The two men went to their out-door beds as usual on the fatal Thursday night, leaving Mrs. Newton alone in the house, where she retired soon after the men had taken their departure. She was sleeping soundly when she was awakened by the sound of a pistol, which was soon followed by a second report. The reports appeared to be in the direction of the grain stacks, and Mrs. Newton rushed to the window, thinking that some one had come to burn the grain, and that her brother and the German had fired upon the intruder. She had been out of bed but a second when she heard some one evidently approaching the house from the direction of the grain, and calling her loudly by her first name, “Belle! Belle! Belle!” three times in succession.
Mrs. Newton was clad in the thinnest kind of night clothes, wearing nothing but a light undergarment. She was so thoroughly excited, however, at the noise of the pistol reports, and at the calling out of her own name, that she rushed to the door and opened it. As she swung it back, the German employé stepped up, with a shotgun in his hand, and appeared to be considerably excited, replying to her hurried inquiry: “They’re here! They’re around!”
“Who’s here?”
“The grain burners; don’t you know!”
“But where is my brother—where is George?”
“Oh,” replied the man, “he is pursuing one of them—he’s down there.”
The moon was just about its first quarter and was sinking over behind the adjacent mountains, but still gave out sufficient light to afford an indistinct view of surrounding objects. It was a mellow, warm evening, and a thousand flies, bats and whippoorwills buzzed and sang around. Long shadows fell upon the ground and seemed in their great length and intensity to add a hundred-fold to the already lonely and weird view surrounding. It was a still, dead scene that presented itself as Mrs. Newton, clad in her ghost-like garb of white, stepped out of her door with her hand raised over her eyes to peer along the lines of the shadows down to where her brother was. She had scarcely turned her back when—bang! crash!—thundering came the report of a gun in her immediate proximity, and she felt the hot leaden messengers tearing through her vitals.
The entire load of buckshot from one barrel of the gun had been emptied into her breast.
“My God, what—what is this? I am shot! You have murdered me. You have murdered George and now you have murdered me. You have shot me to the heart. What does it mean?”
The badly wounded woman did not fall, but staggered to the door and continued to support herself and got into the house. Meyers cried out as she disappeared: