Some persons have been uncharitable enough to suggest that the general manager and the range foreman had entered into a conspiracy and “put up a job” on the company for their personal pecuniary benefit, namely, anticipating and perhaps urging the removal of one herd, they had “doctored” the tally sheets so as to show two thousand head less than the real number. Then, when the gather was made, if they found all the books called for less, say two or three hundred, they could buy the remnant for a few hundred dollars--less than half of the market value of the shortage, for it costs nearly all the value of the tailings of a herd to gather it--and thus have a two thousand herd of their own. But the little unpleasantness of the invasion made the climate of Johnson County unhealthy for Messrs. Baxter and Shonsey, and the cattle gathering had to be done by cowboys not in the deal. Thus, everything bearing the company’s brands was brought in and the soft snap so carefully planned was “given away.” Assuming that there is no truth in this very plausible story, which is proper in the absence of direct proof, and that if Baxter and Shonsey had made the gather of the cattle, the same results would have been secured, the fact remains that the herd had not been looted, as claimed by Baxter and his co-workers in the invasion, and the belligerent attitude was assumed without cause. Baxter must accept one of the two horns of this dilemma--he either allowed the tally sheets to be incorrectly made out, or he knowingly set up a false cry of stolen cattle to justify an outrage upon his state and the people such as was before unknown in the history of the United States, for no practical cattleman, as he claims to be, could visit his range month after month and year after year without realizing that his herd was rapidly increasing, instead of being day by day growing less from wholesale robbery, as he everywhere proclaimed. This effectually lifts the charge of cattle stealing from the citizens of Johnson County. Several members of the Texas contingent of the invaders have paid the debt of nature since their release from custody by the Wyoming court, all dying with “their boots on”; and many of them under circumstances peculiarly distressing. One of the sad stories will be sufficient to record here. The article copied below is from the Buffalo Voice of a date early in February, 1894, under the heading, “Vengeance Is Mine”: