Page:The Chicago Martyrs (1899).pdf/109

Your honor, this was the fifth day of May, the day following the Haymarket affair. Mr. Burnett was found and repeated the above facts to the district attorney, reaffirming the statement to which he subsequently swore in court for the defense, that the strange man stood thirty-five feet south of the alley; that be saw him light the fuse and then throw the bomb; that he wore dark clothes; and it was proven on trial that Rudolph Schnaubelt, the man Gilmer implicated, wore light clothes that night, and this Pinkerton man had a mustache and no chin or side whiskers, while Schnaubelt, the Anarchist, had both; and he was a man of medium size, whereas Schnaubelt is noted for his great height ; he is six feet two inches. The district attorney had to stultify his own witnesses by the unsupported, manufactured, perjured evidence of Gilmer, because for forty pieces of silver, he was willing to swear that Spies lit the fuse while another man threw the bomb—a very tall man in height, in light clothes, with a light or sandy beard. Gilmer swore that when Fielden was speaking he was looking for a party he expected to find there, "and I went back in the alley between the Crane building and the building on the south of it. I stopped in the alley and noticed some parties in conversation across the alley on the south side. Some one said: 'Here come the police.' There was a man who jumped from the wagon down to the parties somewhere standing on the south side of the alley, and lit a match and touched oil something or other, and the man gave a couple of steps forward and tossed it over into the street." Side by side with this, we give the precise words of Mr. Bonfield, as published in the Chicago Times of May 5, to a knot of reporters gathered around him at the station house half an hour after the tragedy occurred. He is reported in the Times of May 5 to have said: "The exact scene of the explosion is near the center of the street and exactly opposite the alley on the east side which separates No. 9 South Desplaines street from Crane Brothers' foundry. At intervals between this alley and Randolph street there are large, heavy, box-like frames at the edge of the sidewalk, and it is here that the bomb was thrown." Lieutenant Haas located the spot there also as some fifteen feet south of the alley, not in the alley, as Gilmer would have it. Yes, the prediction of the Indianapolis stranger was verified. The bomb was heard from, and heard around the world. The purpose avowed in the New York city papers to pick out the leaders and make such examples of them as to scare the others into submission, was put into successful execution, and well was the diabolical and nefarious plot executed. Eight men—"leaders"—three labor editors and five labor organizers and orators—now before you, are here to receive sentence of death in pursuance of that vile plot, of which the Haymarket tragedy, in the hands of a Pinkerton detective, was the entering wedge; and Gilmer's testimony is but a part of a scheme to divert attention from the evidence of twelve witnesses, exclusive of Bonfield's, to the Times reporter, that the infernal machine was hurled from fifteen to thirty-five feet south of the alley, just where the short man in dark clothes actually stood when the angel of death was sped on its infernal mission, not only to sacrifice purposely the lives of the policemen on the ground, but that the labor leaders might be arrested and doomed to death under a charge of the commission of the offense, in order, as avowed by the New York Times, the agent and representative of the falling stock markets of the east, to scare