or wounded four or five of our regiment between the time when the line in which he came wavered and went back, and the time when the second line of Yankees charged us. Every one of our men noticed him, and in the interval of the two charges the yell went all along the front of the regiment, Don't shoot him, boys, don't shoot him! It's a pity to kill as brave a man as that one.""

6

Yet more affecting at least to Moran was his new acquaintance's description of that second charge, when the Federals in vain tried to wrench from Lee's grip the key of his position. Hubbard told with real pathos, a rare rôle with him, how a Federal Colonel of some Ohio regiment, as he remembered it, was found by actual measurement after the battle to have got within twenty feet of the works. He described him as a giant of a man with deep red hair and whiskers, both closely trimmed, lying on his face in the little blood made by the ball which found a home in his brain. He said he was by a good distance the nearest man to the works, as could be seen after the fight by a glance along the line of the Federal dead, and his right arm clutching his sword was stretched at full length. He said, "I turned him over and envied him those shoulder straps of a real colonel."

Mr. Hubbard did certain things well which he did rarely, thus contradicting the practice-perfection theory. He was rarely other than commonplace in language, but when he sought to stir the blood for a moment he divined the true ring of words without ever a miss.

Mrs. Moran's servant girl informed the gentlemen that dinner was waiting before this conversation ended.

The afternoon ride to the depot contained no matter for my reader's interest except that after Mr. Archie had said good-bye to the Lynchburg factor of the many war memories, and desired his compliments to be given to Colonel Renfrew and family, if Mr. Hubbard should soon meet the Brookwood people, and when he was about to mount his chestnut colored mare, Effie Deans by name, a lame fellow, known as Cicero Crites, a

hanger-on of Maloney's, arrested him under a warrant issued by a United States Commissioner for obstructing a United States official in the discharge of his office.

This Crites was a native Dunhamite, who had been lamed from an accident in boyhood, and was by trade a bar-tender. Mr. Maloney's attention had been called to him by virtue of that gentleman's repeated visits to the place where Crites dispensed his poisons, and in payment of a long standing liquor bill the Irishman had secured Crites the little place of an unbonded deputy-marshal.

John Colwood, late of York State, was both postmaster at Dunham, and commissioner of the United States Courts. Before him Moran appeared with Colonel Paul Foley as counsel, and gave bond for his appearance at the next term of the District Court to be held at Montgomery.

So that Archie, instead of reciting a hundred pages of Blackstone to Colonel Foley, listened to that distinguished member of the Bar pour a hundred pages of abuse upon the heads of Bartlett Swazey, the chief witness for the government, and the bed-ridden prosecutor, Maloney. All this, whether exactly proper I do not say, before Commissioner Colwood, who both committed as magistrate and prosecuted as United States Attorney with a most charming nonchalançe, so honestly worn that it did not seem there was any inconsistency in his official conduct. To Colonel Foley's repeated protests against his taking Swazey from under his cross-fire, Colwood simply grunted out, that if he did n't take care of the government, he would like to know who was there that would?

Now the attentive reader will know that when the sound of the shot which stretched the heroic Maloney on that couch, which he had purchased with his last moiety check, broke upon the night air of the Kroom farm, Mr. Jefferson Kroom was sitting with his head upon his arms, and that head was going round and round in a lunatic whirligig; brave Manuel lay dead as a beef in his own blood, and Mr. Bartlett Swazey was trying to pick himself up from the farther and darker side of a

wood-pile over which Mr. Moran had a few minutes before thrown him.

It has likewise been related how that Manuel Kroom had in his death fall thrown over and emptied upon the smouldering furnace fire a full "stand" of beer, thereby extinguishing wellnigh all the light which could have given the most truthful bystander a knowledge of what happened thereafter.

But Mr. Bartlett Swazey reasoned very correctly that while the Kroom family were not aware of their own knowledge that Mr. Maloney had been shot, they very well knew who were in the distillery able to have shot him, and thoroughly convinced that Mr. Moran was in much better condition to pay cost bills than he was, the commissioner's warrant was at once labelled "Moran," while his fee-freighted subpoena was inscribed "Swazey."

The upshot of the whole matter was that Colonel Foley got a good chance to blow off his week's secretion of bile against carpet-baggers and scalawags, and wound up by signing Archie's bond, along with Dr. Roberts, in the sum of $1,000, for his appearance at the spring term 1870 of the U. S. District Court at Montgomery, to answer the charge of resisting a United States officer in the lawful discharge of his duty. There was a most unhappy lady at Ravenscroft that night on her knees till a late hour, imploring from the purest of heavenward-looking hearts that He who had suffered the injustice of this world's tribunals, would vouchsafe her last child a safe deliverance from wicked

men.

CHAPTER VIII.

RECONSTRUCTION JUSTICE.

When young Moran arrived at the capital of his native State the Legislature was in session. A report of his Fourth of July speech the year before had appeared in the leading Radical State papers, and the young man found himself known by name, and as the son of his father, to various well-dressed officials, to whom he was introduced in the Governor's office, whither he had repaired to secure the intercession of that official with the United States officers, pursuant to a plan mapped out for him by Colonel Foley.

General Lollamead, late of the negro troops, who had once hopes of filling a seat in the United States Senate from some part of District No. 3, was now in Montgomery interested as a lobby lawyer in certain railroad schemes, which were to scatter cities like Scranton broadcast over the coal and iron region of Ala

bama.

This gentleman had been a newspaper man in New England in early life, and spoke of Mr. Sumner and Henry Longfellow with provoking familiarity. He really knew Butler well and had been on his staff at New Orleans.

Believing migration to be Nature's law for all New Englanders, he had blessed Michigan for some years with his citizenship, and, failing in the lumber business because of being overreached by an uncle doing business in New York, whom he greatly trusted, had taken up the trade of soldier, and, by skilful fawning to a distinguished member of a congressional military committee, had been made general of a brigade of colored troops.

Several of his subordinate officers were among the colored members of the Legislature, and as he knew better than any

man of his party how much of the varnish of the Civil Rights Bill to put on each one of his colored visitors when the State's champagne went around his mahogany, he was with reason considered a man whom one should know. The best rooms of the best hotel were always telegraphed for by General Lollamead when the General Assembly was to meet. Railroad passes, sleeping-car passes, express and telegraph franks were as common with and as necessary to the happiness of General Lollamead as pocket-handkerchiefs are to common men.

The General was a fine looking, fat fellow, who read the New York Times at breakfast, wore Burnside whiskers, and always ate with a table napkin tucked in his glazed paper collar.

The negro waiters at the hotel vied with each other in serving him, and verily believed him the executor of Mr. Lincoln's last will and testament in their behalf. It was to him they owed it that the Freedman's savings bank had honored them by opening offices in all the larger towns of the State. He had commanded a band of their noblest warriors, and had collected pensions for the wounded and the widows.

Mr. C—, a democratic congressman from New York, had said in a public speech in Montgomery that the General had done this pension business twice over, that he had a regular Valhalla of colored warriors, both in the pension office and in the branch of the War Department that let out to the General a contract for furnishing tombstones for his colored dead in one of the national cemeteries.

There were other reports, even more scandalous, against this man of battles, in connection with the removal of the colored dead from around Fort, and their final location in a cemetery of the Union. They were supported in part, but that part may have been so warped by the partisan prejudices of the tellers, that I have always looked upon the case as not fully made out. It was naturally a matter of difficulty for this or any other carpet-bagger to get justice in the South, and I do not want to add any stumbling-block to that path, always a rough one to his class.