The dying man had been overseer on his murderer's plantation. A difference had arisen between Mrs. O----r and the overseer about the management of the plantation. And the lady, true to Southern instinct, could not brook opposition from an overseer, so she writes herself "insulted" to the doctor in the army, and home he comes in a rage by the train we were on, and spying the unsuspecting offender through the car-window, leaps out and shoots him down at sight and without warning. No one looked strange or excited, or said a word. We walked back to the train in disgust, feeling it may be our turn next. Went home to B----m, twenty-five miles, and the next morning a friend of ours--a druggist, Dr. F----g, from Paducah, Kentucky, at the opening of the war--was assassinated in the public streets. The writer officiated at his funeral from his widowed mother's house, who was thus robbed of her only son and support in old age. The sheriff of Washington County witnessed the transaction, and had foreknowledge of it, but did nothing officially to prevent or punish the crime. The name of the assassin was B----t, who, the writer learns, has since come to a similar end himself in the State of Mississippi, thus illustrating the innate reflex, as it were, of the law of retributive justice that sleeps not nor slumbers till it has blood for blood, life for life! The murdered man's mother and only sister are since deceased, hurried out of the world by the great sorrow of his untimely and tragic end!
One night after the family had retired several pistol-shots were fired back of our house, attended with boisterous talking. Dressing, we went to the back window, and there saw a man in the moonlight falling to the ground. Just then a voice at the front of the house called: "Mr. N., Mr. N., come down here, I want to see you quick!" Descending the outside stairway leading from the upper to the lower gallery, we met our friend Captain C., who instantly exclaimed: "Mr. N., I have shot my best friend all to pieces. Please go and look after him. I must leave. You will find me at Dr. B.'s or about there." We went to the dying man, and found several collected around him. He had two shots through the knee and thigh, the latter cutting the big artery, and he bled to death in a few minutes.
