A WOMAN'S STUDY OF BUTLER.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXIV, Issue 10419, 17 April 1897, Page 2 (Supplement)

A WOMAN'S STUDY OF BUTLER.

A lady reporter on tho staff of the San Francisco Chronicle interviewed Butler in gaol shortly after hia arrest in San Francisco. We give some extracts from her Jfcory:— Here is a man who has passed a lifetime knocking about the world. He is a combi. nation of miner and sailor, no worse than the lowest of the two types. Underneath the grime some fragments of education show, and though he looks equal to the deeds the detectives are triumphantly plastering over him, I am not sure but that if he were well dressed, combed, and washed he would bo as presentable as plenty of men on the docks, the street, even in the counting-house, none of whom eommit murder because their eyes are out of drawing or their noEes irregular. If he were well dressed no doubt we'd all be crying " Impossible!" But, garbed as be is, he fits his reputation. I had waited a bad quarter of an hour in the House of Smells while the star boarder of the prison bowed out his numerous callers. You would suppose, to see the crowd, that feeding-time in a menagerie had arrived. Around Butler's cage the curious mas 3 were craning their necks, jostling, staggering on tiptoe, climbing up by the shoulders of others. Even the prisoners hereabout fight for place to see the man of the hour. My first glimpse of him is when, towed by Captain Robinson, he crosses the cool, damp, etone-flagged corridor with a brisk, springy step, the artist- and I following his nimble lead to the prison kitchen. He claims to have been a cavalryman, and he walks like a soldier, looking neither to the right nor to the left—a purposeful man, and one not easily swerved from his intention. In the prison kitchen I am properly and formally presented. The interviewee offers his hand, and, if I had never heard of hie nationality, I should know from that terrific grip that he was English. Later the Australian detectives cause me the same anguish in triplicate. Never say that the hearty handclasp speaks the honest man. It's purely a question of which land cradled you. We sit at opposite sides of a long deal table, scrubbed with scrupulous cleanliness. For Beats there are white pine benches, like tbe forms of a backwoods Echool. Butler slides sinuously into his place, crossing his slippered and unstockinged feet beneath ti.e table. I sit opposite him, separated by two feet from this man with the bloody past. A couple of white-aproned cooks stand sgape, and keep up a quite superfluous brushing of invisible crumbs within easy earshot. At the door Captain Robinson paces sentinel-wise, and we are alone for our three-cornered teie α-tete.

For some reason the prisoner dislikes to uncover his head. Even in the steaming kitchen, redolent of soupy odours and uncomfortably warm, he clung to his ugly little bat. It is of tbe shape they call a dicer—a low, flat Derby, rusty with age, with a crown scarcely three inches high, and a low, flat brim—most unbecoming to Butler's low-set eyebrows and broad nose.

Once I asked him to take off his hat, and the tout awtmbU of tbe face was much improved. 1 fail to see tbe youth that the reporters have noted so blithely in tbe man's face. He has a head which rune somewhat to a point, ehaped like a cocoanut, but well covered by a matted thatch of hair, combed but not parted. The hair is a bit time-worn and grizzled, as is his moustache, which he keeps carefully waxed and twisted, and is greying just enough to look bleached and faded. Its quality is coarse and tough, and refinement never dwelt under a shook like that. The forehead ie reasonably high, marred horizontally by two deep creases, the thick skin rising in folds between. The lines are so deep that they are as if laid in with charcoal, and as the man talks the heavy forehead wrinkles uj. and down and moves the chipper little hat. The noee is broad and red, swollen from rough weather. It is a hairy nose, standing well out from the plane of the face—a nose of determination. The "eyebrows are grizzled and heavy, and behind them grey gimlet eyes, small as a ferret's, play at bide and seek with the world. Tho pupils are so small and the iris so pale that you can scarcely tell when the owner in looking at you. He does glance at you sometimes, catching you off guard and transfixing you with that sharp gaze. When you are looking his eyes are anywhere but on yours, restless, shifty, quiok —looking above, below, beyond, and around yon — but never submitting those small, alert pupils to scrutiny. Yet the eyes fascinate you. They are like tbe little eyes of snakes fixing you in menaces. It was not imagination that at the roots of my hair a wiutry breath seemed to stir and chill. About thoae unpleasant little eyes are the crow's feet which laughter and deeds leave behind them. It is a fp.ce that might placidly smile with dreams of assassination. But the smiles are, all in mockery, and somewhere on the high seas Butler dropped tho mirthfulness he finds it impossible to muster now. Perhaps he never had it. If the man ever laughed aloud it would be a laugh A ridicule, hatred, ferocity. As it is, Cue noise babbles and purglea in his throat, and the unpleasant lines make hie face a guide-book to infernal regions. Those lines never came from 8 life of well* doing. They are in the wrong places, ind the book of his face, wid'j open before Con, reads wrong from cover to cover. Of his mouth I speak with reluctance. Like many a better man, Butler uses a moustache to cover a multitude of sins. His hairy ornament is like a shoebrush, stiff, coarse, unmanageable, encouraged to hide the upper lip entirely. The under lip is heavy and banging; but the chin redeems it with a glimmering dimple, cleft in the bony structure. There ire long deep lines ath wart the mouth; ears of tho type that old wives call generous, and a jaw strongly defined; a face conscienceless and cruel, with matter always ruling over mind. But between conversational fragments I could catch no glimpse of the lust of killing. I cannot imagine those small, greedy eyes (floating over the irory of a dead face for pure love of the deed, But I can see those hands methodically rifling the pockets of a corpse or unlocking the stiffening fingers of a dead hand. With Butler murder ii a traffic, a trade—killing a profession. It is the greed of gold that has been the undoing of him. He is abnormal, not insane. Under that small, peaked skull no conscience keeps the balance of power. It is not even murder 18 a fine art that he hus engaged in, but killing for what there was in it—£s perhaps, or a speculation. Here are no fine-epun nervee to send haunting dreams. No faint cries at night, do echo of a eudden pistol shot in lonely Australian mountains come to disturb the fine physical poise of this brain, This man is no high-strung murderer of tbe play. He fears neither God nor man, not the baiter nor tho hereafter. Mammon is his god, and in his way toward wealth he cut and slashed whatever barred the path. Once only did be appeal for sympathy or belief.

