The San Francisco Call. Newspaper, December 13, 1903, Page 14

14 THE SUNDAY CALL. Cactus Jurisprudence. admission to eme Court nation have ent, as the ally Califor- Ari- I mean that if one fore- those days ms. mplaisant ssion of the burned ght oil nt, *w ald rified tion on rved as Pro- »d to know , and Judge the pas: =\VITH RIGAT he put old dwe case EMINENT i DOMAIN T difference between the constitu & State and the constitution United States?” always replied, Clark street, “The one is a he propounded the interrogati n Ari- or disregard of its own and of the constitution of the tates. Its members stood rea orghnic to applicants, and d in accc effersonian I “What, amination. Porter, who was as face and said, n of the The posted applicant rant of power and the other is a restriction on rse sports power.” But this applicant had not X been posted, and he answered with dif- fidence, “Well, thar ain't much differ- ence, except that one is a heap bigger than the other.” The Justice nervously fingered his mustache, but anxious to help the poor feliow along, 1ad photograph other form: “By what right,” n in his box with “does the Legislature sent it to the Chi- of Arizona enact tter stating that Legislature was in It h « on to the passed several laws in brazen deflance act, United ling either the es- any time to make, for a sufficient trator. consideration, a bill of sale of the entire ed at the story and Territory. Its daring and its enterprise the examination were well known to the candidate; so to Chie tice French. Dear, with right arm outstretched he ex- nest, esteemed and self-esteemed claimed in a sepulchral voice, “By the Grattan Wilberforce French, right, your Honor, of eminent domain.” his name on hotel The Chief Justice groaned and sig- question which he nied to Associate Justice de Forest Porter that he might complete the ex- fond of fun as a boy of 14, pulled on a grave at, sir, is the rule // aRM ouTbTRET(H-\ ED HE EXCLAIMED IN A SEPULCHURAL in Ny's e 2 A cloud crossed the certain night they had stopped the brow of the candidate. He slowly coach near Wickenburg and robbed It opened his tobacco box as he replied, of the express box and several sacks of W ur Honor has got me at last, mail. The men who accomplished the for I'm d—d if I know.” robbery were masked. The trail of When the Judges discussed the ap- their horses was traced into Wicken- plication in their chambers, Judge Por- burg, and Jack and his companion were ter said, “Let us admit him. He's a in Wickenhurg early next morning, good citizen. He killed three Apaches forty miles or more from Jack’s cattle in He can’t do any harm practicing among ranch. When news of the robbery reached Prescott, Jack was drinking a running fight in Tonto Basin the Mormons in his outlying county, in a saloon and he immediately gave and you know he answered it out that he was the robber, but fion correctly.” averred that he got nothing by it, for admitted. he scorned to rob unarmed passengers, Lithe and graceful as a panther, with long black hair floating down his back, Jack Swilling, iooking like the frontispiece of a dime novel, glided into my office in Prescott one June years States Depu a desire to r in the case of the United States against Swilling and another charged with rob- bery of the United States mails, & federate army, a scout, a hunter and rancher, and a It hired man and companion that on a and there was no money in the mail sacks. Upon this evidence he was ar- rested and brought before the United States Commissioner for a preliminary examination. Jack had a reputation as a desperado, which he hagd fairly earned, but he was a braggart, as well as a bravo, and when in his cups would avow that he had committed every robbery and murder that had been perpetrated in California or Arizona. Yet he was known to be as honest a fellow as. ever lived, and though his homicides were many, he had always, on examination, been exonerated as having acted in self-defense. Jack had a penchant for collecting and giving burial to the bones of pio- robed in buckskin and morning more than twenty in t custody of a United arshal, and expressed etain me for the defense ago ack was a Texan, a waif of the Con- with a Jarge Mexican wife smali band of Mexican cattle. was charged against him and his R S @ O-DAY in the calendar of the church is termed All Saints’ g day. It is the one day In the year when b vers turn their thoughts and their prayers toward th. innumer- able ude of souls who have pa; d into the Silent , ia comparison with whom the millions who now bit the earth are but a handful. It is a beautiful 1 holy custom growing out of the irrepressible instincts of the human heart, which cannot, will not, let go of »m it has once loved and