A Sunday fishing party—"Bad-men"—Ben Thompson and other desperadoes—The story of a hot spring.

A few weeks after I arrived at the mines, some of the men wanted to get up a fishing party one Sunday to go over to the Nueces River, and I was asked to make one of the number.

It was arranged that we should leave the mines on Saturday night, camp out, and come home on Sunday afternoon. We started at 6.30 P.M., got over to the river by eight o’clock, and by eleven o’clock I and a young electrician named Burnet were the only two sober men in the crowd. Luckily for me Burnet was a giant in strength and a “Long-horn” (as native-born Texans are called); for it was not long before the others started wrangling, and finally one of them said he could lick any one in the crowd, bare hands or with a knife. I and Burnet suppressed him and took away his knife, then Burnet told the rest of the men he would lick any one who started trouble, and we all rolled up in our blankets and tried to get some sleep. But every few minutes the first man would stick his head 114out of his blankets and say, “I can lick any one in the crowd.” Finally, this got monotonous, and Burnet told him he would sit him on the fire to cool off. This subdued him for a while, and I was beginning to think for good, when, just as I was dropping asleep, out popped his head with the same remark, which he repeated again after a short interval. Not getting called down by Burnet, he finally got quite brave, crawled out of his blankets, and kept getting louder and louder in his remarks. Just as I was beginning to think Burnet must be asleep, and was preparing to try a fall with him myself, up jumped Burnet and, grabbing his man, threw him bodily into the fire. Luckily for the poor devil, he staggered as he fell, and consequently dropped mostly on the far side of the fire, with only his legs in it. He soon jerked them out, and escaped with no worse hurt than singed pants. After this we had peace for the rest of the night.

Next morning they started drinking again (we had not destroyed the liquor as we could not fight the whole crowd), but by noon we got them started home. Most of these young fellows would have been quiet enough in different surroundings. But the little town of Uvalde had turned out more “bad-men” than any town of its size in the West, and the fathers of these young men had been handy with a gun and mixed up 115in some shooting or other, so the sons thought it behoved them to keep up the family reputation. One young fellow, John Garnet (who was later my shift mate in the extracting house), was the only survivor of a large family, every member of which had died by violence. His father was a large sheep-owner and very brutal to his Mexican herders. One night the boys, coming home from a barbecue in town, found the old man tied in his arm-chair with his throat cut, and every herder on the place gone. There and then the eldest boy made a vow to kill every Mexican he met. He went over to C. P. Diaz, across the Mexican line from Eagle Pass, and shot two or three Mexicans who, he thought, had been implicated in his father’s killing. The Rurales tried to arrest him, and he killed two and wounded three before they finally killed him. John himself I saw once in Uvalde, some years later, have a fight with his Cousin Joe, whom he licked. Joe said, "John, you are too big for me to fight with my fists, but I’ll get my gun and fix you." The rest of us got round John, and finally got him into his buggy and started off to his ranch, but fifteen minutes later I saw him drive round the plaza with a shot-gun across his knees. We remonstrated with him, but all he would say was, "Boys, it’s no use; I cannot leave town as long as Joe is looking for me." Luckily, 116some other friends had worked on Joe by telling him how bad it looked for the last two members of the family to be fighting, and got him to go home. It is this feeling that they cannot back down that makes so many young fellows who are naturally decent enough become killers and bad-men. For once you had killed some one and got a reputation as a fighter, your gun had to guard your life, for there were plenty of would-be fighters willing to try you out, and if they killed you they got the reputation you had and their own as well. The reader wonders probably why the city marshal or the sheriff did not interfere in a case like this. The reason is twofold: in the first place, whoever moved would make an enemy of both men if he interfered before there was any shooting done, and it would hurt his chances at elections; in the second place, because a fair, square “shooting-scrape” was even at that time not thought a very serious matter in West Texas. And how could it be otherwise in a community like Uvalde, where the man who was sheriff while I was there, and had held the office for twenty-two years, had killed more than one man in his youth in a private feud which his father had started; in a community where they still speak of Ben Thompson as a hero?

Ben Thompson was a noted character of San Antonio 117some years ago—a man utterly without fear, a good shot and quick on the draw. He was a bad-man of a peculiar type, insomuch as he never bothered any but bad-men, and therein lay his immunity from the law, as the men he killed were all practically outlaws, and he could always plead self-defence. When he heard of any really tough man in his neighbourhood who was wild and woolly, he would hunt him up, pick a quarrel wit............