As soon as Slade found all entreaty useless, he sent a messenger for his wife, and recovered in some degree his wonted composure. The only favor he now asked of the Committee was that his execution might be delayed until his wife arrived,—a favor that would have been granted could the Committee have been assured that her presence and remarkable courage would not have excited an attempt at rescue, and been the cause of bloodshed. The scaffold, formed of the gateway of a corral, was soon prepared, and, everything being in readiness, Slade was placed upon a dry-goods box, with the fatal cord around his neck. Several gentlemen whom he sent for came to see him and bid him farewell. One of his comrades, who had exhausted himself in prayers for his release, as the fatal moment drew nigh, threw off his coat, and, doubling his fists, declared that Slade should be hanged only over his dead body. The aim of a hundred rifles brought him to his senses, and he was glad to escape upon a promise of future good behavior. The execution immediately followed, Slade dying with the fall of the drop. His body was removed to the Virginia Hotel, and decently laid out.
A few moments later his wife, mounted on a fleet horse, dashed up to the hotel, and rushed madly to the bed on which the body lay. Casting herself upon the inanimate form, she gave way to a paroxysm of grief. Her cries were heartrending, mingled with deep and bitter curses upon those who had deprived her of her husband. Hours elapsed before she was sufficiently composed to give directions for the disposition of the body.
“Why, oh, why,” she exclaimed, in an agony of grief, “did not some of you, the friends of Slade, shoot him down, and not suffer him to die on the scaffold? I would have done it had I been here. He should never have died by the rope of the hangman. No dog’s death should have come to such a man.”
The body was placed in a tin coffin filled with alcohol, and conveyed to the ranche, where it remained until the following spring, when it was taken to Salt Lake City and buried in the cemetery. A plain marble slab, with name and age graven thereon, marks the burial-place of Slade,—a man who surrendered all that was noble, generous, and manly in his nature to the demon of intemperance. A friend of his, in a recent letter to me, relating to him, says:
“Slade was unquestionably a most useful man in his time to the stage line, and to the cause of progress in the Far West, and he never was a robber, as some have represented; but after years of contention with desperate men, he became so reckless and regardless of human life that his best friends must concede that he was at times a most dangerous character, and no doubt, by his defiance of the authority and wholesome discipline of the Vigilantes, brought upon himself the calamity which he suffered.”
CHAPTER XLV
A MODERN HAMAN
“We’ve got a woman for breakfast this time, and a Chinawoman at that,” said X. Beidler, as he drew up to the well-filled breakfast table of the saloon where he boarded. “There’s no want of variety. We had a negro election day, and plenty of white men the week before.” (The expression “a man for breakfast,” signifies, in mining parlance, that a man has been murdered during the night.)
“What is the new sensation, X.?” inquired one of the boarders.
“Nothing remarkable,” replied X., “a Chinawoman choked to death, and robbed of a thousand dollars during the night.”
“Who did it?”