must say, if such a
dastardly outrage as this should be allowed to go unpunished. Now that
Colonel Potts has brought suit against the city we suppose the council
will have that mill-race covered. We have repeatedly warned them about
this. We wonder if they ever heard a well-known saying about "locking
the stable door after horse is stolen," etc.=

=The card of Colonel Potts, printed elsewhere in this issue, is a
sufficient refutation of the malicious gossip that has been handed back
and forth lately that he had planned to leave Little Arcady. It looks
now like certain busybodies in this community had over-stepped
themselves and been hoisted up by their own petard. The Colonel is a
fine man for County Judge, and we bespeak for him the suffrages of every
voter who wants an honest judiciary.=

Westley Keyts, reading this, wanted to know what a petard was. Inquiry
disclosed that he hoped it might be something that could be used upon
Potts to the advantage of almost every one concerned. But in the minds
of others of us an agonized suspicion now took form. Had the letters
been upon Potts when he went down? Had they been saved? Were they
legible? And would he use them?

It was decided that Solon Denney should try to illuminate this point
before taking the candidacy of Potts seriously. In the next issue of the
_Argus_, therefore, was this paragraph, meant to be provocative:--

=God's providence has been said to watch over fools and drunkards. We
guess this is so; and that the pretensions of a certain individual in
our midst to its watchfulness in the double capacity indicated can no
longer be in doubt.=

These lines did their work. The next _Banner_ spoke of a foul
conspiracy whose nefarious end it was to blacken the sterling character
of a good man, of that Nestor of the Slocum County Bar, Colonel J.
Rodney Potts. As testimony that the best citizens of the town were not
involved with this infamous ring, it had extorted from Colonel Potts his
consent to print certain letters from these gentlemen setting forth the
Colonel's surpassing virtues in no uncertain terms--letters which his
innate modesty had shrunk from making public, until goaded to
desperation by the hell-hounds of a corrupt and subsidized opposition.

The letters followed in a terrific sequence--a series of laudations
which the Chevalier Bayard need not have scorned to evoke.

Then we waited for Solon, but he was rather disappointing. Said the next
_Argus_: