s were the death-masks of
those men and women who had fulfilled the awful law which ordains
that the murderer shall be, in his turn, done to death.

"All hanged!" said the guardian of the Black Museum briefly. "Casts
taken after death."

Bunting smiled nervously. "They don't look dead somehow. They
looks more as if they were listening," he said.

"That's the fault of Jack Ketch," said the man facetiously. "It's
his idea--that of knotting his patient's necktie under the left
ear! That's what he does to each of the gentlemen to whom he has
to act valet on just one occasion only. It makes them lean just a
bit to one side. You look here--?"

Daisy and her father came a little closer, and the speaker pointed
with his finger to a little dent imprinted on the left side of each
neck; running from this indentation was a curious little furrow,
well ridged above, showing how tightly Jack Ketch's necktie had been
drawn when its wearer was hurried through the gates of eternity.

"They looks foolish-like, rather than terrified, or--or hurt," said
Bunting wonderingly.

He was extraordinarily moved and fascinated by those dumb, staring
faces.

But young Chandler exclaimed in a cheerful, matter-of-fact voice,
"Well, a man would look foolish at such a time as that, with all his
plans brought to naught--and knowing he's only got a second to live
--now wouldn't he?"

"Yes, I suppose he would," said Bunting slowly.

Daisy had gone a little pale. The sinister, breathless atmosphere
of the place was beginning to tell on her. She now began to
understand that the shabby little objects lying there in the glass
case close to her were each and all links in the chain of evidence
which, in almost every case, had brought some guilty man or woman
to the gallows.

"We had a yellow gentleman here the other day," observed the guardian
suddenly; "one of those Brahmins--so they calls themselves. Well,
you'd a been quite surprised to see how that heathen took on! He
declared--what was the word he used?"--he turned to Chandler.

"He said that each of these things, with the exception of the casts,
mind you--queer to say, he left them out--exuded evil, that was
the word he used! Exuded--squeezed out it means. He said that
being here made him feel very bad. And twasn't all nonsense either.
He turned quite green under his yellow skin, and we had to shove him
out quick. He didn't feel better till he'd got right to the other
end of the passage!"