This is the position of affairs in the country, and the situation is rendered particularly serious by the offenders being very rarely arrested; their secret is too well kept. Besides, when they are arrested, it is not of much use; the juries know what to expect if they give an adverse verdict, and therefore the few culprits brought before them are nearly always acquitted. The other day there was a very amusing case of this kind.
One of the Colonel’s neighbours, also an ex-officer, Major F----, had some difficulties with a drover who occupied a very small farm. He gave him notice to quit. The man complained to the Land League, and the president wrote to the Major telling him that he had received a complaint against him and requesting him to give some explanation about the motives that had led him to act so harshly. The Major considering this summons a simple piece of impertinence naturally took no notice of it. But he suffered for his neglect. A few days’ later as he finished breakfast, he noticed five or six cows feeding in a field of clover in front of his windows. He went out, for he could not understand how they had entered. When he reached the field he found they had passed through a gap in the wall that had evidently been made on purpose.
He drove them before him, intending to make them go out by the same gap, when he suddenly perceived, not ten paces from him, a man on the other side of the wall deliberately aiming at him with a long holster pistol. He instantly recognised his drover. The shot followed; he realised that he was not hit, but he turned on his heels and ran back into the house to find a weapon. When, ten minutes later, he returned to the fields, he made a curious discovery--the pistol had burst; this accident had saved his life. The fragments of the weapon were on the ground. The drover had disappeared, but he had been severely wounded; his right hand thumb had been blown off, and was found in a pool of blood.
Five or six days later the assassin was arrested in a hospital where he had gone to have his wounds attended to. He was sent to the assizes; but on the eve of the trial each juryman received a letter signed “Captain Moonlight,” informing him that the man had only obeyed orders, and that if he were condemned, others would be found ready to avenge him and to make them suffer the same fate from which the Major had so narrowly escaped.