shook his head to clear it of

recollections which were the better forgotten. He shook it again and

again.

He would get to bed; a good night's rest would make him feel better and

more natural. It was an excellent idea--this idea of sleep. So he raised

the bottommost half of the curtain-less side window for air, drew down

the shade by the string suspended from its lower cross breadth, until

the lower edge of the shade came even with the window sash, and

undressed himself to his undergarments. He was about to blow out the

light when he remembered he had left the money that was the price of his

morning's work in his trousers which hung, neatly folded, across the

back of a chair by the centre table. He was in the act of withdrawing

the bills from the bottom of one of the trouser-pockets when right at

his feet there was a quick, queer sound of rustling. As he glared down,

startled, out from under the crumpled newspaper came timorously creeping

a half-grown, sickly looking rat, minus its tail, having lost its tail

in a trap, perhaps, or possibly in a battle with other rats.

At best a rat is no pleasant bedroom companion, and besides, Uncle Tobe

had been seriously annoyed. He kicked out with one of his bare feet,

taking the rat squarely in its side as it scurried for its hole in the

wainscoting. He hurt it badly. It landed with a thump ten feet away and

sprawled out on the floor kicking and squealing feebly. Holding the wad

of bills in his left hand, with his right Uncle Tobe deftly plucked up

the crushed vermin by the loose fold of skin at the nape of its neck,

and with a quick flirt of his arm tossed it sidewise from him to cast it

out of the half-opened window. He returned to the table and bent over

and blew down the lamp chimney, and in the darkness felt his way across

the room to his bed. He stretched himself full length upon it, drew the

cotton comforter up to cover him, and shoved the money under the pillow.

His fingers were relaxing their grip on the bills when he saw

something--something which instantly turned him stiff and rigid and

deathly cold all over, leaving him without will-power or strength to

move his head or shift his gaze. Over the white, plastered wall

alongside his bed an unearthly red glow sprang up, turning a deeper,

angrier red as it spread and widened. Against this background next stood

out two perpendicular masses like the broad shadows of uprights--like

the supporting uprights of a gallows, say--and in the squared space of

brightness thus marked off, depending midway from the shadow crossing it

at right angles at the top, appeared a filmy, fine line, which

undoubtedly was the shadow of a cord, and at the end of the cord dangled

a veritable jumping-jack of a silhouette, turning and writhing and

jerking, with a shape which in one breath grotesquely lengthened and in

the next shrank up to half its former dimensions, which kicked out with

indistinct movements of its lower extremities, which flapped with

foreshortened strokes of the shadowy upper limbs, which altogether so

contorted itself as to form the likeness of a thing all out of

perspective, all out of proportion, and all most horribly reminiscent.

* * * * *

A heart with valves already weakened by a chronic affection can stand

just so many shocks in a given time and no more.

* * * * *

A short time later in this same night, at about eight-forty-five

o'clock, to be exact, a man who lived on the opposite side of the

unfenced common gave the alarm of fire over the telephone. The

Chickaloosa fire engine and hose reels came at once, and with the

machines numerous citizens.

In a way of speaking, it turned out to be a false alarm. A bonfire of

leaves and brush, abandoned at dusk by the boys who kindled it, had,

after smouldering a while, sprung up briskly and, flaming high, was now

scorching the clap-boarded side of the Dramm house.

There was no need for the firemen to uncouple a line of hose from the

reel. While two of them made shift to get retorts of a patent

extinguisher from the truck, two more, wondering why Uncle Tobe, even if

in bed and asleep at so early an hour, had not been aroused by the

noise of the crowd's coming, knocked at his front door. There being no

response from within at once, they suspected something must be amiss.

With heaves of their shoulders they forced the door off its hinges, and

entering in company, they groped their passage through the empty front

room into the bedroom behind it, which was lighted after a fashion by

the reflection from the mounting flames without.

The tenant was in bed; he lay on his side with his face turned to the

wall; he made no answer to their hails. When they bent over him they

knew why. No need to touch him, then, with that look on his face and

that stare out of his popped eyes. He was dead, all right enough; but

plainly had not been dead long; not more than a few minutes, apparently.

One of his hands was shoved up under his pillow with the fingers

touching a small roll containing seven ten-dollar bills and one

five-dollar bill; the other hand still gripped a fold of the coverlet as

though the fatal stroke had come upon the old man as he lifted the

bedclothing to draw it up over his face. These incidental facts were

noted down later after the coroner had been called to take charge; they

were the subject of considerable comment next day when the inquest took

place. The coroner was of the opinion that the old man had been killed

by a heart seizure, and that he had died on the instant the attack came.

However, this speculation had no part in the thoughts of the two

startled firemen at the moment of the finding of the body. What most

interested them, next only to the discovery of the presence of the dead

man there in the same room with them, was a queer combination of shadows

which played up and down against the wall beyond the bed, it being

plainly visible in the glare of the small conflagration just outside.

With one accord they turned about, and then they saw the cause of the

phenomenon, and realised that it was not very much of a phenomenon after

all, although unusual enough to constitute a rather curious

circumstance. A crippled, tailless rat had somehow entangled its neck in

a loop at the end of the dangling cord of the half-drawn shade at the

side window on the opposite side of the room and, being too weak to

wriggle free, was still hanging there, jerking and kicking, midway of

the window opening. The glow of the pile of burning leaves and brush

behind and beyond it, brought out its black outlines with remarkable

clearness.

The patterned shadow upon the wall, though, disappeared in the same

instant that the men outside began spraying their chemical compound from

the two extinguishers upon the ambitious bonfire to douse it out, and

one of the firemen slapped the rat down to the floor and killed it with

a stamp of his foot.