use of his revolver is to be judged with due reference to the character and known disposition of the man with whom he had to deal and to his previous actions and threats.  He was attending Justice Field, against the will of the latter and in spite of his protest, in obedience to an order from the Attorney-General of the United States to Marshal Franks to detail a deputy to protect the person of Justice Field from Terry’s threatened violence.  A slap in the face may not, under ordinary circumstances, be sufficient provocation to justify the taking of human life; but it must be remembered that there were no ordinary circumstances and that Terry was no ordinary man.  Terry was a noted pistol-shot; it was known that he invariably carried arms and that he boasted of his ability to use them.  If on this occasion he was unarmed, as Mrs. Terry asserts,[1] Neagle had no means of knowing that fact; on the contrary, to his mind every presumption was in favor of the belief that he carried both pistol and knife, in accordance with his usual habit.  As a peace officer, even apart from the special duty which had been assigned to him, he was justified in taking the means necessary to prevent Terry from continuing his assault; but the means necessary in the case of one man may be wholly inadequate with a man bearing the reputation of David S. Terry, a man who only a few months previously had drawn a knife while resisting the lawful authority of another United States officer.  It is true that if Terry was unarmed, the deputy marshal might have arrested him without taking his life or seriously endangering his own; but Terry was a man of gigantic stature, and though aged, in possession of a giant’s strength; and there is no one who was acquainted with him, or has had opportunity to learn his past history, who does not know that he was a desperate man, willing to take desperate chances and to resort to desperate means when giving way to his impulses of passion, and that any person who should at such a moment attempt to stay his hand would do so at the risk of his life.  Whether he had a pistol with him at that moment or not, there was every reason to believe that he was armed, and that the blow with his hand was intended only as the precursor to a more deadly blow with a weapon.  At such moments little time is allowed for reflection.  The officer of the law was called upon to act and to act promptly.  He did so, and the life of David S. Terry was the forfeit.  He fell, a victim to his own ungovernable passions, urged on to his fate by the woman who was at once his wife and his client, and perhaps further incited by sensational newspaper articles which stirred up the memory of his resentment for fancied wrongs, and taunted him with the humiliation of threats unfulfilled.

The close of Judge Terry’s life ends a career and an era.  He had the misfortune to carry into a ripened state of society the conditions which are tolerable only where social order is not