From Place to Place | Page 9

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