| OCR Text |
Show DICK TURPIN. 287 pair of blankets under him, groaning in agony. The ghastly wreck of what had once been a woman, was giving such attention as was possible under the circumstances, while a crowd of bloated and degraded bummers stood around, some of them in a maudlin way expressing sympathy, and some jeering at the dying man. "A brief examination demonstrated the fact that the victim was fatally wounded. So, giving the poor fellow a heavy dose of morphine, to ease his pain, the doctor departed, after informing the bystanders that his patient could not last more than twenty-four hours. "The prediction proved true, and within the time mentioned the man was dead, and in two or three hours after his spirit had taken flight, he was buried at the expense of the county in the old cemetery on the brow of the bluffs overlooking Pueblo, and immediately in the rear of its principal street. "And so Dick Turpin was dead. In the vigorous, though somewhat coarse vernacular of the natives • of southern Colorado, 'he was too dead to skin,' and was apparently planted with his toes to the daisies, there to rest for many years, until the storied horn of the Angel Gabriel should finally awake the sleepers in their graves, rouse them from -their beds, and create a scramble for bones in the old cemeteries of the world. "One evening, shortly after the event above mentioned had transpired, two individuals might have been seen (so to speak) sitting on a stoop of a business house on Santa Fe avenue, enjoying the moonlight and their cigars, and engaged in a conversation which ran somewhat as follows: '"Professor Nathan R. Smith, I would like very much |
