Witnesses at the investigation into the circumstances testified that at half-past eleven o'clock forty or fifty horsemen, in the regulation garb and armed with revolvers, their horses robed and hooded, approached to within a short distance of the hotel, where all except the customary horse-holders dismounted and quickly and unhesitatingly entered the hotel office, posted guards at all entrances, and then commanded the clerk to take up a candle and show them to Mr. Boyd's apartment. Obediently the clerk led the way until he reached the corridor upon which opened the room they sought. Pausing here, in his speechlessness he indicated the door by pointing, and then fled the scene. Within a brief space an agonized scream, heard blocks away, issued from the room of the doomed man, and was almost instantly succeeded by a heavy volley of pistol shots. The panic-stricken clerk had hardly resumed his seat upon the office stool, with hands to ears and head bowed upon his ledger, when the dread invaders reappeared in the office. Signaling with whistles the recall of sentinels, they quietly withdrew, remounted and rode around the square, in military order, and then departed in the direction from which they first appeared. [They were traced to the Mississippi border line.] After their departure, officials and others repaired to the corridor and discovered the dead body, robed in night dress, perforated with many bullets and almost completely drained of blood. Not a shot had missed the mark. Inside the room a table, bearing a lighted lamp, his revolver and watch, stood close to the head of the bed. He had not attempted to use the weapon. Evidently the purpose of his slayers was to remove him from the building, for one of them carried a suggestive coil of rope, but his outcry and struggles settled his fate. Boyd was a nephew of William Miller, probate judge. Some years before the war he was convicted of killing a young man named Charner Brown, and sentenced to a term in the penitentiary. A petition in his behalf was presented to Governor Winston, and in response thereto the sentence was commuted to one year's imprisonment in the county jail. Having served the sentence, Boyd departed for another state. At the close of the war he reappeared, and, following the example of his uncle, sought office in 1868 at the hands of the negroes, and was made county solicitor and register in chancery. He was not distinguished as a prosecutor, but regarded as indifferent.