The morning news. [volume] (Savannah, Ga.) 1887-1900, 1893-08-20
COURAGE AT Q A. NJ.
A Gagged California Bandit Discourses
on This Napoleonic Subject.


Correspondence San Francisco Chronicle.
Chris Evans, the noted bandit who lies
in Jail at Fresno recovering from the
wounds received at Stone Corral, is a
man of most peculiar ideas on many sub
1ects on which men usually give little
thought. He is a fatallist of the most
confirmed sort, and yet he mixes with
this doctrine a certain influence which
actions have over events, and mingled
with it all there is a weird superstition
which obeys no rule. A few days ago a
reporter was talking with him in his cell
when the all absorbing topic of the Heath
trial came up. 1t was the day after Deu-
prey, in addressing the jury, explained
how McWhirter could have taken his own
life.
"McWhirter did not commit suicide"
remarked Evans, commenting on this
speech, which he had read in the morning
paper II can offer an argument that will
convince anybody on earth that McWhirt-
err did not commit suicide, and it is an ar
gument which no body has ever thought
Of so far as l have heard'
When pressed to give his argument,
Evans suddenly asked What time was
it that McWhirter met his death2"
"Fifteen minutes after 3 O'Clock in the
morning.
man can deliberately commit suicide at
that hour. No man has ever deliberately
taken his own life between l o'clock and
daybreak -
"What do you mean by that2 What has
that to do with itl''
II will tell you, - continued Evans "a
man who is in great pain. or under the
influence of liquor, or crazy, win kill him
self at any time. But man in full health
and in his right mind could not take his
life at that hour, because there comes a
period in every night, when it becomes to
grow toward morning, but when daybreak
is yet a very long way of, when every
man is a coward. He shrinks from an
imaginary fear A man will fight twice
as quick before midnight as he will after
When the night begins to wear away an
uneasiness comes upon men. They lose
their courage and cannot stick to a reso-
luton. l ought to know what am talk
ing about, and l do know that such is the
case.
"Haye you never observed that sick
persons are nearly always worse in the
after part of the night} Deaths occur
then oftener than at any other time I
have been told that sailors who die of long
sickness nearly always die at a time
when the tide GIBBS in the latter part of
the night There is a saying among
them that they will go out with the tide.
Men obey laws and rules which they can
not understand. McWhirter was brave
man, | have been told, yet he was not
brave enough to have deliberately gone
out and killed himself at that hour. He
would have begun to tremble, and at the
last moment would have turned back to
the house
1.-THE dreadful fear and uneasiness
which men feel then can not be describ-
ed. Those who want to do crime or any
thing desperate must fill themselves with
whisky. 1t is not because men are afraid
of the darkness, for it is Just as dark in
the early part of the night as at any 9TH
er time, and yet the man who fears moth
ing early in the night is a coward toward
morning. l noticed the lawyers in argu-
ing the Heath case repeatedly said that
the darkest hour is Just before the dawn;
but this is nonsense, unless il is used in a
figurative sense. Yet it expresses a
truth as wide as the human race and as
deep as the human soul. 1t seems dark
er Just before the dawn because people
grow restless and frnciful then and i'm
agine all sorts of dangers. The darkness
and gloom are in their feelings and not in
the nlgh6. Every small thing is magni-