The Career of a Fast Young Man

Terminates in His Being Shot by

A Vigilant committee in Texas

Robbed of the Virtue of

His Wife, He Becomes an

Outcast and a Thief  

In the recent dispatches from Indian nation, the particulars of the shooting of this young man by a vigilant committee was given. He was there living under an assumed name, but from a reliable source, and in conversation with a prominent citizen of Moberly, Mo., a Times reporter learned the particulars of his death and some of the facts of his early life.

At the time of the breaking out of the war he was living in Monroe county, Missouri, and was engaged in farming. Being of a good family, he was looked upon as a promising young man, generous to a fault, and as brave as a lion. The state of affairs then existing in his county, afforded to him the opportunity he had longed for, of choosing the reckless, dare-devil life which his impulsive nature had always craved, and he took to the bush. He was mixed up in a number of daring acts during the war, and at one time being bantered by a comrade, the two charged through the streets of Paris, Monroe county, Mo., there being then nearly a regiment of Federal troops stationed there.

After the war he settled in the same county, and was married to a Miss Mollie Matthews, of Randolph county. When the now prosperous little city of Moberly opened such encouraging opportunities for business, Alexander moved there and commenced the business of saloon keeping. For a time he was happy, or apparently so, having a loving wife, a sweet little babe, and a very lucrative business. But at last chaos came in the form of a wealthy and prominent citizen, and now an official of the city of Moberly, who seduced the wife and made an outcast of the husband. After a separation from his wife he seemed to grow more and more reckless, and after being the principal in one or two cutting and shooting scrapes, in one of which he cut a young man named Jeffries near to death, he became a wanderer. He was frequently heard from in different parts of the State, first in Kansas City and then in some other place remote from the one from the one he would be forced to flee, until in the last extremity he migrated to the land of long horns, where he has just been summarily dealt with by a vigilant committee, being caught in the act of horse-stealing. He was shot down without a moment’s warning, and had not a chance given him to compromise or ask the forgiveness of that Being whom had defied and wronged, and while he fills a felon’s grave in the far-off State where people take the law into their own hands and deal out justice extravagantly and inconsistently, his wife now plies the profession of a prostitute in this city. A full record of the deeds and life of this once promising young man would occupy more space than we can devote to it; but, to point the moral to adorn the tale, it shows that slow and inevitable suicide of a man sunk deep into the fathomless depths of dissipation and crime seeking that borne as the only resource of relief, and goaded by the thought of a pure and once loved wife, driven even from the society of relatives and friends into a pitiless world to earn her bread by selling her soul. He has at last found his fate at the hands of a class of men who neither pity nor forgive.