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-rifle. 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 



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