The Story of Cyrus Baley.

Observer, Volume X, Issue 624, 13 December 1890, Page 9

The Story of Cyrus Baley.

Katfangata,' in the Bulletin, makes an interesting yarn about the exploits of Cyrus Haley, a notorious Auckland criminal. It does not quite agree with a verßion I have heard in Auokland, but it is interesting reading: nevertheless. He writes: — Haley fit-t burst upon the Stock (share) Exchange, Auckland, as a sharebroker. He was a handsome, dignified man, very gentlemanly in manner and appearance. When the boom was just on the turn he took the iargre room back of the great Exchange Court in the N.Z. Insurance Co.'s buildings and opened it with much eclat as a swell dming-room, furnishing it, without regard to expense, on credit. The first night it was opened he burnt it, and though the grand water-supply of Auckland saved' the building that portion was gutted. Haley was pitied— and paid by the Insurance Go. His wife was a clever, showy woman, but a dipsomaniac, and managing to get ' under the influence ' one night when she had to sing at the Choral Hall, she was naturally rebuffed by Judge Fenton, the president, and cold-shouldered by the local fashionables. Then Cyrus took his little matchbox and burnt the .vooden hall down. Tt was rebuilt, and he burnt it down again. He was a persevering man, was Cyrus! Between whiles he set fire to the ship City of Auckland, and she had to.be scuttled to save some of her, her repairs costing almost as muoh as a new ship. Then Oyrua went out to the Pah farm (not after breaking gaol, for he never broke it but once, his last break) and fired Russell's haystacks. The kerosene bond of Arohard and Brown, Mechanics Bay, was his next little Guy Fawkes 1 blaze ; to light which he tore aside a, sheet of the corrugated iron of which it was buiit, and so gave clear evidence of incendiarism. Two nights or so after, without changing his buffcoloured slippers, in which he had been seen madly pao- , ing his own verandah, by a servant next door, whose eviden c thereanent went strongly against him subsequently, he clutched his little gun and went out to Tom Russell's again. That downy C. M. G. was in England, but Cyrus was unaware of the faot, and when he knocked at the French door after midnight and young Russell got up and pulled aside the blind, he fired .at him throngh the glass, luckily missing him. Russell and a servant girl both noted the buff slippers as Haley danced round the verandah. The police were on the alert— mad, in fact — and when Haley called on his friends again a night or two after and fired the remaining haystacks, word was at once wired to to xn from Onehunga, dnd Inspector Brohatn, then a magnificent athletic figure, aroused Detective Jeffery (of unsavoury memory) and the pa ; r, on horseback, galloped out to try and meet the inoendiary if possible. Going down Kyber Pass, Broham turned into the Mountain-road past Seccombe's Brewery, and. sent Jeff ery round by Newmarket. Well, round the back of Mount Eden, in the clear moonlight, Broham saw a man coming along towards him, who, as soon as he sighted the horse nan, turned off the road over a stone wall and took to the fields. Broham dashea irp to the spot, dismounted, and started after him. The inspector's superior speed soon enabled niin to run the suspect down, when the latter turned and pulled a revolver, pointing it full in Broham °s face. Brave as a lion, Broham simply said, ' What, is it you, Haley ? You are my prisoner.' The only reply was, 'Yea, it is I, Broham,' and he pulled the trigger. How true it is that the devil, however long he sticks to his votaries, always deserts them at a critical moment ! The pistol only clicked, and Broham belted his friend over the head with his loaded whip, clobed with him, and handcuffed the miscreant. ' just my luck,' said Haley — ' I must even be arrested by a swell ; no poor devil of a constable will get the kudos.' His defence was masterly, during a long trial, but he several times made the fatal mistake of asking a witness a question beginning with, * When I was So-and-So," or ' When you saw me at such-and-such a place." Pure admissions, as any lawyer knows. Haley was convicted on absolute proot' and sentenced to life-imprisonment. He was drafted to Dunedin Gaol, and when he had done about two years he ' took his hook ' off an outside job, was chased by a warder into the streets of the town, and being now in better condition than whon young Broham ran him down, was escaping, when the warder stood, called upon him to stop, and then sighting at 100 yds, and being a better shot than moat officials, drilled a hole through the small of Cyrus Haley'a back with a Snider bullet, and that was the end of the coldest-blooded and most dangerous criminal of modern colonial days. I may add that what saved the life of Haley's captor, Broham, and undid Mr Cyrus, was the fact that while proceeding up Symonds-atreet, on his inoendiary errand, Haley evid mtly began nursing his gun in gleeful anticW pation, and, in putting it back in his pecker,, muat hare disturbed the gear, for the pistol taken from him by Broham was minus its chambers, and these were found,, all loaded, by a milkman as he went via Symond3-street to town in the dawn succeeding the eventful night.