Lynch Law 
subjected. On landing, we found these people 
in a state of excitement. It appeared that on 
the night preceding the day of our arrival one 
of a party of four who were of the same “‘ outfit,” 
and inhabited the same tent, seemed to think 
that his comrades disliked him for no apparent 
reason that I could learn ; probably he had been 
drinking heavily. He put his head inside the 
flap of the tent, then, pointing his revolver, shot 
dead on the spot, and in cold blood, two of his 
companions. The fourth man put the candle 
out, slipping beneath the canvas at the back. 
The assassin slept in the tent that night. In 
the morning the whole camp was wild with 
rage; the murderer could not possibly have 
escaped into the back country, where he would 
inevitably have starved to death in a few days. 
The tent was surrounded on all sides by the 
angry miners, every man of whom was armed 
with a repeating-rifie. A tall man, who told me 
the story, then went up to the tent, calling out 
to the man inside to come out. He must have 
known that the game was up, and that, had he 
made a movement to shoot the man who was 
trying to arrest him, he would have been riddled 
with bullets from a hundred rifles. So he 
quietly handed up his “ gun.” He was then 
brought before a number of men who constituted 
themselves his judges—a miners’ meeting—who, 
after hearing the evidence from the man who 
207 
