Gallows For a Gunman

by Rod Miller

  I had served an apprenticeship as a printer in my homeland. But again, my lack of ability to read or write the American language disallowed employment in the composing room as I could not, of course, set type. Oh, I could have made my way, I suppose, performing other tasks as I learned. But the printer’s ink that had blackened my fingers throughout my younger years did not flow in my veins, and my desire was for something different.

  The Army, in those days and even now, offered a haven for the immigrant. The duties required of the enlisted man were simple and easily explained with a few words and gestures. So I found myself in uniform as a private soldier, assigned to the frontier post Fort Custis.

  “Henker!”

  Sarge had a nasty habit of shouting in one’s ear to scare away sleep. I was immediately upright in my bunk, blinking and wondering why. It was still deep darkness.

  “Yessir?”

  “Roll out and report to the stockade.”

  “Stockade? What have I done?” I asked, now frightened as well as disoriented.

  Sarge laughed. “Not a damn thing, Henker. At least not yet. But you’re about to do something. One of the guards over there, Knopfler, has took sick. You’re his replacement. Get a move on.”

  Thus my introduction to law enforcement.

  Knopfler did not recover from his illness, as it turned out, and was buried a week later. My duty as a stockade guard became permanent. Among my charges was a fellow named Walser. He too was recently arrived in America, and his boyhood home had been not far from mine. We knew our friendship would be brief, as he was locked up for killing a comrade. The other soldier had cheated him at a gambling game and Walser, in a drunken rage, beat him to death with an oaken barrel stave.

  To shorten a long story, Walser was sentenced by the court-martial to hang and I was on guard duty when the sentence was executed.

  Military hangings were not public affairs. They were not exactly hidden, understand, as that would interfere with their function as a deterrent to crime. But neither were they festive occasions as civilian hangings often are. At Fort Custis, hangings were rare and the officer in charge of the stockade was responsible for their administration. Walser’s hanging was the first there for more than two years.

  With the usual military precision, the trapdoor was set, rope strung from the gibbet, and Walser marched to the gallows to the rat-a-tat of snare drums. With the usual military ineptitude, the trapdoor jammed, breaking Walser’s fall.

  All of us on duty watched, shocked and sickened at the sight of Walser trussed up like a turkey, convulsing and gagging at the end of the rope. It occurred to none of us, standing there fully armed, to put the poor bastard out of his misery with a gunshot or even the thrust of a bayonet, either of which would have been preferable to the officer’s course of action.

  What the officer-cum-hangman did was this.

  Walser was bobbing at the end of the rope, several feet below the officer’s station at the trip lever atop the gallows. Recovering from his initial shock at the malfunction of the gallows, he walked the few steps across the platform to the trapdoor and gazed down the hole.

  He then grabbed the rope with both hands and slid down its length. His descent ended when his feet hit Walser’s shoulders, and he proceeded to jump up and down there in an attempt to break the soldier’s neck. The sergeant of the guard then joined the action, running under the gallows and wrapping his arms around Walser’s legs and pulling downward.

  Eventually—it seemed hours, but must have been but a few minutes—Walser’s convulsions ceased and he was declared dead.

  In the officer’s defense, he was as shattered by what had occurred as the rest of us who witnessed the catastrophe, if not more so. He informed the commanding officer that, should occasion demand another hanging, he absolutely would not perform the duty, and that an experienced executioner should be brought in for the distasteful task.

  Occasion did demand another hanging, as it turned out, just four months later. An Irishman named Callahan forced his intentions on a washerwoman, whose determined refusal led to a violent beating from which she died. Callahan, whose fondness for drink and ungentlemanly behavior had kept him at the bottom of the ranks despite his many years of service, was sorry for the woman’s death.

  But he did not consider the fault his own, believing the availability of sexual favors on laundry row was his—and every soldier’s—due. His defense boiled down to: “Everyone knows that’s why we have washerwomen—this laundry business is nothing but a sideline. Had the woman done her duty, she’d not be in the fix she’s in.”

