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 role 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, but in all other essentials a small-town man with a small-town
mind; in short, saw Uncle Tobe as he really was. The reporter did
something else which marked him as a craftsman. Without stating the fact
in words, he nevertheless contrived to create in the lines which he
wrote an atmosphere of self-defence enveloping the old man--or perhaps
the better phrase woul