Word: hangman
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That unsolicited testimonial comes from Rhodesia's retired hangman, Edward ("The Dropper") Milton, and it is in praise of the fiber extracted from a cactus-like plant that grows mostly in Africa and Latin America. Not everyone, however, feels the same affection for sisal. Though it is still used in rope, twine, potato sacks and carpets, sisal is being steadily replaced by nylon and other synthetics. Its last bastion is agricultural twine, which now accounts for 75% of world sisal production...
Desperado Dean Martin and four of his scruffy gunmates are set to swing for murder. The visiting hangman (James Stewart) rides into town looking like Ichabod Crane with a bad case of saddle sores, and cacklingly tells the condemned that they have the kind of "necks that'll snap pretty good." The joke, see, is that Stewart is really Martin's square-shootin' brother, and the hangman bit is a ruse to spring Dino and the boys. The trick clicks, and the gang gallops off into the bandolero (bandit) country of Mexico. On the way they pick...
...maximum-security prison. Their number swelled at week's end with the sentencing to death of five Africans convicted of entering Rhodesia with "weapons of war"-a newly created capital offense. The gallows, on the other hand, became suddenly unmanned; the government dismissed Rhodesia's only hangman, Edward ("Lofty") Milton, probably because he has been talking too much to the press about his work...
...style ambush and the third of whom, Duly Shadrack, had axed a native chief to death in the bush. But by blatantly ignoring the mercy move of Queen Elizabeth, to whom they still claimed to profess fealty, the leaders of the runaway colony also applied the hangman's noose to the few fragile hopes that still remained for a reconciliation with Britain...
...crime. The guilty party is a third person, created by the challenges Hickock and Smith defy the polarities of sanity and insanity. It is said that neither of them would have committed the act alone. Against their insensitivity, the mechanistic judicial system, with its $300-a-head hangman, bears a brutality...