say whether the prisoner was the man he ferried over the river the day of
the murder.

[Illustration: Lynching of C.J. Miller, at Bardwell, Kentucky, July 7,
1893.]

The sheriff of Ballard County informed him, sternly that if the prisoner
was not the man, he (the fisherman) would be held responsible as knowing
who the guilty man was. Gordon stated before, that the man he ferried
across was a white man or a bright colored man; Miller was a dark brown
skinned man, with kinky hair, "neither yellow nor black," says the _Cairo
Evening Telegram_ of Friday, July 7. The fisherman went up to Miller from
behind, looked at him without speaking for fully five minutes, then slowly
said, "Yes, that's the man I crossed over." This was about six o'clock,
Friday morning, and the crowd wished to hang Miller then and there. But
Mr. Ray, the father of the girls, insisted that he be taken to Bardwell,
the county seat of Ballard, and twelve miles inland. He said he thought a
white man committed the crime, and that he was not satisfied that was the
man. They took him to Bardwell and at ten o'clock, this same excited,
unauthorized mob undertook to determine Miller's guilt. One of the Clark
brothers who shot at a fleeing man in the Dupoyster cornfield, said the
prisoner was the same man; the other said he was not, but the testimony of
the first was accepted. A colored woman who had said she gave breakfast to
a colored man clad in a blue flannel suit the morning of the murder, said
positively that she had never seen Miller before. The gold rings found in
his possession had no names in them, as had been asserted, and Mr. Ray
said they did not belong to his daughters. Meantime a funeral pyre for the
purpose of burning Miller to death had been erected in the center of the
village. While the crowd swayed by passion was clamoring that he be burnt,
Miller stepped forward and made the following statement: "My name is