From Place to Place | Page 3

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 rôle 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,