In all the vast acreage of cattle pens, ordinarily marked by tossing horns and eddies of sheep and swine, there was little life save where men handling the disinfecting machine waged battle against the germ of the costly malady. The twenty-five miles of streets and alleys within the inclosures were wintry in appearance, snow white with the lime spread over them.
The resumption of slaughtering at the Chicago yards will not mean the restoration of business to its normal volume because the business in stockers and feeders will be affected. Two of the greatest cattle-producing States, Illinois and Iowa, are under the government ban because of the presence of the foot-and-mouth contagion. When Delaware was put under quarantine it was the thirteenth State in the list. By special order of the United States department of agriculture, Canada was included in the quarantine area. No evidence of foot-and-mouth disease had been discovered in the Dominion, but it was learned that infected cars had been sent over the border and the order was issued to prevent their return.
The government authorities took steps to prevent the disease from getting a foothold in the ranges and grazing sections of the West. “The government will kill all infected animals,” said Secretary of Agriculture Houston. “It will stop all movement of infected cattle from infected areas, and will do everything to localize the epidemic.”
That the foot-and-mouth disease cannot be transmitted to human beings by eating the flesh of diseased animals, but can be contracted by drinking unboiled milk or butter made from the milk of an infected cow, is the statement made by doctors who have studied the disease.
Fate Calls Upon a Modern Valjean.
This is a story of a few sheets of legal cap paper faded and yellow with age, a modern Jean Valjean, whose quarter of a century of peace and industry may end in a black cloud of misery and death, and a passionate crime in which brother slays brother.
Unlike Victor Hugo’s celebrated character, this modern Valjean has not mounted the rostrum of justice to proclaim his guilt and true self before the wide world, but, to the contrary, the man accused refuses to acknowledge the alleged facts and criminating evidence that the hand of the law spreads before him.
Recently carpenters moving an old desk in the district attorney’s office in Pittsburgh, Pa., accidentally broke open a locker, from which tumbled a number of dusty papers. Among them were the verdict and minutes of a coroner’s inquest and an indictment for murder. The papers recalled the crime of almost a quarter of a century ago.[Pg 65]
In 1892, Joseph Gantt and his brother Frank were ex-convicts. Both had served their time, reformed, gone to work, and were living with their parents in Pittsburgh.
On the day before the murder, just twenty-two years ago, Frank Gantt was picked up by the police on the strength of his former record.