Judge Davis alone stood by the unhappy man in this his great extremity, and tried to save his life. He conversed with several leaders of the Committee, suggesting that they should substitute banishment for death. But the people were implacable. Slade’s life among them had been violent, lawless, desperate. No brigand was more dreaded by all who knew him; and the speech which, at the foot of the gallows, Davis addressed to the crowd in his behalf, fell like water upon adamant. There was no mercy left for one who had so often forfeited all claims to mercy. Yet there were a few men, even among those who had doomed this man to death, that would have given all they possessed to save his life. They could not witness his execution; and some of them, stout of heart and accustomed to disaster, it is no shame to say, wept like children when they beheld him on his march to the scaffold. As soon as Slade found all entreaty useless, he sent a messenger for his wife, and recovered in some degree his wonted composure. The only favor he now asked of the Committee was that his execution might be delayed until his wife arrived,—a favor that would have been granted could the Committee have been assured that her presence and remarkable courage would not have excited an attempt at rescue, and been the cause of bloodshed. The scaffold, formed of the gateway of a corral, was soon prepared, and, everything being in readiness, Slade was placed upon a dry-goods box, with the fatal cord around his neck. Several gentlemen whom he sent for came to see him and bid him farewell. One of his comrades, who had exhausted himself in prayers for his release, as the fatal moment drew nigh, threw off his coat, and, doubling his fists, declared that Slade should be hanged only over his dead body. The aim of a hundred rifles brought him to his senses, and he was glad to escape upon a promise of future good behavior. The execution immediately followed, Slade dying with the fall of the drop. His body was removed to the Virginia Hotel, and decently laid out. A few moments later his wife, mounted on a fleet horse, dashed up to the hotel, and rushed madly to the bed on which the body lay. Casting herself upon the inanimate form, she gave way to a paroxysm of grief. Her cries were heartrending, mingled with deep and bitter curses upon those who had deprived her of her husband. Hours elapsed before she was sufficiently composed to give directions for the disposition of the body. “Why, oh, why,” she exclaimed, in an agony of grief, “did not some of you, the friends of Slade, shoot him down, and not suffer him to die on the scaffold? I would have done it had I been here. He should never have died by the rope of the hangman. No dog’s death should have come to such a man.”