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tor kaldale Intiuno,ersoft arrived at Kam Tin and had proceeded thence to Taipo, where I sent him Your Excellency's orders to embark and return to Hong Kong.
The Naval detachment returned to day and I intimated to Davidson that his assistance could now be dispensed with, thanking him for the aid he had so promptly rendered in a time of need.
21st.
At about 2 p.m. Mr. Lockhart received a petition from a woman and her son praying for redress on account of the murder of her husband and the boy's father. Her statements were that Tang A Cheung, her husband, had been sent from Hong Kong about the middle of the month, with the Governor's Proclamation with instructions to distribute copies in the villages in the Pingshan, Un Long, and Kam Tin Districts. On arrival near Un Long he was seized and kept a prisoner for a day and a half. In the meantime certain ringleaders sat in Council at the Un Long Meeting House and, after deliberation, they hired a man to murder him. The unfortunate creature was cruelly beaten, shot (3 wounds in the body) tied in a pig basket and thrown into a creek.
Mr. Lockhart and I proceeded at once to Ha Tsun, assembled the elders (who are clansmen of those implicated in the murder), in the Temple, and instituted inquiries into the case. They all corroborated the widow's statement in the main, but said that of the men named in the petition two were innocent. The investigation took a long time and was carefully conducted by Lockhart, the result being that no doubt exists in our minds of the truth of the widow's statement that her husband