TWO SCOUTS. 171 



will be that he's hangin' to a tree somewheres 

 down Troy way. I know I 'm booked for that 

 if I 'm ketched, and till I am ketched I 'm goin' 

 my own gait." 



We had become too much accustomed to this 

 state of feeling among the scanty Union popu- 

 lation of the Southwest to be so shocked by it 

 as we ought to have been, and it was not with- 

 out sympathy with Dixon's wrongs that I let 

 him go, with an earnest caution that he should 

 mend his ways, if only for his own sake. 



It remains only to say that he did go his own 

 gait, and that he went it with a desperation and 

 an elan that I have never known equalled ; and 

 that, months later, after our snug quarters at 

 Union City had been turned over to a feeble band 

 of home-guards, word came that they had been 

 burned to the ground, and that Pat Dixon, be- 

 trayed at last into the hands of the enemy, had 

 been hanged in the woods near Troy. We could 

 find no fault with the retribution that had over- 

 taken him ; for, viewed with the eyes of his exe- 

 cutioners, he had richly merited it : but we had 



