to his class “without looking at the book.” I leave it to the reader to
fancy what it was like, as it fell, riddled with slang, from the lips of
that grave, earnest teacher, and was listened to by his little learners
with a consuming interest that showed that they were as unconscious as he
was that any violence was being done to the sacred proprieties!
CHAPTER XLVIII.
The first twenty-six graves in the Virginia cemetery were occupied by
murdered men. So everybody said, so everybody believed, and so they will
always say and believe. The reason why there was so much slaughtering
done, was, that in a new mining district the rough element predominates,
and a person is not respected until he has “killed his man.” That was
the very expression used.
If an unknown individual arrived, they did not inquire if he was capable,
honest, industrious, but–had he killed his man? If he had not, he
gravitated to his natural and proper position, that of a man of small
consequence; if he had, the cordiality of his reception was graduated
according to the number of his dead. It was tedious work struggling up
to a position of influence with bloodless hands; but when a man came with
the blood of half a dozen men on his soul, his worth was recognized at
once and his acquaintance sought.
In Nevada, for a time, the lawyer, the editor, the banker, the chief
desperado, the chief gambler, and the saloon keeper, occupied the same
level in society, and it was the highest. The cheapest and easiest way
to become an influential man and be looked up to by the community at
large, was to stand behind a bar, wear a cluster-diamond pin, and sell
whisky. I am not sure but that the saloon-keeper held a shade higher
rank than any other member of society. His opinion had weight. It was
his privilege to say how the elections should go. No great movement
could succeed without the countenance and direction of the saloon-
keepers. It was a high favor when the chief saloon-keeper consented to
serve in the legislature or the board of aldermen.
Youthful ambition hardly aspired so much to the honors of the law, or the
army and navy as to the dignity of proprietorship in a saloon.
To be a saloon-keeper and kill a man was to be illustrious. Hence the
reader will not be surprised to learn that more than one man was killed
in Nevada under hardly the pretext of provocation, so impatient was the
slayer to achieve reputation and throw off the galling sense of being
held in indifferent repute by his associates. I knew two youths who
tried to “kill their men” for no other reason–and got killed themselves
for their pains. “There goes the man that killed Bill Adams” was higher
praise and a sweeter sound in the ears of this sort of people than any
other speech that admiring lips could utter.
The men who murdered Virginia’s original twenty-six cemetery-occupants
were never punished. Why? Because Alfred the Great, when he invented
trial by jury and knew that he had admirably framed it to secure justice
in his age of the world, was not aware that in the nineteenth century the
condition of things would be so entirely changed that unless he rose from
the grave and altered the jury plan to meet the emergency, it would prove
the most ingenious and infallible agency for defeating justice that human
wisdom could contrive. For how could he imagine that we simpletons would
go on using his jury plan after circumstances had stripped it of its
usefulness, any more than he could imagine that we would go on using his
candle-clock after we had invented chronometers? In his day news could
not travel fast, and hence he could easily find a jury of honest,
intelligent men who had not heard of the case they were called to try–
but in our day of telegraphs and newspapers his plan compels us to swear
in juries composed of fools and rascals, because the system rigidly
excludes honest men and men of brains.
I remember one of those sorrowful farces, in Virginia, which we call a