The scheme of the assault may have been: First--To terrify me by making me conscious of my own helplessness after making actual though not legal threats against my life.
Second--To imply that I could save my life only by writing or signing certain specific statements which if not subsequently explained would eternally have branded me as infamous and would have consigned my family to shame and want, and to the dreadful compassion and patronage of the rich.
Third--To blow my brains out the moment I had signed, thereby preventing me from making any subsequent explanation such as could remove the infamy.
Fourth--Philip Lynch to be compelled to testify that I was killed by John B.

Winters in self-defence, for the conviction of Winters would bring him in as an accomplice.

If that was the programme in John B.

Winters' mind nothing saved my life but my persistent refusal to sign, when that refusal seemed clearly to me to be the choice of death.
The remarkable assertion made to me by Mr.Winters, that pity only spared my life on Wednesday evening last, almost compels me to believe that at first he could not have intended me to leave that room alive; and why I was allowed to, unless through mesmeric or some other invisible influence, I cannot divine.

The more I reflect upon this matter, the more probable as true does this horrible interpretation become.
The narration of these things I might have spared both to Mr.Winters and to the public had he himself observed silence, but as he has both verbally spoken and suffered a thoroughly garbled statement of facts to appear in the Gold Hill News I feel it due to myself no less than to this community, and to the entire independent press of America and Great Britain, to give a true account of what even the Gold Hill News has pronounced a disgraceful affair, and which it deeply regrets because of some alleged telegraphic mistake in the account of it.