gh the opening the haltered form shot straight downward
to bring up with a great jerk, and after that to dangle like a plumb-bob
on a string. Under the quick strain the gallows-arm creaked and whined;
in the silence which followed the hangman was heard to exhale his breath
in a vast puff of relief. His hand went up to his forehead to wipe
beads of sweat which for all that the morning was cool almost to
coldness, had suddenly popped out through his skin. He for one was
mighty glad the thing was done, and, as he in this moment figured, well
done.

But for once and once only as those saw who had the hardihood to look,
Uncle Tobe had botched up a job. Perhaps it was because of his great
haste to make an end of a scandalous scene; perhaps because the tirade
of the bound malefactor had discomfited him and made his fingers fumble
this one time at their familiar task. Whatever the cause, it was plainly
enough to be seen that the heavy knot had not cracked the Lone-Hand
Kid's spine. The noose, as was ascertained later, had caught on the edge
of the broad jawbone, and the man, instead of dying instantly, was
strangling to death by degrees and with much struggling.

In the next half minute a thing even more grievous befell. The broad
strap which girthed the murderer's trunk just above the bend of the
elbows, held fast, but the rest of the harness, having been improperly
snaffled on, loosened and fell away from the twitching limbs so that as
the elongated body twisted to and fro in half circles, the lower arms
winnowed the air in foreshortened and contorted flappings, and the freed
legs drew up and down convulsively.

Very naturally, Uncle Tobe was chagrined; perhaps he had hidden within
him emotions deeper than those bred of a personal mortification. At any
rate, after a quick, distressed glance through the trap at the writhing
shape of agony below, he turned his eyes from it and looked steadfastly
at the high wall facing him. It chanced to be the western wall, which
was bathed in a ruddy glare where the shafts of the upcoming sun,
lifting over the panels at the opposite side of the fenced enclosure,
began to fall diagonally upon the whitewashed surface just across. And
now, against that glowing plane of background opposite him, there
appeared as he looked the slanted shadow of a swaying rope framed in at
right and at left by two broader, deeper lines which were the shadows
marking the timber uprights that supported the scaffold