This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

accompanied Sumner; and the colonel, who must have estimated the situation cleverly, sympathizing with Brown and yet feeling bound to do his duty, turned to this civil officer, and said, "Have you not some warrants to serve here?" The man looked at Brown, standing there armed to the teeth, tall, with terrible eye. No one in Kansas believed that the old man would allow himself to be taken alive. "I—I see no one that I have a warrant against," the civil officer said. If this were a scene in a play, one can imagine the silence, and then the applause.

So Colonel Sumner, who could hardly do less, or more, compelled Brown to release his prisoners, and ordered him to disband his own party, but did not undertake to disarm one of them. Brown's men "disbanded"—and banded again a mile or two further on, and kept up their guerilla warfare.

Within no very long time Brown's