Henry Plummer, whose fate has been described in a previous chapter, was one of those who died in a sense of guilt and terror. His was a nature of some sensitiveness, not callous like that of Boone Helm. Plummer begged for life on any terms, asked the Vigilantes to cut off his ears and hands and tongue, anything to mark him and leave him helpless, but to leave him alive. He protested that he was too wicked to die, fell on his knees, cried aloud, promised, besought. On the whole, his end hardly left him enshrouded with much glamor of courage; although the latter term is relative in the bad man, who might be brave at one time and cowardly at another, as was often proved.
[Illustration: THE SCENE OF MANY HANGINGS]
Ned Ray and Buck Stinson died full of profanity and curses, heaping upon their executioners all manner of abuse. They seemed to be animated by no understanding of a life hereafter, and were concerned only in their animal instinct to hold on to this one as long as they might. Yet Stinson, of a good Indiana family, was a bright and studious and well-read boy, of whom many good things had been predicted.
Dutch John, when faced with death, acted much as his chief, Henry Plummer, had done. He begged and pleaded, and asked for mutilation, disfigurement, anything, if only he might still live. But, like Plummer, at the very last moment he pulled together and died calmly. "How long will it take me to die?" he asked. "I have never seen anyone hanged." They told him it would be very short and that he would not suffer much, and this seemed to please him. Nearly all these desperadoes seemed to dread death by hanging. The Territory of Utah allowed a felon convicted under death penalty to choose the manner of his death, whether by hanging, beheading, or shooting; but no record remains of any prisoner who did not choose death by shooting. A curiosity as to the sensation of hanging was evinced in the words of several who were hung by Vigilantes.
In the largest hanging made in this Montana work, there were five men executed one after the other: Clubfoot George, Hayes Lyons, Jack Gallegher, Boone Helm, and Frank Parish, all known to be members of the Plummer gang. George and Parish at first declared that they were innocent--the first word of most of these men when they were apprehended. Parish died silent. George had spent some hours with a clergyman, and was apparently repentant. Just as he reached the box, he saw a friend peering through a crack in the wall. "Good-by, old fellow," he called out, and sprang to his own death without waiting for the box to be pulled from under his feet.