Robbery and desperate affray.—­On Tuesday night, a German named Charles Hurtzal, engineer in a mill at Silver City, came to this place, and visited the hurdy-gurdy house on B street.  The music, dancing and Teutonic maidens awakened memories of Faderland until our German friend was carried away with rapture.  He evidently had money, and was spending if freely.  Late in the evening Jack Williams and Andy Blessington invited him down stairs to take a cup of coffee.  Williams proposed a game of cards and went up stairs to procure a deck, but not finding any returned.  On the stairway he met the German, and drawing his pistol knocked him down and rifled his pockets of some seventy dollars.  Hurtzal dared give no alarm, as he was told, with a pistol at his head, if he made any noise or exposed them, they would blow his brains out.  So effectually was he frightened that he made no complaint, until his friends forced him.  Yesterday a warrant was issued, but the culprits had disappeared.

This efficient city officer, Jack Williams, had the common reputation of being a burglar, a highwayman and a desperado.  It was said that he had several times drawn his revolver and levied money contributions on citizens at dead of night in the public streets of Virginia.

Five months after the above item appeared, Williams was assassinated while sitting at a card table one night; a gun was thrust through the crack of the door and Williams dropped from his chair riddled with balls.  It was said, at the time, that Williams had been for some time aware that a party of his own sort (desperadoes) had sworn away his life; and it was generally believed among the people that Williams’s friends and enemies would make the assassination memorable—­and useful, too—­by a wholesale destruction of each other.

It did not so happen, but still, times were not dull during the next twenty-four hours, for within that time a woman was killed by a pistol shot, a man was brained with a slung shot, and a man named Reeder was also disposed of permanently.  Some matters in the Enterprise account of the killing of Reeder are worth nothing—­especially the accommodating complaisance of a Virginia justice of the peace.  The italics in the following narrative are mine: 

More cutting and shooting.—­The devil seems to have again broken loose in our town.  Pistols and guns explode and knives gleam in our streets as in early times.  When there has been a long season of quiet, people are slow to wet their hands in blood; but once blood is spilled, cutting and shooting come easy.  Night before last Jack Williams was assassinated, and yesterday forenoon we had more bloody work, growing out of the killing of Williams, and on the same street in which he met his death.  It appears that Tom Reeder, a friend of Williams, and George Gumbert were talking, at the meat market