, Uncle Tobe would
advance forward, and laying a kindly, almost a paternal hand upon the
shoulder of the man who must die, would steer him to a certain spot in
the centre of the platform, just beneath a heavy cross-beam. There
would follow a quick shifting of the big, gnarled hands over the
unresisting body of the doomed man, and almost instantly, so it seemed
to those who watched, all was in order: the arms of the murderer drawn
rearward and pressed in close against his ribs by a broad girth
encircling his trunk at the elbows, his wrists caught together in
buckled leather cuffs behind his back; his knees and his ankles fast in
leathern loops which joined to the rest of the apparatus by means of a
transverse strap drawn tautly down the length of his legs, at the back;
the black-cloth head-bag with its peaked crown in place; the noose
fitted; the hobbled and hooded shape perhaps swaying a trifle this way
and that; and Uncle Tobe on his tiptoes stepping swiftly over to a
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