"The Illinois legislature petitioned Congress to extend United States jurisdiction over No Man's Land, and so did the state of Indiana; and it was attached to the East District of Texas for the purposes of jurisdiction. Congressman Springer held up this bill for a time, using it as a club for the passage of a measure of his own upon which he was intent. Thus, it may be seen that the tawdry little tragedy in that land which indeed was 'No Man's Land' in time attained a national prominence.
"The collecting of the witnesses for this trial cost the United States government over one hundred thousand dollars. The trial was long and bitterly fought. It resulted, as did every attempt to convict those concerned in the bloody doings of Stevens county, in an absolute failure of the ends of justice. Of all the murders committed in that bitter fighting, not one murderer has ever been punished! Never was greater political or judicial mockery.
"I had the singular experience, once in my life, of eating dinner at the same table with the man who brutally shot me down and left me for dead. J. B. Chamberlain, the man who shot me, and who thought he had killed me, came in with a friend and sat down at the same table in a Leavenworth, Kansas, restaurant, where I was eating. My opportunity for revenge was there. I did not take it. Chamberlain and his friend did not know who I was. I left the matter to the law, with what results the records of the law's failure in these matters has shown.
"Of those who were tried for these murders, J. B. Chamberlain is now dead. C. E. Cook, who was much alarmed lest the cases might be reinstated in the year 1898, claims Quincy, Illinois, as his home, but has interests in Florida. O. J. Cook is dead. Jack Lawrence is dead. John Kelley is dead. Other actors in the drama, unconvicted, are also dead or nameless wanderers. As the indictments were all quashed in 1898, Sam Robinson, whose whereabouts is unknown, will never be brought to trial for his deeds in the Hay Meadow butchery. He was not tried at Paris, being then in the Colorado penitentiary. His friend and partner, Bert Nobel, who was sent to the penitentiary for seven years for participating in the postoffice robbery, was pardoned out, and later killed a policeman at Trinidad, Colorado. He was tried there and hanged. So far as I know, this is the only legal punishment ever inflicted upon any of the Hugoton or Woodsdale men, who outvied each other in a lawlessness for which anarchy would be a mild name."