From the cross-tree of a telegraph pole hung the body of a man when the 9:30 Union Pacific Overland Express stopped for a "slow" order across a bridge that a band of Comanche Indians had tried to burn.
A Massachusetts woman enroute to 'Frisco stuck her head out of a car window and exclaimed, "How awfully terrible!"
Yes, it was.
Ed Preston was a one-eyed man. I don't know how he lost the other one, but I do know that he was a dead shot with the one eye that he slanted along the barrel of his pistol or buffalo rifle, the latter a sawed-off Springfield and the first mentioned an old-time army Remington.
Preston's marksmanship cost him his life. They hung Preston, the boys did, because he killed a man just for the meanness of it, or, as one of them said, because he was spoiling for trouble.
One day as we were camped on the north bank of the North Platte near the eastern line of Wyoming, Preston, full of liquor, lurched up to a bunch of bullwhackers and asked if anyone present thought he was a "dead shot." Of course, all hands admitted that his reputation was unquestioned.
"But you never saw me shoot," he said, "so what the —— do you know about it?" Then he pulled his gun and backed off, saying, as he pointed to a heap of discarded tomato cans:
"Hey, you Charley, heave one o' them cans in the air—hurry up."
Observing his apparent quarrelsome attitude, Charley Snow, a youthful member of the outfit, obeyed without protest. Snow had been assigned by Martin, the wagon-boss, to help the cook and the cook had made him responsible for the proper boiling of a pot of beans. Snow left the beans and threw a can as far away from himself as he could, and before it hit the ground it was perforated by a bullet.
"Now throw one straight up in the air," commanded Preston, and Snow obeyed. Preston put two shots into that "on the wing." Snow attempted to resume his duties at the mess fire, but Preston's shooting had drawn a dozen or more of the men of the outfit to the scene, and he was in the humor to show off; therefore as Snow was the youngest and possibly the most inoffensive man in the party, Preston decided to eliminate the bean question by ordering Snow, with a flourish of his gun, to remove the beans from the fire. This done, he continued: