From Place to Place | Page 7

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