ch were so cut as
to enclose his lower face in a nappy fringe, extending from ear to ear
under his chin. He suffered from a chronic heart affection, and this
gave to his skin a pronounced and unhealthy pallor. He was neat and prim
in his personal habits, kind to dumb animals, and tolerant of small
children. He was inclined to be miserly; certainly in money matters he
was most prudent and saving. He had the air about him of being lonely.
His name was Tobias Dramm. In the town where he lived he was commonly
known as Uncle Tobe Dramm. By profession he was a public hangman. You
might call him a gallowsmith. He hanged men for hire.

So far as the available records show, this Tobias Dramm was the only man
of his calling on this continent. In himself he constituted a specialty
and a monopoly. The fact that he had no competition did not make him
careless in the pursuit of his calling. On the contrary, it made him
precise and painstaking. As one occupying a unique position, he realized
that he had a reputation to sustain, and capably he sustained it. In the
Western Hemisphere he was, in the trade he followed, the nearest modern
approach to the paid executioners of olden times in France who went,
each of them, by the name of the city or province wherein he was
stationed, to do torturing and maiming and killing in the gracious name
of the king.

A generous government, committed to a belief in the efficacy of capital
punishment, paid Tobias Dramm at the rate of seventy-five dollars a head
for hanging offenders convicted of the hanging crime, which was murder.
He averaged about four hangings every three months or, say, about nine
hundred dollars a year--all clear money.

The manner of Mr. Dramm's having entered upon the practise of this
somewhat grisly trade makes in itself a little tale. He was a lifelong
citizen of the town of Chickaloosa, down in the Southwest, where there
stood a State penitentiary, and where, during the period of which I am
speaking, the Federal authorities sent for confinement and punishment
the criminal sweepings of half a score of States and Territories. This
was before the government put up prisons of its own, and while still it
parcelled out its human liabilities among State-owned institutions,
paying so much apiece for their keep. When the government first began
shipping a share of its felons to Chickaloosa, there came along, in one
clanking caravan of shackled malefactors, a half-breed, part Mexican an