roached her,
offering awkward condolences, and at once was moved to a further
expression of his sympathy for her in her great loss by trying to shake
her hand. At the touch of his fingers to hers the woman, already in a
mood of grief bordering on hysteria, shrank back screaming out that his
hand smelled of the soap with which he coated his gallows-nooses. She
ran away from him, crying out as she ran, that he was accursed; that he
was marked with that awful smell and could not rid himself of it. To
those who had witnessed this scene the hangman, with rather an injured
and bewildered air, made explanation. The poor woman, he said, was
wrong; although in a way of speaking she was right, too. He did, indeed,
use the same yellow bar soap for washing his hands that he used for
anointing his ropes. It was a good soap, and cheap; he had used the same
brand regularly for years in cleansing his hands. Since it answered the
first purpose so well, what possible harm could there be in slicking the
noose of the rope with it when he was called upon to conduct one of his
jobs over up at the prison? Apparently he was at a loss to fathom the
looks they cast at him when he had finished with this statement and had
asked this question. He began a protest, but broke off quickly and went
away shaking his head as though puzzled that ordinarily sane folks
should be so squeamish and so unreasonable. But he kept on using the
soap as before.

* * * * *

Until now this narrative has been largely preamble. The real story
follows. It concerns itself with the birth of an imagination.

In his day Uncle Tobe hanged all sorts and conditions of men--men who
kept on vainly hoping against hope for an eleventh-hour reprieve long
after the last chance of reprieve had vanished, and who on the gallows
begged piteously for five minutes, for two minutes, for one minute more
of precious grace; negroes gone drunk on religious exhortation who died
in a frenzy, sure of salvation, and shouting out halleluiahs; Indians
upborne and stayed by a racial stoicism; Chinamen casting stolid,
slant-eyed glances over the rim of the void before them and filled with
the calmness of the fatalist who believes that whatever is to be, is to
be; white men upon whom at the last, when all prospect of intervention
was gone, a mental numbness mercifully descended with the result that
they came to the rope's embrace like men in a walking coma, with glazed,