lost. It means or may mean much to t or have been taken from them, whether they bave long sorrow.ng way or whether only last week came the bolt which has prostrated them with grief. people go when they die?” This question, which almost every child as soon as it begins to think at all, is with us and still unanswered. What would not that merchant prince 10 lost the other day the beloved companion of many years give for an answer How quickly and cagerly that young mother who has just laid aw the grave her baby would fare forth across the seas to distant lands ere could find out where her darling is to-day. But no sphinx or oracle discloses the secret. And I am not so foolish as to think 1 can give any 1g like a definite or eatisfying answer, but certain bellefs, or if you prefer to call them hopes, are crystallizing into convictions in my mind and they bear upon the underlying problem and illuminate it to some extent. One is that the dead are somewhere. The very form of this age-long question i lies that. One asks instinctively about the person who has just stopped breathing, not “Why has he ceased to be?”’ but “Where has he gone?” That strong, commanding spirit who only recently was the most vig- orous among us must still be somewwhere. In the early days of this coun- try, when people emigrated from New England to the distant West, relying solely on emigrant wagons, their friends who bade them good-by knew that 5 ay in WHERE DO PEOPLE GO WHEN THEY DIE? ! they might not hear from the travelers for months, perhaps not for years, but they did not on that account think of them thereafter as non-existent. The long wait for us who have lost friends by death, the awful s!lence seems some- times unbearable, but the greatest wrong we can do ourseives or them is to think of them as anything but living, growing, developing souls some- where in God’s universe. And they are doubtless better off. The anostle Paul thought so at any rate, and he seems to have had special information on the matter. When we consider the physical and the moral risks to which a human being is sub- Jject in this imperfect world from babyhood to old age, when we reflect upon the contagion of disease, the liabilities to accident, the inherited maladies, the pitfalls in the path of him who would be good, when we think 6f man’s inhumanity to man and the large domains of life where cruelty, tyranny and lust still hold sway, we can at least hope and expect that the “other room” into which God taikes his children one by one is free from some of the evils that blight this carth and that there the average soul is freer, happier and holier. Certainiy, all the evolutionary processes and tenden- JaK vwas a TEXAN, A WAIF OF THE CON- FEDERATE ARMY, A SCOoVT, A MUNTER AND i neers who had been killed by the Apache Indians. Years before one Colonel Snively was killed on Antelope Mountain by hostile Indians. Several expeditions had endeavored to find Snively's bones without success and finally Jack announced his determina- tion to make a personal search for them. So taking a bag in which to transport them, when found, he mount- ed his bronco, and accompanied by his hired man, departed on the search. He did not find the bones and that night the stage was robbed and this coincidence, together with the fact that the robbers had a bag in which they carried away their plunder, was suffi- cient to cause the arrest of Jack and his hired man. “Afr you at yourself,” said Jack, as he was seated in the Commissioner’s office awaiting the arrival of that of- cles at work in this present world look as if they made for something bet- “ficer to proceed with the examination, ter and higher hereafter. beginning: Helen Hunt voiced this faith in the sweet poem Mother, I see you with your nursery light, Leading your babies all in white, To their sweet rest; Christ, the good Shepherd; carries mine to-night, And that 1s best. But how about rewards and punishments? How about the sharp division? ‘Well, there are divisions here and it is forever true that a man to be happy in heaven must have a heavenly mind. There is a solemn truth in the re- ply which a wise man made to the flippant question, “Where does all the sul- phur in the infernal regions come from?” *“Each man,” sald he, “brings his own.” The place where peop'e go when they die is determined not by a harsh, powerful despot, but by a loving personal will and the degree to which a hu. man being has brought his life into conformity with it. THE PARSON. “for you will heard some hard things about me, and mabbe I had better ex- plain matters a little. What have you heard about me?” “Well, Jack,” said I, “it {s alleged that you have killed thirteen men.” “That's just the way they lie about a man—the