in a row," but the delay of the train on the road deprived us of the means of verifying the statement, and I give it as it was made. It would seem as if the criminal supply were super-abundant, or that death on the gallows had no deterrent influence. The chances of escape are, if not numerous, at least considerable. At Deming, Denver, Leadville, Tucson, Tombstone, and other cities, the vast mass of the inhabitants are law-abiding, peaceable, honest, and honourable men, who feel as much horror at the violence and bloodshed around them as the most refined lady in any saloon of Boston, Paris, or London, but they appear to endure these things in the hope that the law will be enforced at last; now and then they break into vigilance committees and execute their own decrees, though the judges do not fail to lay it down that they have been accessories to murder. The great civiliser and police agent is the railroad. It is affirmed that as the iron way is pushed on the outlaws and the _personnel_ of outlawry congregate at the terminal town, but I suspect that there is a fringe of the material left on the border as it runs. As our party were at dinner in the palace-car one evening the train pulled up at a station. There was a group of rough men on the platform, who stared in with all their eyes at the white tablecloth, set with bright glass and silver, and at the cheerful faces under the lamps. "How merry they are. I wonder if they know that this is Dodge City?" exclaimed one of the crowd. I was told by an official that when they were making a railway in these parts the surveyors, &c., were much troubled by gangs of gamblers and robbers, who impeded the work and debauched the men, so after due warning they made a razzia on the gamblers, shot a lot of them, and the rest "vamosed." There was not very long ago an actual war in the Grand Cañon Valley between the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé Railway and the Denver and Rio Grande Railway, in which there was an array of armed forces and fighting on both sides, and we saw with our own eyes the remains of the breastworks cast up in the Grand Cañon by the belligerents. The law came in at last. "One side got at the judge first and gave him $50,000. The other was quite ready to go beyond that, but the first was too quick, and the suit went against the company." I was talking to a lawyer about the length of time which is allowed by the judges to criminals sentenced to death as a detail of the execution of the law not in accordance with the general practice of civilised nations, when one of the company remarked, "They must do it, sir, to please the people. If we had Judas Iscariot in gaol to-morrow there would be thousands of petitions to commute his sentence, and thousands of dollars ready for an appeal to the Supreme Court. Our people don't like prompt sentence." Nevertheless, sentence and execution are pretty swift when the desperadoes take the law into their own hands, as we have seen.