Читать книгу Vigilante Days and Ways. The pioneers of the Rockies; the makers and making of Montana and Idaho онлайн

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“There goes another nail into your coffin, Ferd.”

Wincing under these repeated admonitions, Patterson’s eyes assumed their blood-drinking expression, and at last the mental strain becoming too great for longer composure, he exclaimed with a profane curse,

“I wish it had been he, in the place of Old Pinkham.”

Upon the trial of Donahue the jury failed to agree. He was remanded to prison, from which he afterwards escaped, fled to California, where he was rearrested, and released upon a writ of habeas corpus, by the strange decision that the provision of the Constitution of the United States requiring one State to deliver up a fugitive from justice to another claiming him, did not apply to Territories.

To certain of my readers, some explanation for detailing at such length the life of a ruffian and murderer may be necessary. Not so, however, to those familiar with mountain history. They will understand that both Patterson and Pinkham were noted and important members of frontier society, representative men, so to speak, of the classes to which they belonged. Their followers regarded them with a hero-worship which magnified their faults into virtues, and their acts into deeds of more than chivalric daring. Their pursuits, low, criminal, and degrading as they are esteemed in old settled communities, were among the leading occupations of life among the miners. Said one who had been for many years a resident of the Pacific slope, after spending a few weeks in the Atlantic States: “I can’t stand this society. It is too strict. I must return to the land where every gambler is called a gentleman, and where every woman, no matter what her character, is called a lady.”