Rensselaer Union, Volume 9, Number 12, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 December 1876 — A Bloody Business. [ARTICLE]

A Bloody Business.

A vivid picture of frontier Texas life and death comes from Corsicana. Six men start in a wagon to go from Fort Griffin to Sau Antonio. Two of the men own the wagon. The other four are passengers. A~days journey from Fort Concho the party encamp. Two of the passengers persuade the owners of the team to go out hunting with, them, and they go, leaving the other two men in charge of the camp. The two passengers who went bunting come back without the owners of the wagon, and tell the camp watchers that they have killed tlie owners in order to have the wagon all to themselves. The two innocent men take their choice of being killed on the spot or keeping quiet and sharing the proceeds. They acquiesce in the latter alternative and the four drive on to Concho. Here one of the innocent men interviews the sheriff, and the two murderers, snuffing danger in the air, hastily gear up and rapidly drive off. The sheriff summons a posse of six men, and gallops in pursuit. The sheriff’s force overtakes the wagon at Kickapoo Springs and captures one of the two murderers before he can use his arms. The other runs to a thicket of hackberry bushes where he lies down flat on the ground and opens fire upon the Sheri tl and his posse. The Sheriff and his men fire upon the hackberry grove from the open prairie and fight the ruffian in this way from ten in the morning until three in the afternoon. One of the Sheriff’s party is shot, and he turns upon the prisoner, shoots and kills him in his tracks, and then lies down and dies. The man in the hackberry grove finally ceases firing and then the sheriff and several wounded men move upon the thicket They find the murderer pierced by several balls, and dead. Five or six dead men in all: no work for the courts, and no owners for the horses and wagon. — St. Louie Republican.

—During ■ the progress of a fire in Quebec, not very long ago, two boys, who were watching it from a cliff, lost their balance and fell over. One of them was caught in a small tree, and clung there till he was rescued. He need not have had all that trouble, however, for the other one, who tumbled the whole distance to the bottom, about 200 feet, was picked up uninjured. Probably neither one of them will get near the edge of high cliffs very soon again. Mr. David Crockett, who resides seven miles southwest of Mexico, Mo., while clearing rubbish out of his killed sixty rats. After clearing the crib of shocks and rats, he commenced to haul corn from a number of pens in his field, and while sb doirig killed 270 more rats, and then wound up by captaring eleven more in the open field.