the
murderer.

By a long course of usury and legal persecution the Cannon brothers had
become detested in their own community, and when they sued O'Day, or
Daw, for cutting down a bee-tree on one of their farms he had tilled,
and then enforced the judgment of ten dollars, Daw,--now a man in
growth and of Celtic vindictiveness,--loaded his gun and started for
Cannon's Ferry, and waylaid Jacob just as he was leading his horse off
the ferry scow.

"Are you going to give me back that ten dollars, you old scoundrel?"
shouted O'Day.

"Stand back! stand back!" answered long Jacob; "the quotient was
correct; the _lex loci_ and the _lex terrae_ were argued. The _lex
talionis_--"

"Take it!" cried the villain, adroitly firing his shot-gun into the
merchant's breast, so as not to injure his humaner beast.

Jacob Cannon staggered to the fence at the head of the wharf, and caught
there a moment, and fell dead.

"You scoundrel," screamed Isaac Cannon from the window, "to kill my
brother, my executive comfort."

"Yes," answered O'Day, "and I'll give the other barrel to you!"

As Isaac Cannon barricaded himself in, Owen O'Day collected his effects
without hurry, and betook himself to the wilds of Missouri.

Cannon's Ferry fell into decay when the railroad at Seaford carried off
its trading importance, but there are yet to be seen the never tenanted
mansion of the disappointed bridegroom, and the gravestones which show
how Jacob's fate frightened Isaac Cannon to a speedy tomb.

In the meantime, John M. Clayton had made use of the fears of Calhoun
and his nullifiers, who were menaced with the penalties of treason by
the president, to pass a great protective tariff bill by their aid, thus
establishing the manufactures in the same period with the railways.

This triumph in the senate left him free to conduct the suit of Randel
against the Canal Company, which occupied as many years as the railroad
enterprise of Meshach Milburn.

The barbarous system of "pleadings" was then in full vogue, though soon
to be weeded out even in its parent England, and the law to be made a
trial of facts instead of traverses, demurrers, avoidances, rebutters
and surrebutters, churned out of the skim milk of words. Clayton's
pleadings require a bold, dull mind to read them now, but he tired his
adversaries out, and his cousin, Chief-Justice Clayton, who was jealous
of him, had yet to decide in his favor.

Then, after the lapse of years, the issu