"Do I look like a man with a bad record!" he said, smilingly, I was glad that he followed it quickly with another question. He appreciates the comedies of hie capture as keenly as the next man, for he has the saving grace of hnmnnr. He is keen •nough to be circumspect in criticising the men who are to be his enforced travelling companions; but he twinkles his small eyes when he remembers how Detective MeHectic, the Australian amateur, snatched off his false whiskers and pounced at the manacled prisoner like a Newfoundland dog, and how the same detective pranced op and down the deck, thanking God fervently for fifteen minutes' running, when he should have thanked Captain Fraeer. Or bow Conroy had pistole even in his boots and vest pockets, while Serpeant Bunner mapped his pistol eight times at the tip B( the sailor's noee. The prisoner is not as clever as he it credited, or he would not have sailed into a trap with all the damaging evidence upon him. But he is cooler and keener than his captors, for all that. When the prisoner is excited, which is seldom, he relapse* into the broadest of ' English. " One feller shoved a gun in me faice and told me to put me We hup," he Mid; "and two other tellers kept'old of .me Wβ and wouldn't let me put 'em hop,

They won't led me 'are me clo'a lest I won't look aa worse as I can. And they say as how I was religions on the ebip. They're religious in the colonies, but that's all hypocrisy. Why, — it, I never thought of such a thing." At heart, the man baa all the vanity and egotism of the class that kills. He shows it in his speech nnd in bis anxiety for his clothes ; and he looks proudly at his slim, trim hands, where be is etching out the tattoo marks with milk, and which look as though they had done very little grubbing in the earth or furling of Bails. His paet does not rise to trouble him; he sees the future clondleM, and the present— well, he is very comfortable. He finds gaol life luxurious after the Swanhildit. "I had no hides I'd so many friends in 'Frisco," be remarked. " I'm doing a tery big trade in autographs and cigars. I'm very fond of smoking. Does this smoke annoy you !" He tries to handle hie cigar like a gentleman, as though he knew the etiquette of tobacco, with crooked and quirked finger like a girl mincing with her teacup. Tho only sign that underneath all is not calm as on the surface is in the constant, quick puffing of those long, black

cigars. When autograph-searchers come to him he asks them what name thoy will have. " You see, I've so many aliases," he eays. " Most of them your papers have given me, but I'll write any name you want." He'* fond of autographing, and, left to himself, writes the name of the victim who proved his nemesis. " Lee Weller," " I,ee Weller," he writes over and over, in a big, black, flowing character, the letters bent the wrong way, like his nature, and the chirography unmistakably English. One would think the name would conjure unpleasant images of a bent figure huddled in a tunnel in the far Australian bush, but these grey eyes never see ghosts. He is not cursed with second sight. "They say I've lost flesh," he eaid. " Well, it's not remorse. I lost about five pounds during the voyage from want of proper sleep. We 'ad such a beastly rough trip that it's put the' kibosh' on my ever going to sea again. Why, last night you couldn't hare woke me with a band of music." Later be talked of Weller. " Wouldn't a man be a fool to take that much money into the bush? I tell you (passionately) Weller had no money. Why, I wouldn't shoot a man for five shillings." But how about five pounds, Mr. Butler? Then be had a laugh at men and methods here. " Why, I'm great; I'm famous," he eaid. "This morning a newspaper offered me 500 dollars or even 1000 dollars if I'd make a statement. But I don't want

money." " Be sure to say I'm not afraid of getting hoff," he flung at me from his cage.