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The opportunity presented itself in the Lathrop, Calif, railroad station in the summer of 1889. By that time, the U. S. Attorney General had heard of Terry's threats, provided Justice Field with a bodyguard. He was U. S. Deputy Marshal David Neagle, remembered as "a man of small stature but strong, left-handed and quick with a gun." He was standing by when Sarah Terry and her husband entered the station restaurant, spied Justice Field at a table. Mrs. Terry turned on her heel, left the room. The 66-year-old onetime Chief Justice of California's Supreme Court walked quietly up behind the 72-year-old U. S. Supreme Court Justice, slapped him twice. Before he could slap again, quick David Neagle shot him dead.
Both Justice Field and his bodyguard were arrested for murder. The Governor of California got the case against the Justice dropped. Neagle's case was fought up to the U. S. Supreme Court, where a decision in his favor created the chief precedent by which Federal officials in the course of duty are outside the jurisdiction of state courts.*
Two years after her husband's death, Sarah Althea Terry one day walked out on San Francisco's streets in a ballroom dress at high noon, eyes blank, lips babbling as they continued to babble until pneumonia stopped them forever last week.
*Much quoted currently is Justice Field's remark when, grown senile at 80, he was asked by his colleagues to resign from the Supreme Court. Refusing, he was reminded that he had once served on a committee to secure the resignation of another doddering Justice, Robert Cooper Grier. "Yes," blazed the stubborn oldster, "and it was the dirtiest deed of my whole life!"