  The court-martial did not see it his way, however, and sentenced him to hang.

  True to his word, the officer in charge of the stockade refused the duty. Seeing his point, the post commander sent off to a military prison seeking assistance.

  Dunn answered the call.

  A proper Englishman, Dunn was a military officer, but had little use for the trappings of the service. He saw his duty as executing miscreants, performed his duty with perfection and enthusiasm, and ignored all else.

  As a matter of fact, Dunn walked a fine line, continually in danger of being charged with insubordination for ignoring superior officers, failure to properly attire himself in military uniform and regalia, and exhibiting near-total disregard for protocol in all its forms.

  But give the man a gallows, a length of rope, and a death sentence, and his efficiency and proficiency weighed so heavily in his favor that all else was counterbalanced. Dunn would hang men singly or in groups, adolescents or the aged. He would hang women. He would hang soldiers or Indians, officers or enlisted men. And he hanged them all with a smile on his face.

  I fell under Dunn’s spell the first time I saw him. He breezed into the stockade one afternoon, all bluster and business.

  “Take me to the prisoner Callahan, lad,” he demanded of me.

  “State your business, sir,” I replied, unsure of the “sir” as he was only partially in uniform and his status uncertain.

  “I intend to kill the man. Now stop the nonsense and take me to him or stand aside.”

  “I don’t understand, sir.”

  “I am the executioner, you daft lad. The hangman. I demand an audience with my man. Now hop to it.”

  “Yessir,” I said as realization dawned. “This way, please.”

  I led Dunn upstairs to where Callahan was locked up, and even though I was moving at more than double time, his feet on the steps dogged mine, their impatience hurrying me along even faster.

  “This is it, sir,” I said, stopping before a cell door, like all the others, made of heavy dark wood with a small rectangular hole cut through at eye level.

  “Unlock the door. I have to see my man.”

  “Yessir. But watch him, sir. He’s not in the best of moods lately.”

  “Don’t you worry, lad. I shall not be intimidated by any common criminal. Especially an Irish ruffian.

  “Callahan!” he shouted as I swung the door open. “On your feet!”

  “What the hell do you want?” he asked, blinking in the sudden light.

  “I want to put a noose around your neck and hang you until you are dead. It shouldn’t take more than a minute. I stand ready to do my part. Do you?”

  “Are you giving me a choice then?” Callahan said.

  “Only whether you will face it like a man or like a whimpering Paddy.”

  “Damn the disgrace. My death not only comes on account of a Mexican whore, but at the hands of a bloody Englishman.”

  “You would do well to thank your lucky stars for that, Callahan. Despite the deficiencies of your heritage, professional pride requires that I dispatch you in an instant with neither pain nor suffering. You’ll be burning in the depths of hell before you even know what has happened. Now, turn around.” Callahan turned his back to Dunn and stopped. “Keep going,” Dunn said after a few seconds.

  “You stand five feet and eight inches, I say, and weigh twelve stone and three
.”

  “You’re right with me height. But you’ll have to tell me pounds for I don’t know ‘stone’ from shit.”

  “Twelve stone three makes you one hundred and seventy-one pounds.”

  “Right you are, last time I checked.”

  “Now, Callahan, I must have a feel of your neck. It will take but a few seconds.”

  “My neck? What in hell for?”

  “To determine the strength of the musculature, identify any injuries, check for irregularities of bone structure. All in a good cause, I assure you. Steady on.”

  Dunn then grasped Callahan by the neck and probed and squeezed and stroked with all eight fingers and both thumbs. He asked Callahan to tip his head from side to side and again turn in a circle as he examined the neck from all angles.

  “My God, man,” Dunn said, “you’ve a neck like a Durham bull. Thicker than your head and just as hard.”

  “I don’t suppose that’s cause to spare me as an unlikely candidate for hanging, is it?”

