forces many times their number, being thoroughly
well acquainted with the country, and scrupling at nothing in the way of
treachery, just as they considered little the odds against which they
fought. Their victims were sometimes paroled, but not often, and a
massacre usually followed a defeat--almost invariably so if the number
of prisoners was small.

Cold-blooded and unhesitating murder was part of their everyday life.
Thus Jesse James, on the march to the Lawrence massacre, had in charge
three men, one of them an old man, whom they took along as guides from
the little town of Aubrey, Kansas. They used these men until they found
themselves within a few miles of Lawrence, and then, as is alleged,
members of the band took them aside and killed them, the old man begging
for his life and pleading that he never had done them any wrong. His
murderers were no more than boys. This act may have been that of bad
men, but not of the sort of bad men that leaves us any sort of respect,
such as that which may be given Wild Bill, even Billy the Kid, or any of
a dozen other big-minded desperadoes.

This assassination was but one of scores or hundreds. A neighbor
suspected of Federal sympathies was visited in the night and shot or
hanged, his property destroyed, his family killed. The climax of the
Lawrence massacre was simply the working out of principles of blood and
revenge. In that fight, or, more properly, that massacre, women and
children went down as well as men. The James boys were Quantrell riders,
Jesse a new recruit, and that day they maintained that they had killed
sixty-five persons between them, and wounded twenty more! What was the
total record of these two men alone in all this period of guerrilla
fighting? It cannot be told. Probably they themselves could not
remember. The four Younger boys had records almost or quite as bad.

There, indeed, was a border soaked in blood, a country torn with
intestinal warfare. Quantrell was beaten now and then, meeting fighting
men in blue or in jeans, as well as leading fighting men; and at times
he was forced to disband his men, later to recruit again, and to go on
with his marauding up and down the border. His career attracted the
attention of leaders on both sides of the opposing armies, and at one
time it was nearly planned that Confederates should join the Unionists
and make common cause against these guerrillas, who had made the name of
Missouri one of reproach and contempt.