The jury without leaving their box pronounced their verdict for the Company, and the judge thereupon solemnly announced that he would direct a criminal prosecution to be instituted against the plaintiff for the crimes disclosed in that most painful case. At this announcement, I rose and entreated the judge not to adopt that course. I reminded him of the dying anxiety of the poor daughter to have her father saved, and urged that the plaintiff would be sufficiently punished by the loss of position which must be consequent on the verdict. But my solicitations were all in vain. The judge said that he sat there to protect society, and that if such crimes as had been that day disclosed were allowed to pass unpunished, he would fail in the duty which he sat there to discharge. A few minutes afterwards Mr M—— left the court in custody; and as I saw him thus committed to the pitiless mercy of the law, compassion—which can look on the wicked as well as the good—seemed to rise within me, and I almost regretted that I had put the insurance Company on the track which they had followed with such fatal accuracy.
The law, however, though very powerful, is not omnipotent; and in this case its power was destined to be futile. It was found not to be convenient to try Mr M—— at the same assizes; and his trial was therefore postponed till the following one, and he himself allowed out on bail. The next assizes came round, and everything was ready for the trial; but the prisoner was nowhere to be found. They called him in the court, they called him outside; but in vain. It was soon found that the prisoner had absconded—vanished no one knew where; and the individuals who had been kind enough to stake a portion of their worldly goods on his reappearance, were asked to shew their affection for him by paying the penalty which the law so properly attaches to such misplaced philanthropy. The following comment on the case appeared a day or two afterwards in the local newspaper: ‘We can only say that justice has been defeated, and a very bad type of criminal has escaped unpunished. The inscrutable wisdom of Providence has reserved his punishment for another world.’
More than twenty years after the events above narrated, the course of my professional business led me to cross the Atlantic and visit the city of New York. It happened in the course of that visit, as I was returning to my hotel at a late hour one night, that I became conscious that a human form was following me. I at once looked round, and saw within a yard of me an old man with a long white beard and weather-beaten face, dressed in ragged attire, shoeless and stockingless. Something in his face caught my attention, and on looking at it more closely, I recognised it as one which I had seen before, though I could not then tell where. When I turned round, the old man muttered in an earnest, almost savage manner: ‘Give me some money; I want it badly—very badly;’ but as I did not feel quite easy at finding so questionable a creature so close to me at such an hour of the night and in a strange city, I made no reply to his request, but hastened my steps. He, however, followed me, and again craved for money; and this time I answered in our English stereotyped form: ‘I have nothing for you, my good man.’
I suppose, however, that he did not catch my reply, for he added sharply: ‘What do you say?’ To which I answered: ‘I say that I have no money for you.’
‘Do you indeed?’ he said with fury. ‘Then keep it, and perish with it. I hope it may drag you down, as it did me.’ With these words he turned away, and I heard his steps behind me no more; but I had not gone very far when I recollected on what former occasion I had seen the old man’s face. I remembered that it was the same face which twenty years before I had seen in that northern court-house—the face that had known a death-like pallor when the heavy chain of Truth clanked forth its tale of hidden guilt. I at once stopped and turned round; but I could only distinguish faintly the outline of his figure in the distance; and as I gazed at that ragged form, retreating I knew not whither, there flashed with vivid reality through my mind the events which I have endeavoured here to relate, and I remembered the words of a thoughtful modern writer: ‘The secrets of men’s lives are rarely held inviolate till eternity—there is a reckoning here without the aid of eternal books.’
THE PRAIRIES AND THEIR INHABITANTS.
The subject of sport has a fascinating interest for readers of almost every class. Nor is this interest lessened when the scene of such adventures is laid in the wide prairies of the Far West. On those vast plains, ocean-like in their rolling expanse, the wigwam of the red man, and the bison and other denizens of the prairie, are alike disappearing, to be succeeded by the stately and magnificent cities which are the result of American enterprise and civilisation. Lieutenant-colonel Dodge, an officer in the United States army, gives us, in his Hunting Grounds of the Great West (London: Chatto and Windus, 1877), an instructive résumé of the present aspect and position of those plains, which are still in great measure a Debatable Land, on the frontiers of which a fierce warfare is almost constantly being carried on between the wandering Indian tribes and the white settlers who are every year supplanting them.
The distinctive term ‘The Plains’ is specially applied to the area of rolling prairies extending from the mountains of Texas on the south to the British line on the north, and from the Missouri river on the east to the Rocky Mountains on the west.