Shortly after midnight, of election day, the…

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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. 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.