Zack Mulhall, who has run a free and easy career for the last fifteen years or so, has been rounded up with fair
chances of being landed behind prison walls. He has been convicted by a St. Louis jury of assault with intent to kill, and his
punishment has been fixed at three years hard labor in the Missouri stte penitentiary. The offense he commmitted was wounding
an innocent bystander in a shooting scrape, in a crowd on the Pike at the World's Fair last summer. The verdict rendered
seems proper and reasonable for such an offense.
Zach Mulhall is one of the breezy products of the plains who outlived his usefulness and became strangely out of place amid
the rapid development going on around him. His stamping ground was Oklahoma, but he freuently left the reservation and hiked
out for big cities, where he reveled in the reputation of an open-handed, open-mouthed son of the wild and wooly West, who would
spend his last cent on a friend in distress or shoot him in a minute if he refused to take a proffered drink.
Such men, in pioneer days, when each man was a law unto himself, were invaluable members of society. Generosity, bravery and
fidelity to friends were then among the most desirable qualities that a citizen could possess. The killing of a man once
in a while did not count for much then if done in a fair fight or as an accidental result in a drunken row for which proper
apologies had been made to the sorrowing widow. But now times are different. In fact, the West does not like to have any
of its citizens do acts which keep up the false notion that it is still an Indian, buffalo and cowboy country.
Zack Mulhall apparently does not realize this change, else he would not have manifested such a surprise at the verdict which made him a
criminal for "shooting up the town." The verdict, of course, is a hard blow to a man like Zach, who loves unlimited freedom
so much; but he is young yet and ought to come out from durance vile a better and wiser man. He won't loose caste much by
a term in the pen. Those who know and understand him will simply look on his incarceration as a severe but necessary method of "breaking him in"
to civilized ways.
K. C. Journal.