“Well, all right. You go on and try him and I’ll go down and overhaul
his conscience and prepare him to go–like enough he needs it, and I
don’t want to send him off without a show for hereafter.”
This was another obstacle. They finally convinced him that it was
necessary to have the accused in court. Then they said they would send a
guard to bring him.
“No, sir, I prefer to fetch him myself–he don’t get out of my hands.
Besides, I’ve got to go to the ship to get a rope, anyway.”
The court assembled with due ceremony, empaneled a jury, and presently
Capt. Ned entered, leading the prisoner with one hand and carrying a
Bible and a rope in the other. He seated himself by the side of his
captive and told the court to “up anchor and make sail.” Then he turned
a searching eye on the jury, and detected Noakes’s friends, the two
bullies.
He strode over and said to them confidentially:
“You’re here to interfere, you see. Now you vote right, do you hear?–or
else there’ll be a double-barreled inquest here when this trial’s off,
and your remainders will go home in a couple of baskets.”
The caution was not without fruit. The jury was a unit–the verdict.
“Guilty.”
Capt. Ned sprung to his feet and said:
“Come along–you’re my meat now, my lad, anyway. Gentlemen you’ve done
yourselves proud. I invite you all to come and see that I do it all
straight. Follow me to the canyon, a mile above here.”
The court informed him that a sheriff had been appointed to do the
hanging, and–
Capt. Ned’s patience was at an end. His wrath was boundless. The
subject of a sheriff was judiciously dropped.
When the crowd arrived at the canyon, Capt. Ned climbed a tree and
arranged the halter, then came down and noosed his man. He opened his
Bible, and laid aside his hat. Selecting a chapter at random, he read it
through, in a deep bass voice and with sincere solemnity. Then he said:
“Lad, you are about to go aloft and give an account of yourself; and the
lighter a man’s manifest is, as far as sin’s concerned, the better for
him. Make a clean breast, man, and carry a log with you that’ll bear
inspection. You killed the nigger?”
No reply. A long pause.
The captain read another chapter, pausing, from time to time, to impress
the effect. Then he talked an earnest, persuasive sermon to him, and
ended by repeating the question:
“Did you kill the nigger?”
No reply–other than a malignant scowl. The captain now read the first
and second chapters of Genesis, with deep feeling–paused a moment,
closed the book reverently, and said with a perceptible savor of
satisfaction:
“There. Four chapters. There’s few that would have took the pains with
you that I have.”
Then he swung up the condemned, and made the rope fast; stood by and
timed him half an hour with his watch, and then delivered the body to the
court. A little after, as he stood contemplating the motionless figure,
a doubt came into his face; evidently he felt a twinge of conscience–a
misgiving–and he said with a sigh:
“Well, p’raps I ought to burnt him, maybe. But I was trying to do for
the best.”
When the history of this affair reached California (it was in the “early
days”) it made a deal of talk, but did not diminish the captain’s
popularity in any degree. It increased it, indeed. California had a
population then that “inflicted” justice after a fashion that was
simplicity and primitiveness itself, and could therefore admire
appreciatively when the same fashion was followed elsewhere.
CHAPTER LI.
Vice flourished luxuriantly during the hey-day of our “flush times.” The
saloons were overburdened with custom; so were the police courts, the
gambling dens, the brothels and the jails–unfailing signs of high
prosperity in a mining region–in any region for that matter. Is it not
so? A crowded police court docket is the surest of all signs that trade
is brisk and money plenty. Still, there is one other sign; it comes
last, but when it does come it establishes beyond cavil that the “flush