unseeing eyes, and dragging feet; other white men who summoned up a
mockery of bravado and uttered poor jests from between lips drawn back
in defiant sneering as they gave themselves over to the hangman, so that
only Uncle Tobe, feeling their flesh crawling under their grave-clothes
as he tied them up, knew a hideous terror berode their bodies. At
length, in the tenth year of his career as a paid executioner he was
called upon to visit his professional attentions upon a man different
from any of those who had gone down the same dread chute.

The man in question was a train-bandit popularly known as the Lone-Hand
Kid, because always he conducted his nefarious operations without
confederates. He was a squat, dark ruffian, as malignant as a moccasin
snake, and as dangerous as one. He was filthy in speech and vile in
habit, being in his person most unpicturesque and most unwholesome, and
altogether seemed a creature more viper than he was man. The sheriffs of
two border States and the officials of a contiguous reservation sought
for him many times, long and diligently, before a posse overcame him in
the hills by over-powering odds and took him alive at the cost of two of
its members killed outright and a third badly crippled. So soon as
surgeons plugged up the holes in his hide which members of the vengeful
posse shot into him after they had him surrounded and before his
ammunition gave out, he was brought to bar to answer for the unprovoked
murder of a postal clerk on a transcontinental limited. No time was
wasted in hurrying his trial through to its conclusion; it was felt that
there was crying need to make an example of this red-handed desperado.
Having been convicted with commendable celerity, the Lone-Hand Kid was
transferred to Chickaloosa and strongly confined there against the day
of Uncle Tobe's ministrations upon him.

From the very hour that the prosecution was started, the Lone-Hand Kid,
whose real name was the prosaic name of Smith, objected strongly to this
procedure which in certain circles is known as "railroading." He
insisted that he was being legally expedited out of life on his record
and not on the evidence. There were plenty of killings for any one of
which he might have been tried and very probably found guilty, but he
reckoned it a profound injustice that he should be indicted, tried, and
condemned for a killing he had not committed. By his code he would not
have rebelled strongly against being punis