Following the Equator

Let us be grateful to Adam our benefactor. He cut us out of the "blessing of idleness," and won for us the "curse of labor."
-- Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

We soon reached the town of Nelson, and spent the most of the day there, visiting acquaintances and driving with them about the garden -- the whole region is a garden, excepting the scene of the "Maungatapu Murders," of thirty years ago. That is a wild place -- wild and lonely; an ideal place for a murder. It is at the base of a vast, rugged, densely timbered mountain. In the deep twilight of that forest solitude four desperate rascals -- Burgess, Sullivan, Levy, and Kelley -- ambushed themselves beside the mountain-trail to murder and rob four travelers -- Kempthorne, Mathieu, Dudley, and De Pontius, the latter a New Yorker. A harmless old laboring man came wandering along, and as his presence was an embarrassment, they choked him, hid him, and then resumed their watch for the four. They had to wait a while, but eventually everything turned out as they desired.

That dark episode is the one large event in the history of Nelson. The fame of it traveled far. Burgess made a confession. It is a remarkable paper. For brevity, succinctness, and concentration, it is perhaps without its peer in the literature of murder. There are no waste words in it; there is no obtrusion of matter not pertinent to the occasion, nor any departure from the dispassionate tone proper to a formal business statement -- for that is what it is: a business statement of a murder, by the chief engineer of it, or superintendent, or foreman, or whatever one may prefer to call him.

"We were getting impatient, when we saw four men and a pack-horse coming. I left my cover and had a look at the men, for Levy had told me that Mathieu was a small man and wore a large beard, and that it was a chestnut horse. I said, 'Here they come.' They were then a good distance away; I took the caps off my gun, and put fresh ones on. I said, 'You keep where you are, I'll put them up, and you give me your gun while you tie them.' It was arranged as I have described. The men came; they arrived within about fifteen yards when I stepped up and said, 'Stand! Bail up!' That means all of them to get together. I made them fall back on the upper side of the road with their faces up the range, and Sullivan brought me his gun, and then tied their hands behind them. The horse was very quiet all the time, he did not move. When they were all tied, Sullivan took the horse up the hill, and put him in the bush; he cut the rope and let the swags -- [A "swag" is a kit, a pack, small