“He looks at him, and says he, ‘I can’t talk to you now: I’m busy. You must come around after working hours.’ Then the prisoner says, ‘You’ve got to talk to me, and you’ve got to talk to me now.’ And Mr. Steel he says, ‘Wal’, I ain’t agoin’ to,’ and turned round to take hold of the lumber again; and the prisoner, he reaches down and pulls out his pistol, and, before I could holler to him or do anything, he just put it close behind Mr. Steel’s head and fired. Mr. Steel dropped, and the prisoner he ran. I started round the waggon to grab him, but he ran t’other way. Then I picked up Mr. Steel; he was breathing, but he never spoke. The bullet went in at the back of his head, and come out over his right eye. Me and some more took him into the house.” “Mr. Tallboys, have you any question to ask this witness?” said Captain Sopris. Mr. Tallboys consulted with the prisoner awhile, and announced that he had not. The witness, a teamster, was accordingly dismissed, like the former one. Three or four more were called, and repeated the story told by these two in much the same words. It was elicited that the prisoner had had no pistol on when he came to dinner and was put out-of-doors, so that he must have procured it in the interval before he came back. The case was so clear that there was no necessity to distress those poor, unhappy women by calling them. One of the men who captured the prisoner testified that he was at work near, and “happened to have a saddled horse near, and a Winchester handy.” Also that he had a friend similarly provided. Tenderfoot though I was, it dawned on me that these men must belong to an organized body who had made themselves ready beforehand. Evans had its Vigilantes. The two friends heard a shot, saw a man with a pistol running for the brush, heard the people crying murder, and at once set after him. He just got to cover as they caught him up, but he showed no fight; as soon as they covered him with the Winchesters, he threw up his hands and surrendered, and here he was. Here the lawyer saw his chance to put a few questions in cross-examination, asking whether they promised the prisoner his life when he surrendered, and so forth; but nothing came out that could help him. Things looked terribly black for the wretched man, and he began to cry. Nothing could have been more orderly than the behaviour of the court. While the witnesses were being examined, you might have heard a pin drop. Between whiles the crowd conversed among themselves, but in sober and hushed tones. There was no yelling of a mob for the blood of a victim, but a most evident deadly resolution to exact the uttermost penalty. I remember thinking to myself, “How I wish Carlyle were here” (he was still alive in those days), “to feel for himself the contrast between this and the revolutionary tribunals of Paris! This would seem to him more like some old Teuton gathering of freemen in the Northern forests.”