f all these
mysteries: for while I saw that that fatal rifle-shot meant destruction,
I had no conception of a plot.

Just as I reached the point where I had joined the poor man who had
fallen,--it was a Mr. Turner, formerly a captain in the army, and a
person deservedly held in high esteem by all his friends and
neighbors,--a knot of two or three armed men stopped me, and after a
short parley directed me to some one in authority, who would hear my
story. The guard who escorted me to the great man was garrulous and kind
enough to tell me more in detail the story, now familiar to all of us,
of the capture of Mr. Lewis Washington and other persons of note in the
Sunday night raid of a body of unknown men. The dread of something yet
to come, with which the people were manifestly possessed, was such as
only those can know who have lived in a Slave State; and while there was
plenty of talk of the steadiness of the slaves near the Ferry, it was
plain that that was the magazine that was momentarily in danger of going
off and carrying them all along with it.

The officers of the neighboring militia had gathered together in the
main tavern of the place, without waiting for their men, but not
unmindful of the impressive effect of full uniform, and half a dozen
kinds of military toggery were displayed on the half-dozen persons
convened in a sort of drum-head court-martial. I was not the only
prisoner, and had an opportunity to hear the recitals of my fellows in
luck. First and foremost of all was a huge, swaggering, black-bearded,
gold-chain and scarlet-velvet-waistcoated, piratical-looking fellow, who
announced himself as a Border Ruffian, of Virginia stock, and now
visiting his relations near the Ferry; but he said that he had fought
with the Southern Rights party in the Kansas war, and that when he
heard of the "raid," as he familiarly called the then unfamiliar feat of
the Sunday night just past, he knew who was at the top and bottom of it,
and he described in a truthful sort of way the man whose name and
features were alike unknown to all his listeners,--"Ossawatomie Brown,"
"Old John Brown." Garnishing the story of their earlier contests with
plentiful oaths, he gave us a lively picture of their personal
hand-to-hand rights in the West, and said that he had come to help fight
his old friend and enemy, and to fight him fair, just as they did in
"M'souri." He wanted ten or a dozen men to arm themselves to the teeth,
and he'd