152 The Winning of the West 



of Virginia. In the first impulse of anger at find- 

 ing that he was the criminal, one of the McAfees 

 rushed at him to kill him with his tomahawk; but 

 the weapon turned, the man was only knocked down, 

 and his assailant's gusty anger subsided as quickly 

 as it had risen, giving way to a desire to do stern 

 but fair justice. So the three captors formed them- 

 selves into a court, examined into the case, heard the 

 man in his own defence, and after due consultation 

 decided that "according to their opinion of the laws 

 he had forfeited his life, and ought to be hung" ; but 

 none of them was willing to execute the sentence 

 in cold blood, and they ended by taking their pris- 

 oner back to his master. 



The incident was characteristic in more than one 

 way. The prompt desire of the backwoodsman to 

 avenge his own wrong; his momentary furious an- 

 ger, speedily quelled and replaced by a dogged de- 

 termination to be fair but to exact full retribution; 

 the acting entirely without regard to legal forms or 

 legal officials, but yet in a spirit which spoke well 

 for the doer's determination to uphold the essentials 

 that make honest men law-abiding; together with 

 the good faith of the whole proceeding, and the 

 amusing ignorance that it would have been in the 

 least unlawful to execute their own rather harsh sen- 

 tence all these were typical frontier traits. Some 

 of the same traits appear in the treatment commonly 

 adopted in the backwoods to meet the case of pain- 

 fully frequent occurrence in the times of Indian wars 

 where a man taken prisoner by the savages, and 



