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

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No person who has witnessed a theatrical performance in a mining camp can forget the general din and noise with which the audience fill up the intervals between the acts. Whistling, singing, hooting, yelling, and a general shuffling of feet and moving about are so invariable as to form, in fact, a feature of the performance. So long as they are unaccompanied by quarrelsome demonstrations, and do not become too boisterous, efforts are seldom made to suppress them. The boys are permitted to have a good time in their own way, and the lookers-on, accustomed to the scene, are often compensated for any annoyance that may be occasioned, by strokes of border humor more enjoyable than the play itself.

Cherokee Bob, eager for an opportunity when he could wreak his demoniac wrath upon some of the Federal soldiers, with the aid and complicity of Deputy Sheriff Porter, who like himself was a Secessionist, contrived the following plan as favorable to his purpose; it was agreed between them, that on a certain evening Bob and his friends should attend the theatre, fully armed. Porter, under pretext of quelling disturbances between the acts, should by his insulting language and manner provoke an affray with the soldiers present, in the progress of which he would command Bob and those with him to assist, and thus under the seeming protection of law, save them from the consequences of any acts of vengeance they desired to commit. On the evening appointed, six or seven soldiers were seated side by side in the pit, a single one occupying a seat in the gallery behind them. Porter was near them, and Bob and his associates in a position convenient to him. When the curtain fell upon the first act, the usual noises commenced, the soldiers joining in making them. Porter sprang from his seat, and striding in front of them, vociferated,