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Show BURNING AT THE STAKE. A Mexican, 20 years old, shot and killed a white woman, the wife of a ranchman near San Antonio, Texas. He was pursued, captured cap-tured and, after confessing his crime, committed, as he said, because the woman "spoke mean to him," he was put to death by burning at the stake. Investigation, we dare say, will prove that the Mexican boy was mentally defective. His neighbors, the people who tortured him to death, should have noted his weakness in time to have averted this horrible double tragedy, but they neglected such a duty until finally final-ly their disregard of the unfortunate derelict brought death to a home and sent the wild-eyed human outcast scurrying to a place of hiding, away from the pursuing, angry mob. Having been in part responsible by their indifference for one murder, these people of the border proceed to commit a second crime equally as brutal and far more brutalizing than the first. They capture the fugitive, bind him to a stake and, surrounding him with ! inflammable material, set fire to the combustibles. 'Hiey watch their I victim in his agony and turn their thoughts from compassion and mercy to gloating over a human being's horrible death. They hear the screams and see the writhing wretch in deepest torture and their one regret i3 that the slowly fading spark of life cannot be made to hold its vitality so as to prolong the agony. When the embers have ceased to glow and the form of a human is reduced to a shapeless mass, they depart for home men, women and children. What of the future? How many of those who took part in that fiendish work of the mob have had aroused a passion that will plague them in the future? And what good has been accomplished? . No murderer ever stopped to measure the penalty of the law or the ' mob. Nearly all murders by witless feUows such as this young Mex ican, are impulsive acts a brain storm of a moment. |
