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“It is true that I hesitate to kill. I am not proud of this hesitation, for the trend of the best medical and sociological thought is now toward the execution of all degenerates and criminals, that they may not contaminate the race with descendants. However, my office is to save life and I cannot do otherwise. But I am a surgeon, and every day I do things in the effort to save and prolong life that to a layman are repulsive 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, and, happily, discovered writing material and stamps upon a table. He would write a letter and throw it on the porch below, where perhaps the postman would find it and send it to its destination. He asked help. His friends must come that night. The doctor would be on guard, and who could say he would not call in others? The doors and windows were all well secured, all but a cellar window on the east side. (Of this, the doctor informed him, that he, the doctor, might not be guilty of instigating the writing of anything that was false in any particular.) They must enter by this window. The door leading above stairs from the cellar could be easily forced and the noise thus occasioned could not be heard outside of the house. They must come at two in the morning. Come before another dawn, as the doctor was going to hold him one day before turning him over to the police, hoping the gang would do something to involve themselves in some way they would not if the police were after them with a hue and cry.