Then a time came when in a hospital in Oklahoma an elderly man
named A. Hamilton Bledsoe lay on his deathbed and on the day before he
died told the physician who attended him and the clergyman who had
called to pray for him that he had a confession to make. He desired that
it be taken down by a stenographer just as he uttered it, and
transcribed; then he would sign it as his solemn dying declaration, and
when he had died they were to send the signed copy back to the town from
whence he had in the year 1889 moved West, and there it was to be
published broadcast. All of which, in due course of time and in
accordance with the signatory's wishes, was done.
With the beginning of the statement as it appeared in the _Daily Evening
News_, as with Editor Tompkins' introductory paragraphs preceding it, we
need have no interest. That which really matters began two-thirds of the
way down the first column and ran as follows:
"How I came to know there was likely to be trouble that evening at the
big-riffle crossing was this way"--it is the dying Bledsoe, of course,
who is being quoted. "The man they sent to the mill with the message did
a lot of loose talking on his way back after he gave in the message, and
in this roundabout way the word got to me at my house on the Eden's
Swamp road soon after dinnertime.
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