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Before them both grand and petty juries were empanelled, indictments drawn up, prisoners tried for assault, burglary, horse-stealing, witchcraft, pocket-picking, keeping up nuisances, cheating, failure to attend church, and almost all other offences of which seventeenth- century Englishmen were capable. If convicted they were placed in the stocks, whipped, or hanged.
The Indians were even more fond of horse-stealing than of murder, and they found a ready market for their horses not only in their own nations and among the Spaniards, but among the American frontiersmen themselves. Many of the unscrupulous white scoundrels who lived on the borders of the Indian country made a regular practice of receiving the stolen horses.
The horses owned by the Arickaras are, for the most part, of the wild stock of the prairies; some, however, had been obtained from the Poncas, Pawnees, and other tribes to the southwest, who had stolen them from the Spaniards in the course of horse-stealing expeditions into Mexican territories. These were to be known by being branded; a Spanish mode of marking horses not practiced by the Indians.
Some of the young ones had been Philip's scholars viz., the Boyles and the Blakes. They were friends of the Bartons, and Old John, the ex-flogger, trained them in the art of cattle-lifting. His teaching was far more successful than that of Philip's, and when in course of time Hugh Boyle appeared in the dock on a charge of horse-stealing, I was pained but not surprised.
The horse-stealing story, more or less garbled, found its way through lips that pretended to decry it, yet eagerly repeated it. Only one member of the Rightbody family and a new one saved them from utter ostracism. It was young Mr. Ryder, the adopted son of the prospective head of the household, whose culture, manners, and general elegance, fascinated and thrilled Boston with a new sensation.
As a singular illustration of the intractable nature of these Indians, I would mention that at the period when the small-pox was most destructive among them they still continued to carry on their horse-stealing raids against the Crees and half-breeds in the neighbourhood of Victoria Mission.
But even as she spoke, her heart misgave her. The Senora would dare anything; would misrepresent anything; only too well Ramona knew what the very mention of the phrase "horse-stealing" meant all through the country. She looked piteously at Alessandro. He read her thoughts. "Yes, that is it, Majella," he said. "If she sent men after Baba, there is no knowing what they might do.
In passing sentence the judge "expatiated on the prevalence of the crime of horse-stealing and the necessity of making an example. The enormity of Read's crime rendered him a proper example, and he would therefore hold out no hope of mercy towards him."
Able seamen sentenced for horse-stealing or rioting, town dwellers raided out of night-houses, impostors who simulated fits or played the maimed soldier, fishermen in the illicit brandy and tobacco line, gentlemen of the road, makers of "flash" notes and false coin, stealers of sheep, assaulters of women, pickpockets and murderers in one unmitigated throng went the way of the fleet and there sank their vices, their roguery, their crimes and their identity in the number of a mess.
Then he tried to pull up, but as he did so his muscles seemed suddenly to give way, his head drooped, and he rolled over and over like a shot rabbit. There were, once, near Mr. Roosevelt's ranch, three men who had been suspected of cattle-killing and horse-stealing.
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