Shortly after midnight, of election day, the…

chunk 4369 · paragraph 0

Shortly after midnight, of election day, the ballots of that precinct were still being counted by a flickering lamp, in a long, low room in the plaza of San Rafael, and poor Provencher was there. He had just received news of a plot to kill the judges and seize the ballot at three pre- cincts, and leaned over to the United States Deputy Marshal, Martin Gallegos, to whisper a warning. Gallegos is hardly more than a boy — a common, illiterate Mexican youth, at whose awkwardness and ignorance most of us would turn up our noses. But that he had in him the stuff of men he showed by the most gallant act I ever saw.