NARROW ESCAPES FROM BEING LYNCHED.
A writer in All the Year Round, observes:—“A dreadful accident down in ‘Illonoy,’ had particularly struck me as a warning; for there, while the shattered bodies were still being drawn from under the piles of shivered carriages, the driver on being expostulated with, had replied:
‘I suppose this ain’t the first railway accident by long chalks!’
Upon which the indignant passengers were with difficulty prevented from lynching the wretch; but he fled into the woods, and there for a time escaped pursuit.
But, two other railway journeys pressed more peculiarly on my mind; one was that of eight or ten weeks ago, from Canandaigua to Antrim. It was there a gentleman from Baltimore, fresh from Chicago, told me of a railway accident he had himself been witness to, only two days before I met
him. The 2.40 (night) train from Toledo to Chicago, in which he rode, was upset near Pocahontas by two logs that had evidently been wilfully laid across the rails. On inquiry at the next station, it was discovered that a farmer who had had, a week before, two stray calves killed near the same place, had been heard at a liquor store to say he would ‘pay them out for his calves.’ This was enough for the excited passengers, vexed at the detention, and enraged at the malice that had exposed them to danger and death. A posse of them instantly sallied out, beleaguered the farmer’s house, seized him after some resistance, put a rope round his neck, dragged him to the nearest tree, and would have then and there lynched him, had not two or three of the passengers rescued him, revolver in hand, and given him up to the nearest magistrate.”