"Murder," I replied.
Had Hamilton been cracked on the head with his own club he would not have been more surprised. Before he could recover the club was taken from his hand and his pistol from his pocket, and his big star from over his palpitating heart. He made a feeble attempt to get indignant, but failed lamentably and broke down completely, and wanted to confess. He was taken to jail and locked up.
We then got in the hack and were driven to Armourdale, where we arrested Robert Geers, after breaking through several doors. While arresting Geers we came near getting our heads blown off by an irate roomer, whose door we had broken open by mistake. After locking up Geers, we went across the river and stopped in front of a shack in the bottoms, and entering it arrested Fred Newport and took him to jail, leaving his wife and six children in tears.
We then visited Kansas City and arrested Mike Leary. He was locked up about 4:30 A. M. There was one man yet missing, William Vassen. We experienced considerable trouble in locating him. He had left his home to go to work for Wood Bros., the Kansas City ice dealers, where he was employed as a driver to deliver ice. We obtained a list of his customers, and finally overtook him near the Kansas City Union Depot, at about seven o'clock. He broke down at once and wanted to confess. After a good breakfast I took him to the St. James Hotel in Kansas City and into the presence of the attorneys for the company. The prisoner broke into tears, as soon as we entered the room, and made a piteous appeal to the gentlemen to see that the wants of his sick wife and children were attended to. "I have never been arrested before, and I was led into this. I went into it at the point of a pistol," he said, crying bitterly. "Damn the Knights of Labor," he continued, and expressed the intention of making a clean breast of the whole affair. He was told by both the lawyers and myself that he did not have to talk if he did not want to. "I have been weighted down too long; I want to tell all about it. I will suffer, I guess, but I deserve it." Then he made a full confession, giving the most minute details of the terrible crime.
It was the intention of the gang, according to the confession, to wreck a passenger train. The tools with which the spikes were pulled, and the fish plates removed, were stolen from a tool house of the company, located between the depot and the scene of the wreck.
Geers and Newport also made confessions, and all these men took the stand at the trial of the defendants when they were arraigned the following January. The testimony of these men was corroborated in every detail, but the jury failed to reach a verdict, standing 7 to 5 for acquittal. The Knights of Labor representatives, through the court officers, who were all, excepting Judge Hineman, members of the order, had succeeded in getting several of its members on the jury. The Knights of Labor employed the best attorneys in the west to defend the men. Among them were Ex-Governor Chas. P. Johnson, Ex-Senator William Warner, Thomas P. Fenlon and others; in fact, the officers of the order spent money very freely to bring about the desired end.
After the mistrial, the attorneys for the defense made application for a change of venue, and the cases were sent to Olathe. The officers of the Knights of Labor immediately sent a swarm of organizers into Olathe and Johnson County, and through coercion and other mysterious methods, succeeded in getting almost every male citizen of the county into the order. The second trial resulted in another farce, the jury again being packed with Knights of Labor.
About this time there was a change of management in the legal department of the road, and the cases were all nollied at the request of the company—even the three men who had made confessions were turned loose.
Peculiar conditions existed in the west at that time. The laboring men knew nothing about the real benefits of unionism. They had been herded into the Knights of Labor like sheep into a pen, and were educated by those who led them into believing that any kind of crime was all right when committed during a strike, or against a firm or company against which there was a grievance, and the latter were often, as in the case of the big strike on the Gould System, proved to be imaginary.