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