e made a discovery which, singular to say, in
nearly three months of intervening time no one has yet thought
of, namely, that no assault was committed.

"The cheap John part of this affair is in Fair Play's letter, in
which in one breath he professes to be a temperance man, and says
a hotel keeper who violates the law and gets punished gets just
what he deserves, and in the next breath tells us that liquor is
a necessity, and asks why trouble the man who furnishes it.
Surely, we see the hem of the cloak of hypocrisy. Fair Play
should also give the public his name, so that people may judge
for themselves the value of his peculiar and disinterested view
of fair play; farther, some folks are already conjecturing who
the author was, and it is not fair to let any one be under the
imputation of a thing he did not do, and surely no man need be
afraid or ashamed to have his own views appear over his own name.
He asks, Who saw the assault? and answers, Nobody. Who saw Hooper
try to drown his wife? Nobody. And yet one of these so-called
detectives was instrumental in landing him in prison, and people
seem to think that he did get fair play.

"Fair Play says careful men view this askance. In this town,
where naturally the keenest interest is taken in this affair,
nearly or quite all of the representative men have condemned the
assault in the most decisive manner.

"Now, Mr. Editor, let me say that among the great mass of the
people of this vicinity, there is no desire to make out that Mr.
Smith is either a hero or a martyr. It is a question of law and
order on the one hand, and crime and violence on the other. The
assault is admitted, and a conspiracy is alleged. No doubt there
are landlords in this country who would not implicate themselves
in any illegal proceedings against Mr. Smith nor sympathize with
the same. Such men are suffering nothing, but it is doubtful if
there is a person of ordinary capacity in this vicinity who does
not believe that the assault was the outcome of a conspiracy, and
men are not slow in expressing the wish that if we have such
people living among us that they may be exposed in their true
character and punished, whether they profess to be saints or
sinners, and the people of this town would extend the same
sympathy an