LYNCHING AT SKIDOO
Joe Simpson, who deliberately murdered James Arnold at
Skidoo Sunday of last week, was taken from the guard on Wednesday
night and hanged to a pole. There was a strong sentiment in favor of
lynching Simpson the night of the murder, but the plotters were
dissuaded from the plan. Arnold was a prominent and respected citizen
of the camp, and his killing was an unprovoked and cold-blooded
affair. Simpson was a gambler, hailing from Reno, but a resident of
the desert camp for some time. He seems to have been a bad character,
a number of offenses being charged against him. The opinion of the
Skidoo people appears to be that the lynchers did a justifiable piece
of business.
He slept poorly, the sounds of the desert mice serving to wake him, that he might recall just a flash of a bad dream. When finally resigned to full consciousness, he noticed it was cold in the cabin, and he looked to the light leaking in from the walls for a warmth that was not provided.
Looking back at his former lives and all the effort to erase any
trace of them, he could never erase the feeling of shame, of
ridicule, which would hover over the obliterated life like a bruise.
There was the son who was never good enough for the father, the young
boy whose exclamations not welcome, and wonder not shared by his classmates.
Then there was the husband whose wife would exclude from her social gatherings,
ashamed of his position as a petty cook in a filthy restaurant. He
left those lives behind to pursue what he felt might be dignity in
the Panamint Mountains.
Yet for each of his successes, for each purchase, a feeling of
fraud would overcome him, as if such a quality thing was not his due.
This he made up for by clothes sent from San Francisco, fine weapons
and a taste for drink. It was small enough a town that he was able
buy a saloon and have interests in the mining company with only a
modicum of effort and capital. He enjoyed this as if he was living another's life, and for a brief time, came to believe the life was his
own.
James Arnold was a man who saw weakness in a person before he
would notice a smile, or the color of a person's eyes. These
weaknesses would trigger a hunger in him. When Joe first arrived in
Skidoo, James saw all the falter beneath Joe's swagger, he caught the
fear residing under Joe's laughs and jokes. Whereas in some folk who
had this gift of seeing and feeling what lies beneath what appears
are moved to compassion for the weak, the estranged or alienated, in
James this gift made him feel like one of the predators of the desert
below, and he allowed Joe's reinvention to unfold that his fall might
be greater.
It was in James' travels where he learned of Joe's past lives. He
learned that Joe's wife did not die, but had left him in favor of his
boss. He learned that Joe held no interests in the gambling
establishments of Reno, but had fled that place with stolen money. As well he learned that Joe was generally thought of as naturally slow
and shy of mind and spirit.
It was in Joe's affection for a local prostitute that James Arnold
saw his chance, for this blonde was a thing which Joe seemed to
really love. Taking away Joe's status, his holdings in the mining
company were after all, simple to aquire and simple to lose. But the
love a person in these hard lands was a thing rare, and the subtle
nature of negotiating a place of warmth in a human heart had odds
worse than striking gold. James had a little talk with this woman
whose business was her body.
Joe remembered that his life was not his own, and as his spirit
woke that cold morning, a thought occurred to him that all lives belong to their
surroundings, and that his own had been revoked by the good people of
Skidoo. The last picture of him was taken by his own doctor, who had
dug his body up, and hung it again once more in a tent before
removing the head, which the doctor took as a keepsake.
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