the prisoner alive or dead, and listening for the…
source date: 1891
availability: public-domain

rgeant’s face and started for the door. The blinded officer, even in the inconceivable anguish of the moment, thought only of his orders to bring in ( 20 ) the prisoner alive or dead, and listening for the footsteps of the fugitive, fired to the sound and dropped his man! As striking an example of “pure nerve*' came under my own observation two years ago, writes Charles F. Lummis. Valencia county. New Mexico, had been disgraced by a long series of cowardly and awful assassinations, done by one young Mexican desperado and his peons, a series which culminated, on the 14th of February, in my own receipt of a leaden valentine, in the shape of two loads of midnight buck shot. The question whether these influen- tial murderers should be punished had entered into local politics, and the campaign was a very exciting one. At some of the precincts the judges of election and the voters were alike armed with Winchesters and six shooters. Among those who were active in the movement to overthrow the evil men who had for years exercised a reign of terror over “Bloody Valencia," was gentle, gen- erous Dumas Provencher, one of the pioneers of the territory, and he was one of the dozen of us whom the assassins had marked for death.