s protest, in obedience to an order from the
Attorney-General of the United States to Marshal Franks to
detail a deputy to protect the person of Justice Field from
Terry's threatened violence. A slap in the face may not, under
ordinary circumstances, be sufficient provocation to justify
the taking of human life; but it must be remembered that there
were no ordinary circumstances and that Terry was no ordinary
man. Terry was a noted pistol-shot; it was known that he
invariably carried arms and that he boasted of his ability to
use them. If on this occasion he was unarmed, as Mrs. Terry
asserts,[1] Neagle had no means of knowing that fact; on the
contrary, to his mind every presumption was in favor of the
belief that he carried both pistol and knife, in accordance
with his usual habit. As a peace officer, even apart from the
special duty which had been assigned to him, he was justified
in taking the means necessary to prevent Terry from continuing
his assault; but the means necessary in the case of one man
may be wholly inadequate with a man bearing the reputation
of David S. Terry, a man who only a few months previously had
drawn a knife while resisting the lawful authority of another
United States officer. It is true that if Terry was unarmed,
the deputy marshal might have arrested him without taking his
life or seriously endangering his own; but Terry was a man of
gigantic stature, and though aged, in possession of a giant's
strength; and there is no one who was acquainted with him, or
has had opportunity to learn his past history, who does not
know that he was a desperate man, willing to take desperate
chances and to resort to desperate means when giving way to
his impulses of passion, and that any person who should at
such a moment attempt to stay his hand would do so at the risk
of his life. Whether he had a pistol with him at that moment
or not, there was every reason to believe that he was armed,
and that the blow with his hand was intended only as the
precursor to a more deadly blow with a weapon. At such moments
little time is allowed for reflection. The officer of the law
was called upon to act and to act promptly. He did so, and the
life of David S. Terry was the forfeit. He fell, a victim to
his own ungovernable passions, urged on to his fate by the
woman who