Page:Travels in Mexico and life among the Mexicans.djvu/575

Rh brought to popular notice, but all committed, so far as we could learn, by aliens from over the Border. One of these was so brutal as to excite comment, even amongst the Mexicans. Two men, named Mudd and Leggett, waylaid and shot a Swedish railway contractor named Hickling, as he was driving through a lonely canon with his buggy laden with silver to pay off his men.

They were captured by Mexican police, who would doubtless have offered no opposition if the threats of lynching, freely made by the employees of the road, had been carried out.

By the Mexican law, no capital punishment could be inflicted; but the alcalde of the village near which the murder was committed thought he could so arrange matters that the chief actors in this bloody drama should be shot, and an accomplice