Exile

One midwinter day in 1900, three men entered the gate in front of Kentucky's capitol at Frankfort and started walking toward the edifice. Halfway through the grounds stands a fountain, the overflow of which had only partly frozen on the path. As the three men turned aside to avoid the sludge, five rifle shots were fired with terrible deliberation and enormous echoes from a lower window of the capitol. One of the men near the fountain collapsed, mortally wounded.

A cub reporter named Cobb, who had been watching the three men approach, dashed out of the capitol and across the frozen lawn. He knew it was Big News. The dying man was William Goebel, who had just successfully contested in the legislature the election of his Republican opponent for Governor of Kentucky.

A policeman, thinking he spied the assassin, whipped out his revolver and began to shoot at the scurrying cub. Someone knocked up the policeman's arm, thus saving to posterity a famed storyteller. Cub Cobb's name was Irvin S. Cobb, who lived to write Speaking of Operations, A Laugh a Day, Here Comes the Bride, etc., etc., and to reminisce last week about the Goebel murder, perhaps as famed a murder as there is in all hard-shooting Kentucky's history.

Caleb Powers, then Secretary of State of Kentucky, was sentenced to death. An underling of the State Auditor was sentenced to life imprisonment. Powers was pardoned, as was the third and foremost figure on the Republican side of the case, whose death last week at 76 from natural causes brought the Goebel murder back in the news.

William S. ("Hog Jaw") Taylor was his name. He was the candidate who had the Governor's office while Goebel contested it. At his trial it was testified that he offered $2,500 to the man who would shoot Goebel. When Goebel was declared Governor by the Legislature, "Governor" Taylor's friends had assembled an army of 1,500 hillbillies in Frankfort for a finish fight. After the shooting, "Governor" Taylor called out the Militia. Frankfort seethed for weeks.

The case dragged along in the courts, and "Governor" Taylor kept out of jail. One day in May the Supreme Court of the U. S. made a decision.* Mr. Taylor paced up and down in the District Attorney's office at Louisville, waiting for the news. Suddenly he cried: "I must go to my home in Butler county.'" and rushed out of the room, his black coattails dancing behind him, his black "Colonel's" hat flapping with the speed.

He slipped out a rear door and into a carriage; eluded detectives; drove across the bridge (Ohio River) into Indiana. There, despite several efforts to kidnap or to extradite him, and despite the pardon issued for him by Kentucky's next Republican Governor (Augustus E. Willson) in 1909, he lived until last week, a respected citizen of Indianapolis, but for reasons of his own an exile.

* Upholding Goebel's case.