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

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One of these side exploits was marked by features of peculiar atrocity. An aged, eccentric German miner, who lived alone in a little cabin three miles from town, was supposed to have a considerable amount of gold dust concealed in his dwelling. One morning, early in August, a neighbor discovered that the house had been violently entered. The door was broken and scattered in pieces. Entering, he beheld the mangled corpse of the old man lying amid a general wreck of bedding, boxes, and trunks. The remains of a recent fire in a corner bore evidence of the failure of the design of the robbers to conceal their crime by a general conflagration. The miners were exasperated at an act of such wanton and unprovoked barbarity. A coroner’s jury was summoned and such an inquest held as men in fear of their lives dared to venture. The verdict, as might have been anticipated, was “murdered by some person or persons unknown.” Here the affair has rested ever since.

Acts of violence and bloodshed were not infrequent among the robbers themselves. Soon after the murder of the German, a company of them, who had been gambling all night at one of the saloons, broke up in a quarrel at sunrise. Before they reached the street, a revolver in the hands of Brockie was discharged, killing instantly one of the departing brawlers. The murderer surrendered himself to a justice of the peace, and escaped upon the singular plea that the shot was accidental and did not hit the person he intended to kill. One of the jury, in a letter to a friend wrote: “The verdict gave universal satisfaction, the feeling over the homicide among good citizens being that Brockie had done a good thing. If he had killed two of the ruffians instead of one, and then hung himself, good men would have been better pleased.”