Gamblers and saloon men of the time always justified any act necessary to get the money, with the following philosophy : "These men are naturally spenders, booze fighter.-, and otherwise dissolute. When they have money, they lay around the towns, drink, and make themselves generally disgusting and disagreeable. Therefore take the money from them as quickly as any device can be arranged. It stops their ruinous notions and sends them into the healthy life of the open, to be 'producers.' "

This logic is about as reasonable as that of profiteers born of the late world war.

Sidney had its large bunch of self-appointed guardian-- of ihis class. So it was that one Saturday morning the town woke up +o the effect that one of its best men, Henry Locmis, had been shot by a gambler named Charles Reed, Loomis was taken to the United States hospital at the Sidney army post, where it was found that the thigh bone was shattered, and an amputation was necessary. He died at live o'clock in the afternoon of May 10, 1879.

Reed had lied to the rocks north of Sidney, bul was taken by Sheriff Zweifel and a posse, and incarcerated in jail. About eleven o'clock in the night four hundred masked men arrived ai lb. jail, overpowered the guards, and took Reed to a telegraph pole on the south side of the track opposite the Union Pacific depot. A ladder was procured, and a rope thrown over tin' cross-bar of the pole, one end of which