ys to put on their guns. On that night
there were killed Gillam, Bill Harold, Dave Warner and Martinez, the
Mexican constable. The dead body of Martinez was lying in the street the
next morning with a deep cross cut on the forehead. From that time on
for the next five years, it was no uncommon thing to see dead men lying
in the streets of Lincoln. The Harold boys had sworn revenge.

There was a little dance in an adobe one night at Lincoln, when Ben
Harold and some Texas men from the Seven Rivers country rode up. They
killed four men and one woman that night before they started back to
Seven Rivers. From that time on, it was Texas against the law, such as
the latter was. No resident places the number of the victims of the
Harold war at less than forty or fifty, and it is believed that at least
seventy-five would be more correct. These killings proved the weakness
of the law, for none of the Harold gang was ever punished. As for the
Lincoln County War proper, the magazine was now handsomely laid. Only
the spark was needed. What would that naturally be? Either an actual law
court, or else--a woman! In due time, both were forthcoming.

The woman in the case still lives to-day in New Mexico, sometimes spoken
of as the "Cattle Queen" of New Mexico. She bears now the name of Mrs.
Susan E. Barber. Her maiden name was Susan E. Hummer, the name sometimes
spelled Homer, and she was born in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Susan
Hummer was a granddaughter of Anna Maria Spangler-Stauffer. The Spangler
family is a noble one of Germany and very old. George Spangler was
cup-bearer to Godfrey, Chancellor of Frederick Barbarossa, and was with
the latter on the Crusade when Barbarossa was drowned in the Syrian
river, Calycadmus, in 1190. The American seat of this old family was in
York county, Pennsylvania, where the first Spanglers settled in 1731. It
was from this tenacious and courageous ancestry that there sprang this
figure of a border warfare in a region wild as Barbarossa's realm
centuries ago.

On August 23, 1873, in Atchison, Kansas, Susan Hummer was married to
Alexander A. McSween, a young lawyer fresh from the Washington
university law school of St. Louis. McSween was born in Charlottetown,
Prince Edward Island, and was educated in the first place as a
Presbyterian minister. He was a man of good appearance, of intelligence
and address, and of rather more polish than the average man. He was an
orator, a dreamer, and a visionary; a s