ive expert judgment that the fall through the trap breaks the
victim's neck. And the victims, like Shakespeare's traveller, never
return to testify to the contrary. But we who have lived in the stir
know of the cases that are hushed in the prison crypts, where the
victim's necks are not broken.

It is a funny thing, this hanging of a man. I have never seen a hanging,
but I have been told by eye-witnesses the details of a dozen hangings so
that I know what will happen to me. Standing on the trap, leg-manacled
and arm-manacled, the knot against the neck, the black cap drawn, they
will drop me down until the momentum of my descending weight is fetched
up abruptly short by the tautening of the rope. Then the doctors will
group around me, and one will relieve another in successive turns in
standing on a stool, his arms passed around me to keep me from swinging
like a pendulum, his ear pressed close to my chest, while he counts my
fading heart-beats. Sometimes twenty minutes elapse after the trap is
sprung ere the heart stops beating. Oh, trust me, they make most
scientifically sure that a man is dead once they get him on a rope.

I still wander aside from my narrative to ask a question or two of
society. I have a right so to wander and so to question, for in a little
while they are going to take me out and do this thing to me. If the neck
of the victim be broken by the alleged shrewd arrangement of knot and
noose, and by the alleged shrewd calculation of the weight of the victim
and the length of slack, then why do they manacle the arms of the victim?
Society, as a whole, is unable to answer this question. But I know why;
so does any amateur who ever engaged in a lynching bee and saw the victim
throw up his hands, clutch the rope, and ease the throttle of the noose
about his neck so that he might breathe.

Another question I will ask of the smug, cotton-wooled member of society,
whose soul has never strayed to the red hells. Why do they put the black
cap over the head and the face of the victim ere they drop him through
the trap? Please remember that in a short while they will put that black
cap over my head. So I have a right to ask. Do they, your hang-dogs, O
smug citizen, do these your hang-dogs fear to gaze upon the facial horror
of the horror they perpetrate for you and ours and at your behest?

Please remember that I am not asking this question in the
twelve-hundredth year after Christ, nor in the time