part of the world than the American
West. It is certain that the worst bad men all over Texas were afraid
of Ben Thompson. He was "chief."

Ben Thompson left the staid paths of life in civilized communities. He
did not rob, and he did not commit theft or burglary or any highway
crimes; yet toiling and spinning were not for him. He was, for the most
part, a gambler, and after a while he ceased even to follow that calling
as a means of livelihood. Forgetting the etiquette of his chosen
profession, he insisted on winning no manner how and no matter what the
game. He would go into a gambling resort in some town, and sit in at a
game. If he won, very well. If he lost, he would become enraged, and
usually ended by reaching out and raking in the money on the table, no
matter what the decision of the cards. He bought drinks for the crowd
with the money he thus took, and scattered it right and left, so that
his acts found a certain sanction among those who had not been
despoiled.

To know what nerve it required to perform these acts of audacity, one
must know something of the frontier life, which at no corner of the
world was wilder and touchier than in the very part of the country where
Thompson held forth. There were hundreds of men quick with the gun all
about him, men of nerve, but he did not hesitate to take all manner of
chances in that sort of population. The madness of the bad man was upon
him. He must have known what alone could be his fate at last, but he
went on, defying and courting his own destruction, as the finished
desperado always does, under the strange creed of self-reliance which he
established as his code of life. Thus, at a banquet of stockmen in
Austin, and while the dinner was in progress, Thompson, alone, stampeded
every man of them, and at that time nearly all stockmen were game. The
fear of Thompson's pistol was such that no one would stand for a fight
with him. Once Thompson went to the worst place in Texas, the town of
Luling, where Rowdy Joe was running the toughest dance house in America.
He ran all the bad men out of the place, confiscated what cash he needed
from the gaming tables and raised trouble generally. He showed that he
was "chief."

In the early eighties, in the quiet, sleepy, bloody old town of San
Antonio, there was a dance hall, gambling resort and vaudeville theater,
in which the main proprietor was one Jack Harris, commonly known as
Pegleg Harris. Thompson frequently patronized t