Mounted Justice

Excerpt from Mounted Justice: True Stories of the Pennsylvania State Police Early one Saturday morning in August, 1913, a peculiarly brutal murder was committed at Maaikenshof, the estate of my friend Miss M. Moyca Newell, in Bedford Hills, New York. The victim was Sam Howell, a fine young American, contractor's foreman on a building job. The murderers were four aliens; their motive, to seize the pay-roll that Howell, unarmed, was carrying to the building site. The four did not get the pay-roll, for the reason that Sam Howell, characteristically, gave his life in its stead. But, although fully identified, they escaped scot free, and walk to-day, as far as that crime is concerned, unpunished and undisturbed. If an overseeing Olympian, weary of the slackness of mankind, had ordained a tragedy especially to show the futility of all existing provision to cover such an event, the result could not have been more complete. Howell's gallant sacrifice, with the immediate consequences, showed in detail and beyond all question that our hoary sheriff-constable system leaves country districts in time of need without protection worthy of the name. The conditions then uncovered were at once humiliating and intolerable; and so, out of sorrow and shame, was born New York State's movement for a State Police. The star of this movement shone from Pennsylvania, whose magnificent State Police Force was then in its eighth year of service. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.