  “No, no. No indeed. Just another inch or two added to the drop. No matter how strong your neck, it will snap like a stick of kindling because your falling body is stronger, you see. Strictly speaking, you will kill yourself when hanged. I am merely the instrument that brings it about.”

  “Some comfort, that,” Callahan said.

  “Until we meet again then, two mornings hence. Buck up,” Dunn said as he turned and left the room. By the time I locked the cell and took the stairs three at a time, he was already well across the parade ground.

  “Mr. Dunn, sir,” I called.

  “Yes?” he said, looking back at me with a curious stare. I hustled over to where he waited.

  “If you don’t mind my asking, sir, what will you be doing next?”

  “I intend to take a late breakfast at the officers’ mess, then get settled in my quarters and perhaps nap for an hour or two before examining the gallows.”

  “Mind if I help you, sir?”

  “With which function—the meal or the nap?” he asked with a twinkle in his eye.

  “No. I’m sorry, sir. Pardon me. With the gallows—the hanging.”

  “Hanging’s caught your fancy, has it, lad?”

  I explained the hanging of Walser, and the distaste it created for shoddy workmanship due to lack of skill. I told him that even though Walser had been something of a friend, even my worst enemy deserved a better fate than the one he suffered.

  And I told him his examination of Callahan had indeed caught my fancy and I wanted to learn more of his methods.

  “I should be delighted to have your assistance,” he said. I had the feeling from his enthusiastic agreement that not many people expressed an interest. I found out later—both from Dunn and from my own experience—that not only do hangmen fail to arouse interest among the mass of mankind, they are more often shunned and despised.

  “I shall request—demand actually—that the post commander assign you to me as assistant executioner throughout the duration of my stay.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Don’t thank me yet, lad. You may regret those words later. Save your gratitude until the hanging is accomplished and see if you still wish to express it then.”

  That afternoon we—he, I should say; I merely hung over his shoulder—checked the gallows from the bottom of the pit to the top of the gibbet. A pair of carpenters had been detailed to Dunn, and he outlined a series of tasks for them, shimming up the platform to level it, reinforcing the joints on the gibbet, and replacing warped planks on the stairway.

  The offending trapdoor was removed entirely, and Dunn demanded the carpenters smash it up on the spot. He sketched out plans for a replacement, and sent the carpenters to the shop to see to its manufacture.

  We next visited the blacksmith shop, where he ordered the smith to forge a new set of hinges and bolts and a trip mechanism. Despite the protests of the smith that the work would take three days to accomplish, Dunn demanded it be finished in twenty-four hours with the threat of court-martial if he failed. I had already discovered that while Dunn had no use for military protocol, he did not hesitate to use his rank as a weapon in order to force his will.

  Long into the night and all the next morning, Dunn schooled me in many aspects of the hanging art—which is what he considered the task.

  “It is a science in many ways,” he said, “requiring mastery of engineering, mathematics, physics. But a hangman must also be a philosopher, moralist, and mystic. The combination of such disparate skills is indeed an art, lad.”

  He related the ways and means of hanging in England, where the most advanced techniques and methods were developed and are continually refined.

  “There was a hangman in Yorkshire, Mr. Berry he was, who reasoned out the number four hundred and twelve—an otherworldly number that forever changed hanging. It is a simple and elegant solution to calculating the length of drop.

  “Simply divide four hundred twelve by the condemned’s weight in stone, and you have it. Accurate to within an inch, as simple as that. A major breakthrough which saved untold grief and suffering on the one hand and blood and gore on the other.

  “It doesn’t work, of course, here in the colonies where weight is no longer measured the English way. While no one, to my knowledge, has arrived at an American equivalent to Mr. Berry’s magic number, I have developed conversion charts that serve me well. It is unfortunate, though, that as in so many other ways, American imitations are but crude facsimiles of their English counterparts.”

