The daily morning journal and courier., 1899-07-15

with a knife foot long. Morgan. cold drunk and savage, shot him before he
 had taken two steps, That closed the
 deal. Morgan went to jail in the mid dle of clump of soldiers. The other masons heard of it, rose like a flock of quail and lit running. Some caught
 passing freight trains, some decamped on borrowed mules, some took to the
 mountains and eventually worked their
 way back to the States. Morgan was
 tried next day and sentenced to be shot.
 Before his execution it occurred to the authorities, however, that if they killed
 him they would have nobody to finish
 their wonderful hall. So they gave him
 a suspension of sentence until he did all
 the carving. The walls of this building
 had been put up before the masons
 came. So every day, in summer shine
 and winter storm, Morgan, suspended on
 a platform a hundred feet above the
 street clipped away at gargoyles and
 griffins and things like that while file
 of soldiers loafed below. He took his
 time, you can bet. Fast work meant
 soon death to him. He put in six
 months on a fat angel three feet long,
 blowing a horn He had em foul and
 used to make em treat him pretty
 white. Sometimes he would strike work
 for a while and pelt the soldiers with
 stone clippings, and they didn't dare to
 shoot him. After three years of this the l authorities, who saw that their hall
 would not be finished before the end of
 the next century, told him that if he
 would get other worlmen to help him
 they would let him off altogether. He | wrote to his brother. who was maker
 of gravestone marbles in Pittsburg, and
 he so worked on the local union that a
 lot of the men agreed to go down to San
 Luis. They had an easy enough time
 after they got there. Indeed, the gover-
 nor of Potosi state gave orders that they
 were to be treated tenderly. He was
 afraid that they might run away and
 further delay the hall They got twenty
 dollars day in Mexican money and
 good barracks Morgan watched his chance and skipped one night. The oth-
 CTS stayed on, and guess the hall is fln- | ished by now"
 'They still do funny things in that country" said another of the engineers. Nearly all of the railway building is now south of the capital, over toward l the Pacific coast. In that part of the world conductors of construction trains are still putting away five hundred dol lars month hauling freight and pas sengers on their own hook. Last winter there was an Irishman named Doyle, boss of a camp of tie-cutters not far from Tehuantepec A hundred men got their grub and bedding in that camp, and one of the three cooks was China man. This Chinaman got black sick ness of some kind It was one of the many fevers of the coast country, and it meant death to him. Doyle was afraid 1t was catching. He had big contract on and good labor was hard to get He didn't want his men to die. The Chinaman laid down on the outer edge of the camp for two days, wrapped in his blanket shivering and burning by turns. No doctor was nearer than fifty miles, On the third day, when all the axemen were out In the woods, Doyle went to the Chinaman and stopped over him.
 Kape tn blanket wropped close about ye,' says he, How're ye feelin' tn day?'
 Me feel plenty slick said John. Me velly blad.' U4
 q" "A poor haythin, v are says Doyle, | 'an' Oi misdoubt thot ye have any soul | at all, but if ye have ut, tn saints be | good to ut
 50 he shot the Chnaman through | the head and piled dry logs upon the body and burned it, blankets and all. When the men came back at night they looked o bn tttt, tba | had been and saw some ashes and lit- tie smoke rising. They did not ask any questions and the other cooks had noth- ing to say"
 Tt used to be a great country for gambling" said the third engineer, land is yet for that matter, but things are not so sasy to our boys. Even a Mexican will learn in time. They are an honora- ble people in games of chance as we'll as the most genuinely polite folks in the world. Formerly 1t was the custom of a man who wanted little sport to walk into a room where banking game was in progress, go up to the table, lay a roll of bills down and say that he bet so much on a certain card. If he won he received the amount he stated and if he lost his roll was taken, and when count ed, was found always to contain the eX- act amount That is the way the Mexi- l cans did it. The Americans worked this to death in a little while. They bet in the same way and if they won they were paid all right. If they lost, howev- er their rolls, when examined, were found to be of brown paper on the inside, with a couple of trifing bills for the covering Now, down in Mexico when a man throws roll on the table the dealer counts it through before he turns card A suburb of the City of Mexico is called Tacubaya and there they run the largest gambling bank in the world. Talk about Monte Carlo! At Monte Carlo the most a man can win on one bet is thirteen hundred dollars. At Ta 3ubaya the limit is the size of the bank roll That is habitually twenty five |, thousand dollars in gold, silver and bills placed in front of the dealer. The :, game is monte, and the number of play ars, as in faro, is limited only by the size 1f the tables. used to know a freight conductor named Hunter who ran into he City of Mexico over the Mexican Ma tional line. His run extended clear up to the Rio Grande, and he got to the ,ity not oftener than once in two weeks. He frequented Tacubaya and figured on