hounds,” said he. *“I pledge you my word I have only killed nine— not ccuntin’ of Injuns, of cose.” “It is said that after killing a Mexi- can at Wickenburg you cut his heart out and carried it around the saloons and made everybody drink to it.” “War, I'll tell you how that was. I did that because I was merciful. I did that to save human life. There were four Greasers of them and they had put up a job to rob me of the gold I gathered on Antelope Hill, and one of them got full of mescal and told his woman, and she told Carmelita—that's my wife—and so I got to know about it. The plan was to ambush me and kill me, and then get the gold, which they knew. I had up at the ranch home. ‘Wall, I jist went down to Wickenburg and there I saw Jose Gonzales—he was the leader of the gang—loungin’ in the road in‘ront of a mescal shop. I walked up and got my back to the wall of the adobe bulldin’ so that the other Greasers couldn’t get me from behind, and I sung out to Jose to get out his gun. I could have got him where he stood before he could have lifted his hand, but I treated him dead squar. I give him the first shot, which he never come nigh me, and then I tumbled him over. I didn’t fire but once—'twant nec- essary, Jack Swilling never misses. He was plumb dead when I went up to him. Now, I knew there were three more of them Greasers and I had either to kill them all or to skeer them out of the camp. Well, Jose was dead. His heart was no use to him, and it didn't hurt him to take it out, so I opened him and got it, and I carried it into that mescal shop and I set up the drinks on it and I saild ‘T was lookin” for Jose's gang and that my word was out to add three more hearts to my collection. before morning. Wall, my plan to save the lives of them other three Greasers worked llke a charm. They got out their broncos and started, and they never stopped runnin’ till they reached the Mexican line.” Jack was discharged by the Magis- trate, it being shown that the robbery occurred in an adjoining county. He was rearrested and spirited away by the Deputy Marshal at daylight on Sunday morning and before a writ of habeas corpus could be got out was incarcerated in the Yuma jail. Year before Jack had been scalped and his skull broken in a fight with the Apaches. He was trepanned and a sil- ver plate Inserted. At times this gave him great pain, which he was accus- tomed to alleviate by the use of mor- phine. Either through Ignorance or malice the jailer at - Yuma withheld from him his usual doses of morphine and he died a few weeks later in awful agony. Months aft trators of t erward one of the perpe- > robbery was discovered and conf nd sentenced to four- teen years’ imprisonment. Jack’s companion in misfortune came into my office one day, travel-stained and thin as a skeleton. “You heard,” said he, “as how they got the robber. That Deputy Marshal knew all the time who it was that robbed the stage and where to find him. He was in with them, I guess, and he tried to put it off on Jack and me. Jack died in jail and they kept me there until last weeld when they turned me out. I have been there for months.” “Did they pay your passage home?” said 1. “Pay nothin’. They jest turned me out without a shirt or a blanket and left me to walk home, and I have walked nigh onto 200 miles, and only I had a few dollars they took from me when they arrested me and give back to me when they let me go, I'd a’ starved, I reckon, for nobody "ud give work to a man as had laid in jail for robbery. Hain't I got a clalm agin the Government for my time for those months? No? Hell! Hain't I got a claim agin Wells, Fargo & Co., for they put up Evans to arrest me? No? Jist got to swallow jt all, have 1? T reckon 80, myself, an I just came in to say to you that Jack, before he died, told me to see you and thank you for what you did for both of us, and he made me promise that somehow I'd pay you, and I will.” I assured the poor man that I had no charge against him. “Well, that don't matter,” sald he. “My word to Jack is out. I ain't got no money. but T'll pay you, barrin’ one thing. If ‘Wells, Fargo & Co. stop carrying bul- lion I can't pay you; otherwise I will I've been locked up and starved for monthsg by Wells, Fargo & Co., just for nothin’. They owe me something. Oh, I'll collect it, and I won't go to law about it, nuther. I never have took a crooked dollar from anybody in my life, but I'm goin’ to change my system now. Oh, I shan't talk that way to anybody, and you jest-forget that I talked so to you. GCood-by; you'll hear from me again.” And T heard from him about a week afterward. A man answering to his de- scription was riddled with buckshot by ‘Wells, Fargo & Co.'s guerd In an at- tempt to hold up the Tucson stage.