of clothing, implements, and provisions,
which in their absence was broken into and plundered. They caught the
thief, "a little diminutive, red-headed white man," a runaway convict
servant from one of the tide-water counties of Virginia. In the first
impulse of anger at finding that he was the criminal, one of the McAfees
rushed at him to kill him with his tomahawk; but the weapon turned, the
man was only knocked down, and his assailant's gusty anger subsided as
quickly as it had risen, giving way to a desire to do stern but fair
justice. So the three captors formed themselves into a court, examined
into the case, heard the man in his own defence, and after due
consultation decided that "according to their opinion of the laws he had
forfeited his life, and ought to be hung"; but none of them were willing
to execute the sentence in cold blood, and they ended by taking their
prisoner back to his master.

The incident was characteristic in more than one way. The prompt desire
of the backwoodsman to avenge his own wrong; his momentary furious
anger, speedily quelled and replaced by a dogged determination to be
fair but to exact full retribution; the acting entirely without regard
to legal forms or legal officials, but yet in a spirit which spoke well
for the doer's determination to uphold the essentials that make honest
men law-abiding; together with the good faith of the whole proceeding,
and the amusing ignorance that it would have been in the least unlawful
to execute their own rather harsh sentence--all these were typical
frontier traits. Some of the same traits appear in the treatment
commonly adopted in the backwoods to meet the case--of painfully
frequent occurrence in the times of Indian wars--where a man taken
prisoner by the savages, and supposed to be murdered, returned after two
or three years' captivity, only to find his wife married again. In the
wilderness a husband was almost a necessity to a woman; her surroundings
made the loss of the protector and provider an appalling calamity; and
the widow, no matter how sincere her sorrow, soon remarried--for there
were many suitors where women were not over-plenty. If in such a case
the one thought dead returned, the neighbors and the parties interested
seem frequently to have held a sort of informal court, and to have
decided that the woman should choose either of the two men she wished to
be her husband, the other being pledged to submit to the decision and
leave t