A new face has been put on the killing of old Mr. Utley, in Green Lake
county, by his son, since the son has made his statement. At the time
the first news was received we felt inclined to lay it up against young
Mr. Utley, as there is nothing that hurts our feelings worse than to
hear that a boy in the first flush of manhood, when the pin feathers are
just appearing on his upper jaw and when the world is all before him to
conquer and lay at his feet, has deliberately shot six No. 40 calibre
bullets into various places in the person of his venerable father, who
has nurtured him from childhood, stored his mind with useful knowledge,
or perchance played mumblety peg with a shingle across the place where
in later years another father may plant oblong pieces of leather,
because of his habit of leaning his youthful stomach across the gate
whereon swings a gentle maiden belonging to this other father, the while
giving her glucose in regard to a beautiful castle that he will rear
with his own hands on a commanding eminence, surrounded with vines and
roses, into the golden portals of which he will usher her and empty into
her lap the precious treasures of the orient, when the cuss knows that
he will never be able to earn more than twelve shillings a day on a farm
the longest day he lives, and that if she marries him she will have to
take in stairs to scrub and cook liver over an oil stove, and wear the
same dress she is married in till it will stand alone. We say that we
are opposed to young men killing their fathers. It has never seemed
right to us. But since the supplemental returns in this case are all in,
and we learn that old Mr. Utley was a drunken bulldozer who would take
the farm horses and go off to town on a three days' drunk, leaving the
young man to do all the work, and come back complaining because the work
was not done, and if the boy attempted to explain, he would be knocked
down with a stick of cord wood, and that on this occasion he was engaged
in trying to dissect young Utley with a butcher knife, claiming that
he was going to hang his hide on the fence, and cut out his liver and
stomach, and other things that Dr. Tanner has given a furlough, and that
the young man shot his father just to keep peace in the family, and to
save his own life, and that there were four quarts of raw whisky in
the old man's panjandrum when he turned up his toes, we feel like
apologizing to the young man and telling him that he did his country a
great service in wiping out his sire, baby mine. When an old man gets so
he can't enjoy himself without filling up with whisky and cutting slices
off the livers of live people, the sooner he climbs the golden stair the
better.