From Place to Place | Page 2

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