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Show CHAPTER LIX. DICK TURPIN. General R. M. Stevenson told me in a quaint way the following story, which he claims to have read in the diary of a brevet physician: "The boom of 1872 had reached Pueblo. The Denver and Rio Grande Railroad was completed to the metropolis of the Arkansas, and the citizens of the town were awakened from a sleep of several years by an influx of gamblers, dance house denizens, thieves, railroad laborers, and all varieties of the odds and ends of the human, family that usually follow the progress of a railway through the new West. Tents were pitched in the outskirts of the town, and gambling houses and dance halls invaded localities unaccustomed to such visitors. "Among the houses occupied as dance halls was a plank building located on Second street, on the borders of the mill ditch, formerly occupied as a boarding house by the employees of a brickyard. About noon, on a lovely spring day, the crack of a forty-five calibre revolver sounded within the building; a man lay on the floor shot through the abdomen and fatally wounded. The poor fellow was a blacksmith, known as ' Dick Turpin,' a good enough fellow in his way, but badly demoralized by whisky; he had followed the railroad to Pueblo. " He had been an habitue of the dance hall, and that morning quarreled with the bar-tender, and during the quarrel received the fatal wound. When a physician arrived he found the poor fellow lying upon a bunk with a 286 |
