The San Antonio Express of the following morning contained this sensational piece of news: 

   BENTON SHARP MEETS HIS MATCH

   THE MOST NOTED DESPERADO IN SOUTHWEST TEXAS SHOT TO
   DEATH IN THE GOLD FRONT RESTAURANT—­PROMINENT STATE
   OFFICIAL SUCCESSFULLY DEFENDS HIMSELF AGAINST THE
   NOTED BULLY—­MAGNIFICENT EXHIBITION OF QUICK GUN PLAY.

Last night about eleven o’clock Benton Sharp, with two other men, entered the Gold Front Restaurant and seated themselves at a table.  Sharp had been drinking, and was loud and boisterous, as he always was when under the influence of liquor.  Five minutes after the party was seated a tall, well-dressed, elderly gentleman entered the restaurant.  Few present recognized the Honourable Luke Standifer, the recently appointed Commissioner of Insurance, Statistics, and History.

Going over to the same side where Sharp was, Mr. Standifer prepared to take a seat at the next table.  In hanging his hat upon one of the hooks along the wall he let it fall upon Sharp’s head.  Sharp turned, being in an especially ugly humour, and cursed the other roundly.  Mr. Standifer apologized calmly for the accident, but Sharp continued his vituperations.  Mr. Standifer was observed to draw near and speak a few sentences to the desperado in so low a tone that no one else caught the words.  Sharp sprang up, wild with rage.  In the meantime Standifer had stepped some yards away, and was standing quietly with his arms folded across the breast of his loosely hanging coat.

With that impetuous and deadly rapidity that made Sharp so dreaded, he reached for the gun he always carried in his hip pocket—­a movement that has preceded the death of at least a dozen men at his hands.  Quick as the motion was, the bystanders assert that it was met by the most beautiful exhibition of lightning gun-pulling ever witnessed in the Southwest.  As Sharp’s pistol was being raised—­and the act was really quicker than the eye could follow—­a glittering .44 appeared as if by some conjuring trick in the right hand of Mr. Standifer, who, without a perceptible movement of his arm, shot Benton Sharp through the heart.  It seems that the new Commissioner of Insurance, Statistics, and History has been an old-time Indian fighter and ranger for many years, which accounts for the happy knack he has of handling a .44.

It is not believed that Mr. Standifer will be put to any inconvenience beyond a necessary formal hearing to-day, as all the witnesses who were present unite in declaring that the deed was done in self-defence.

When Mrs. Sharp appeared at the office of the commissioner, according to appointment, she found that gentleman calmly eating a golden russet apple.  He greeted her without embarrassment and without hesitation at approaching the subject that was the topic of the day.

“I had to do it, ma’am,” he said, simply, “or get it myself.  Mr. Kauffman,” he added, turning to the old clerk, “please look up the records of the Security Life Insurance Company and see if they are all right.”