epulsive and awful, more revolting to him than the sight
of bloodless death itself. From the taking of human life I draw back.
But no repugnance, no horror, unsteadies my hand elsewhere. The end of
the crimes of your devilish confederacy has come. The law has not
restrained you, could not. Your own unparalleled wickedness has
delivered you into my hands. Many a man have you brought low, many a
family have you desolated. Widows and orphans cry out against you, and
not in vain. I shall so knock your gang that never again shall one of
you harm even the weakest. You shall all live, but it shall be your
prayer, if you black hearts can utter prayer, that you be dead."

The outlaw's tongue moved thickly in a mouth that dried suddenly at
these solemn words of the doctor. "You can't do it, you can't do it,
you can't do it, you duffer----" and his voice rumbled on in a long
string of imprecations.

The doctor seized him and carrying him to the cellar, lay him against
the coal bin. Then the captive heard him in a room above engaged upon
some sort of carpentry, and whether it was the captive's imagination,
or design of the doctor, or whether unconsciously the doctor's mind
had become possessed, the sounds of the hammer as it drove nails and
struck pieces of wood into place echoed in the cellar; "knock,
knock--knock; knock, knock--knock." Soon the stairs groaned under the
weight of the doctor carrying some great contrivance, and the outlaw
found himself lying stretched out upon some sort of operating chair,
his ankles held in a pair of stocks below, his outstretched arms held
by the wrists in a pair of stocks above. All was black in the cellar,
all but where a single blood red bar of light from the open door of
the furnace fell upon the doctor turning at the winch of the bed of
torture upon which lay the robber.

Hardly ten turns did he make, for at the first little twinges of pain,
premonishing the agonies to come, the caitiff chattered in terror
promises to do all the doctor should order, and so was released.
Cringing and fawning, the outlaw heard what he was required to do. He
was to write a letter. In this, he was to tell of the method of his
capture. He was to say he was confined in a second-story room, feet
and hands shackled, and that he was also chained to a staple in the
floor. (That this all might be true, the doctor took him to a
second-story room and so fettered him.) He found himself able to use
his hands to write, a