as agreed to shoot them. With that I said, 'We'll take you no
further, but separate you, and then loose one of you, and he can
relieve the others.' So with that, Sullivan took De Pontius to the
left of where Kempthorne was sitting. I took Mathieu to the right.
I tied a strap round his legs, and shot him with a revolver. He
yelled, I ran from him with my gun in my hand, I sighted Kempthorne,
who had risen to his feet. I presented the gun, and shot him behind
the right ear; his life's blood welled from him, and he died
instantaneously. Sullivan had shot. De Pontius in the meantime,
and then came to me. I said, 'Look to Mathieu,' indicating the spot
where he lay. He shortly returned and said, 'I had to "chiv" that
fellow, he was not dead,' a cant word, meaning that he had to stab
him. Returning to the road we passed where De Pontius lay and was
dead. Sullivan said, 'This is the digger, the others were all
storekeepers; this is the digger, let's cover him up, for should the
others be found, they'll think he done it and sloped,' meaning he
had gone. So with that we threw all the stones on him, and then
left him. This bloody work took nearly an hour and a half from the
time we stopped the men."

Anyone who reads that confession will think that the man who wrote it was
destitute of emotions, destitute of feeling. That is partly true. As
regarded others he was plainly without feeling--utterly cold and
pitiless; but as regarded himself the case was different. While he cared
nothing for the future of the murdered men, he cared a great deal for his
own. It makes one's flesh creep to read the introduction to his
confession. The judge on the bench characterized it as "scandalously
blasphemous," and it certainly reads so, but Burgess meant no blasphemy.
He was merely a brute, and whatever he said or wrote was sure to expose
the fact. His redemption was a very real thing to him, and he was as
jubilantly happy on the gallows as ever was Christian martyr at the
stake. We dwellers in this world are strangely made, and mysteriously
circumstanced. We have to suppose that the murdered men are lost, and
that Burgess is saved; but we cannot suppress our natural regrets.

"Written in my dungeon drear this 7th of August, in the year of
Grace, 1866. To God be ascribed all power and glory in subduing the
rebellious spirit