e had arrested Smith and, it is
said, cruelly mistreated him. Whether or not the murder of his child was
an art of fiendish revenge, it has not been shown, but many persons who
know of the incident have suggested that the secret of the attack on the
child lay in a desire for revenge against its father.

In the same town there lived a Negro, named Henry Smith, a well-known
character, a kind of roustabout, who was generally considered a harmless,
weak-minded fellow, not capable of doing any important work, but
sufficiently able to do chores and odd jobs around the houses of the white
people who cared to employ him. A few days before the final tragedy, this
man, Smith, was accused of murdering Myrtle Vance. The crime of murder was
of itself bad enough, and to prove that against Smith would have been
amply sufficient in Texas to have committed him to the gallows, but the
finding of the child so exasperated the father and his friends, that they
at once shamefully exaggerated the facts and declared that the babe had
been ruthlessly assaulted and then killed. The truth was bad enough, but
the white people of the community made it a point to exaggerate every
detail of the awful affair, and to inflame the public mind so that nothing
less than immediate and violent death would satisfy the populace. As a
matter of fact, the child was not brutally assaulted as the world has been
told in excuse for the awful barbarism of that day. Persons who saw the
child after its death, have stated, under the most solemn pledge to truth,
that there was no evidence of such an assault as was published at that
time, only a slight abrasion and discoloration was noticeable and that
mostly about the neck. In spite of this fact, so eminent a man as Bishop
Haygood deliberately and, it must also appear, maliciously falsified the
fact by stating that the child was torn limb from limb, or to quote his
own words, "First outraged with demoniacal cruelty and then taken by her
heels and torn asunder in the mad wantonness of gorilla ferocity."

Nothing is farther from the truth than that statement. It is a
coldblooded, deliberate, brutal falsehood which this Christian(?) Bishop
uses to bolster up the infamous plea that the people of Paris were driven
to insanity by learning that the little child had been viciously
assaulted, choked to death, and then torn to pieces by a demon in human
form. It was a brutal murder, but no more brutal than hundreds of murders
whic