its pursuers.  It was an answer framed not in words, but in deeds.  It said, “We have come to an end.  We have been robbed of the rights guaranteed to us by the Kansas-Nebraska bill.  We have been robbed of the rights of American citizens.  We have been given the alternative of abject and degrading submission or of extermination.  And now we make our answer.  We will return blow for blow, wound for wound, stripe for stripe, and burning for burning.  Murder shall be paid back with murder, robbery with robbery; and every act of aggression shall be paid back with swift and terrible retaliation.”  It must be remembered that at that time news traveled slow, and that it was slow work to take men from their ordinary farm life and organize them into bands of soldiers, and it was some days before “Old John Brown, of Osawatomie,” appeared on the scene of conflict with a company of men.  Of this company his son, John Brown, Jr., was captain.  But the “old man” had come too late.  He was terribly excited, and denounced as a set of cowards the “Committee of the Public Safety Valve” that had dug up the hidden cannon and had surrendered it to Sheriff Jones.  Captain Brown and his company determined to return.  Old John Brown selected a squad of six men to go on a secret expedition.  Of these, four were his own sons, and one was his son-in-law.  His son, Captain Brown, was unwilling that his father should go, and when the old man would not be persuaded, he cautioned him, “Father, don’t do anything rash.”  “Old John Brown” took old man Doyle and two sons and two other men in the dead hour of night and put them to death.  The facts of this awful deed have never been made public—­there has never been a judicial investigation.  It is said that Doyle and his sons were desperate characters, and were in the act of driving off Free State men; but nothing is certainly known.

And now it appeared that the whole country south of the Kaw River was full of armed Free State guerrilla bands.  They rose up out of the earth as if they had been specters—­their blows were swift, terrible and remorseless.  They visited and robbed the houses of Pro-slavery men, as the houses of the Free State men had been visited and robbed.  They stole the Pro-slavery men’s horses, stopped them on the public highways, and repeated in every detail and in every act of violence the cruel atrocities that had been so long perpetrated on themselves.  They showed no partiality—­if they stole the horses of Pro-slavery men, they also stole Gov.  Shannon’s horses, and the Governor posted over the country with a squad of soldiers to find them.  The town of Franklin, six miles from Lawrence, that had been a rendezvous for the “Law and Order” robbers, and out of which they issued to visit Free State settlers’ houses, rob Free State men on the public highway and make raids on Lawrence, was cleaned out.  H. Clay Pate, leader of a “Law and Order” company of militia, went to hunt John Brown and put him to death as he would go to hunt