r, as the
latter was stripped for the noose.

"You won't need it now," replied Gallegher, who was dying blasphemous.
About then, George Lane, one of the line of men about to be hung,
jumped off his box on his own account. "There's one gone to hell,"
remarked Boone Helm, philosophically. Gallegher was hanged next, and as
he struggled his former friend watched him calmly. "Kick away, old
fellow," said Boone Helm. Then, as though suddenly resolved to end it,
he commented, "My turn next. I'll be in hell with you in a minute!"

Boone Helm was a Confederate and a bitter one, and this seems to have
remained with him to the last. "Every man for his principles!" he
shouted. "Hurrah for Jeff Davis! Let her rip!" He sprang off the box;
and so he finished, utterly hard and reckless to the last.

Chapter IX

Death Scenes of Desperadoes--_How Bad Men Died_--_The Last Moments of
Desperadoes Who Finished on the Scaffold_--_Utterances of Terror, of
Defiance, and of Cowardice_.

There is always a grim sort of curiosity regarding the way in which
notoriously desperate men meet their end; and perhaps this is as natural
as is the curiosity regarding the manner in which they lived. "Did he
die game?" is one of the questions asked by bad men among themselves.
"Did he die with his boots on?" is another. The last was the test of
actual or, as it were, of professional badness. One who admitted himself
bad was willing to die with his boots on. Honest men were not, and more
than one early Western man fatally shot had his friends take off his
boots before he died, so that he might not go with the stain of
desperadoism attached to his name.

Some bad men died unrepentant and defiant. Others broke down and wept
and begged. A great oblivion enshrouds most of these utterances, for few
Vigilante movements ever reached importance enough to permit those who
participated to make publicly known their own participation in them.
Indeed, no man ever concerned in a law and order execution ever liked to
talk about it. Tradition, however, has preserved the exact utterances of
many bad men. Report is preserved, in a general way, of many of the
rustlers hung by the cattle men in the "regulator" movement in Montana,
Wyoming, and Nebraska in the late '70's. "Give me a chew of tobacco,
folks," said one. "Meet you in hell, fellows," remarked others of these
rustlers when the last moment arrived. "So-long, boys," was a not
infrequent remark as the noose t