effect; he got away, but they said he was a white man or nearly so.  The search continued all day without effect, save the arrest of two or three strange Negroes.  A bloodhound was brought from the penitentiary and put on the trail which he followed from the scene of the murder to the river and into the boat of a fisherman named Gordon.  Gordon stated that he had ferried one man and only one across the river about about half past six the evening of July 5; that his passenger sat in front of him, and he was a white man or a very bright mulatto, who could not be told from a white man.  The bloodhound was put across the river in the boat, and he struck a trail again at Bird’s Point on the Missouri side, ran about three hundred yards to the cottage of a white farmer named Grant and there lay down refusing to go further.

Thursday morning a brakesman on a freight train going out of Sikeston, Mo., discovered a Negro stealing a ride; he ordered him off and had hot words which terminated in a fight.  The brakesman had the Negro arrested.  When arrested, between 11 and 12 o’clock, he had on a dark woolen shirt, light pants and coat, and no vest.  He had twelve dollars in paper, two silver dollars and ninety-five cents in change; he had also four rings in his pockets, a knife and a razor which were rusted and stained.  The Sikeston authorities immediately jumped to the conclusion that this man was the murderer for whom the Kentuckians across the river were searching.  They telegraphed to Bardwell that their prisoner had on no coat, but wore a blue vest and pants which would perhaps correspond with the coat found at the scene of the murder, and that the names of the murdered girls were in the rings found in his possession.

As soon as this news was received, the sheriffs of Ballard and Carlisle counties and a posse(?) of thirty well-armed and determined Kentuckians, who had pledged their word the prisoner should be taken back to the scene of the supposed crime, to be executed there if proved to be the guilty man, chartered a train and at nine o’clock Thursday night started for Sikeston.  Arriving there two hours later, the sheriff at Sikeston, who had no warrant for the prisoner’s arrest and detention, delivered him into the hands of the mob without authority for so doing, and accompanied them to Bird’s Point.  The prisoner gave his name as Miller, his home at Springfield, and said he had never been in Kentucky in his life, but the sheriff turned him over to the mob to be taken to Wickliffe, that Frank Gordon, the fisherman, who had put a man across the river might identify him.

In other words, the protection of the law was withdrawn from C.J.  Miller, and he was given to a mob by this sheriff at Sikeston, who knew that the prisoner’s life depended on one man’s word.  After an altercation with the train men, who wanted another $50 for taking the train back to Bird’s Point, the crowd arrived there at three o’clock, Friday morning.  Here was anchored The Three States, a ferryboat plying between Wickliffe, Ky, Cairo, Ill., and Bird’s Point, Mo.  This boat left Cairo at twelve o’clock, Thursday, with nearly three hundred of Cairo’s best(?) citizens and thirty kegs of beer on board.  This was consumed while the crowd and the bloodhound waited for the prisoner.