!"

"By the hell-spawned and hell-bound, trebly damned old blotch upon
creation's face, John McNeil, until recently by the grace of bayonets, Tom
Fletcher, and the devil, sheriff of St. Louis county."

"Murdered!"

"Shot to death!!"

"There was our poor, handsome, gallant boyhood friend Tom Sidener--"

"As pure a soul as ever winged its flight from blood-stained sod to that
God who will yet to all eternity damn the fiendish butcher, McNeil."

"Poor Tom!"

"He was engaged to be married to a young lady in Monroe county."

"When he learned he was to be shot, he sent for his wedding suit, which
had just been made, declaring that if he couldn't be married in it; he
intended to die in it."

"Arrayed in his elegant black broad cloth, and his white silk vest, when
he mounted his coarse plank coffin, in the wagon that was to bear him to
his death he looked as if he was going to be married instead of shot."

"The very guards cried like children when they bade him goodbye."

"Raising his cap and bowing to the weeping women who lined the streets, he
was driven from their sight forever!"

"Half an hour afterward six musket balls had pierced his noble heart, and
his white silk vest was torn and dyed with his martyr blood!"

"There was poor old Willis Baker, his head whitened with the snows of more
than seventy winters--"

"Heroic old man!"

"With his white hair streaming in the wind, he seated himself on his rude
coffin and died without a shudder; refusing with his last breath to
forgive his executioners, and swearing he would 'meet them and torment
them in hell through all eternity.' "

"There was that helpless, half-idiot boy from Lewis county, who allowed
himself to be blindfolded; then hearing Sidener and the others refuse,
slipped up one corner of the bandage, and seeing the rest with their eyes
uncovered, removed the handkerchief from his own, died as innocent as a
lamb."

"There were Humstead and Bixler, and Lake, and McPheeters."

"And there was that most wondrous martyr of them all--young Smith, of Knox
county--who died for another man."

"Humphrey was the doomed man."

"His heart-broken wife, in widow's weeds, with her eight helpless little
ones in deep mourning, that was only less black than the anguish they
endured, or the heart of him to whom they appealed, rushed to the feet of
McNeil, and in accents so piteous that a soul of adamant must have melted
under it, besought him for the life of the hu