  We talked of rope, and the superiority of three-quarter-inch, five-strand Italian hemp. He showed me how to soften the fibers and make the rope more pliable and lively by rubbing in gun oil. He told of the advantages some perceived in a metal ring with a leather keeper over the traditional hangman’s knot, but allowed that he preferred the thirteen-coil knot for symbolic reasons, if not functional ones—for he personally believed the added force of the coils snapping the head aside at the point of impact contributed to a cleaner break.

  He showed me the proper method of tying the hangman’s noose—getting the proper twist in the coils, the proper tautness, the proper appearance. He demonstrated its placement, with the knot set just at the angle of the jaw on the left side of the head in order to achieve the proper sideways jerk. It was important to Dunn that everything be “proper.”

  And he regaled me with tales of hangings gone bad because of an “improper” approach. The stranglings, like poor Walser suffered, where a body can struggle for five minutes or more before the life is choked out of it. These, he said, are the result of insufficient drop.

  And he told me of the opposite problem—too long a drop. He had witnessed botched hangings where the extreme force of the drop snapped the head right off the body, leaving the head to bob in the noose while the body poured blood into the pit, often spraying bystanders.

  I confess fascination with it all. I cannot explain its appeal. Perhaps it was the fact that I was able, from the beginning, to separate the humanity of the hanged from the technique of the hanging. I do not know. But it seemed to me then, as it still does, that it was a job that needed to be done and it deserved to be done well.

  Upon delivery of the new ironwork and woodwork to the gallows, Dunn directed the installation of the new trapdoor. His improvements in the mechanism were immediately obvious. The trip lever slid the bolts with silken smoothness and the hinges allowed the door to fall as freely as if it were unattached. Dunn repeatedly applied lubricant to the bolts and hinges, wiped them clean, and applied a different type of oil or grease in an effort to find one which performed flawlessly. I was satisfied long before he was.

  Then the oiled rope was anchored and looped around a bag containing exactly one hundred and seventy-one pounds, as measured on the sutler’s scale, of a mixture of sand and lead shot. Dunn dropped the bag through the trap several times, exactly eight feet and eight inches.

  “You have to stretch your ropes, lad,” he told me. “A
fresh rope, see, has a bit of give in it. Hang a man with it and the stop isn’t so sudden—it stretches a bit when it hits bottom so some of the energy of the drop is directed into the rope rather than the victim’s neck.

  “Snapping the neck cleanly between the second and third cervical vertebrae requires a striking force of twenty-four hundredweight. That’s the purpose of all the tables, you see. But if the rope stretches, it absorbs some of the force and you’re back to strangling the man, even if you’ve calculated the drop correctly.”

  Once the rope was properly stretched, the bag stopped dead at the end, with nary a bounce nor bob, merely a low-frequency twang and resounding hum. Dunn stopped immediately, declaring the rope perfect and not wishing to weaken it with further tests.

  The hanging of Callahan was accomplished without a hitch. And I was hooked.

  My assignment as Dunn’s assistant was made permanent, pending approval from up the chain of command, which was granted. I accompanied him back to the military prison and served as his assistant for a period of two years and four months and thirty-three hangings. Dunn was satisfied with my performance and declared that he had taught me all he knew, and that experience only would improve my abilities.

  When my term of enlistment was up, I opted to leave military service and ply my trade as a hangman in the civilian world. The work has been steady, satisfying, and lucrative. I have never wanted for money and can work on my own terms. The expertise I learned at Dunn’s feet has served me well.

  I have enjoyed the privileges of travel. My work takes me to city and town, from the civilized East to the barely tamed West, from sultry Southern climes to wind-whipped Northern winters. I have visited deserts so arid they dry the saliva right out of your mouth, and witnessed the deadly force of hurricane-driven rains.

  I have moved about by horseback and buggy, stagecoach and freight wagon, and spent more hours and days and weeks and months on the move than I could remember even had I been sober. With the advent of the modern rail network, I seldom find myself at any great distance—in terms of time—from any assignment I choose to accept. But the travel is still extensive, as much by my choice as circumstance.