t, and for this there was a double cause.
First, his parsimonious instincts; second, the fact that for love or
money no negro would minister to him, and in this community negroes were
the only household servants to be had. Among the darkies there was
current a belief that at dead of night he dug up the bodies of those he
had hanged and peddled the cadavers to the "student doctors." They said
he was in active partnership with the devil; they said the devil took
over the souls of his victims, paying therefor in red-hot dollars, after
the hangman was done with their bodies. The belief of the negroes that
this unholy traffic existed amounted with them to a profound conviction.
They held Mr. Dramm in an awesome and horrified veneration, bowing to
him most respectfully when they met him, and then sidling off hurriedly.
It would have taken strong horses to drag any black-skinned resident of
Chickaloosa to the portals of the little three-roomed frame cottage in
the outskirts of the town which Uncle Tobe tenanted. Therefore he lived
by himself, doing his own skimpy marketing and his own simple
housekeeping. Loneliness was a part of the penalty he paid for following
the calling of a gallowsmith.

Among members of his own race he had no close friends. For the most part
the white people did not exactly shun him, but, as the saying goes in
the Southwest, they let him be. They were well content to enshrine him
as a local celebrity, and ready enough to point him out to visitors, but
by an unwritten communal law the line was drawn there. He was as one set
apart for certain necessary undertakings, and yet denied the intimacy of
his kind because he performed them acceptably. If his aloof and solitary
state ever distressed him, at least he gave no outward sign of it, but
went his uncomplaining way, bearing himself with a homely, silent
dignity, and enveloped in those invisible garments of superstition which
local prejudice and local ignorance had conjured up.

Ready as he was when occasion suited, to justify his avocation in the
terms of that same explanation which he had given to the young reporter
from St. Louis that time, and greatly though he may have craved to gain
the good-will of his fellow citizens, he was never known openly to rebel
against his lot. The nearest he ever came to doing this was once when he
met upon the street a woman of his acquaintance who had suffered a
recent bereavement in the death of her only daughter. He app