Forty-one Thieves

Forty-one Thieves, by Angelo
Hall

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Title: Forty-one Thieves A Tale of California
Author: Angelo Hall
Release Date: November 2, 2006 [EBook #19695]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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FORTY-ONE THIEVES ***

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Forty-one Thieves
A Tale of California

ANGELO HALL

Copyright, 1919 THE CORNHILL COMPANY BOSTON

DEDICATED TO J. H. K.
A PARTNER OF WILL CUMMINS AND A NEIGHBOR OF
ROBERT PALMER

CONTENTS
I. Dead Men Tell No Tales
II. The Graniteville Stage
III. The Girl or the Gold?
IV. A Council of War
V. Old Man Palmer
VI. Two of a Kind
VII. An Old Sweetheart
VIII. "Bed-bug" Brown, Detective
IX. The Home-Coming of a Dead Man
X. The Travels of John Keeler
XI. The Snows of the Sierras
XII. The Golden Summer Comes Again

XIII. The End of the Trail
XIV. Golden Opportunities
XV. Three Graves by the Middle Yuba
XVI. When Thieves Fall Out
XVII. Brought to Justice
XVIII. The End of J. C. P. Collins
XIX. The Home-Coming of Another Dead Man
XX. The Bridal Veil

FORTY-ONE THIEVES
CHAPTER I
Dead Men Tell No Tales
In the cemetery on the hill near the quiet village of Reedsville,
Pennsylvania, you may find this inscription:
WILLIAM F. CUMMINS son of Col. William & Martha Cummins
who was killed by highwaymen near Nevada City, California
September 1, 1879 aged 45 yrs. and 8 months
Be ye therefore also ready For the Son of Man cometh At an hour when
ye think not.
It is a beautiful spot, on the road to Milroy. In former times a church
stood in the middle of the grounds, and the stern old Presbyterian
forefathers marched to meeting with muskets on their shoulders, for the
country was infested with Indians. The swift stream at the foot of the
hill, now supplying power for a grist-mill, was full of salmon that ran

up through the Kishacoquillas from the blue Juniata. The savages
begrudged the settlers these fish and the game that abounded in the
rough mountains; but the settlers had come to cultivate the rich land
extending for twelve miles between the mountain walls.
The form of many a Californian now rests in that cemetery on the hill.
A few years after the burial of the murdered Cummins, the body of
Henry Francis was gathered to his fathers, and, near by, lie the bodies
of four of his brothers,--all Californians. The staid Amish farmers and
their subdued women, in outlandish, Puritanical garb, pass along the
road unstirred by the romance and glamour buried in those graves.
Dead men tell no tales! Else there were no need that pen of mine should
snatch from oblivion this tale of California.
More than thirty-five years have passed since my father, returning from
the scene of Cummins' murder, related the circumstances. With Mat
Bailey, the stage-driver, with whom Cummins had traveled that fatal
day, he had ridden over the same road, had passed the large stump
which had concealed the robbers, and had become almost an
eye-witness of the whole affair. My father's rehearsal of it fired my
youthful imagination. So it was like a return to the scenes of boyhood
when, thirty-six years after the event, I, too, traveled the same road that
Cummins had traveled and heard from the lips of Pete Sherwood,
stage-driver of a later generation, the same thrilling story. The stump
by the roadside had so far decayed as to have fallen over; but it needed
little imagination to picture the whole tragedy. In Sacramento I looked
up the files of the Daily Record Union, which on Sept. 3, 1879, two
days after the event, gave a brief account of it. There was newspaper
enterprise for you! An atrocious crime reported in a neighboring city
two days afterward! Were such things too common to excite interest?
Or was it felt that the recital of them did not tend to boom the great
State of California?
CHAPTER II
The Graniteville Stage

On that fateful first of September, 1879, the stage left Graniteville, as
usual, at six o'clock in the morning. Graniteville, in Eureka Township,
Nevada County, is the Eureka South of early days. The stage still
makes the daily trip over the mountains; but the glamour and romance
of the gold fields have long since departed. On the morning