CHAPTER XLVIII.

The first twenty-six graves in the Virginia cemetery were occupied by murdered men.  So everybody said, so everybody believed, and so they will always say and believe.  The reason why there was so much slaughtering done, was, that in a new mining district the rough element predominates, and a person is not respected until he has “killed his man.”  That was the very expression used.

If an unknown individual arrived, they did not inquire if he was capable, honest, industrious, but—­had he killed his man?  If he had not, he gravitated to his natural and proper position, that of a man of small consequence; if he had, the cordiality of his reception was graduated according to the number of his dead.  It was tedious work struggling up to a position of influence with bloodless hands; but when a man came with the blood of half a dozen men on his soul, his worth was recognized at once and his acquaintance sought.

In Nevada, for a time, the lawyer, the editor, the banker, the chief desperado, the chief gambler, and the saloon keeper, occupied the same level in society, and it was the highest.  The cheapest and easiest way to become an influential man and be looked up to by the community at large, was to stand behind a bar, wear a cluster-diamond pin, and sell whisky.  I am not sure but that the saloon-keeper held a shade higher rank than any other member of society.  His opinion had weight.  It was his privilege to say how the elections should go.  No great movement could succeed without the countenance and direction of the saloon-keepers.  It was a high favor when the chief saloon-keeper consented to serve in the legislature or the board of aldermen.

Youthful ambition hardly aspired so much to the honors of the law, or the army and navy as to the dignity of proprietorship in a saloon.

To be a saloon-keeper and kill a man was to be illustrious.  Hence the reader will not be surprised to learn that more than one man was killed in Nevada under hardly the pretext of provocation, so impatient was the slayer to achieve reputation and throw off the galling sense of being held in indifferent repute by his associates.  I knew two youths who tried to “kill their men” for no other reason—­and got killed themselves for their pains.  “There goes the man that killed Bill Adams” was higher praise and a sweeter sound in the ears of this sort of people than any other speech that admiring lips could utter.

The men who murdered Virginia’s original twenty-six cemetery-occupants were never punished.  Why?  Because Alfred the Great, when he invented trial by jury and knew that he had admirably framed it to secure justice in his age of the world, was not aware that in the nineteenth century the condition of things would be so entirely changed that unless he rose from the grave and altered the jury plan to meet the emergency, it would prove the most ingenious and infallible agency