The rejoicing of the free-State men over this not too brilliant victory was short-lived. Returning home in separate squads, they were successively intercepted by the Federal dragoons acting as a posse to the Deputy United States Marshal,[16] who arrested them on civil writs obtained in haste by an active member of the territorial cabal, and to the number of eighty-nine[17] were taken prisoners to Lecompton. So far the affair had been of such frequent occurrence as to have become commonplace--a frontier "free fight," as they themselves described and regarded it. But now it took on a remarkable aspect. Sterling G. Cato, one of the pro-slavery territorial judges, had been found by Governor Geary in the Missouri camp drilling and doing duty as a soldier, ready and doubtless more than willing to take part in the projected sack of Lawrence. This Federal judge, as open a law-breaker as the Hickory Point prisoners (the two affairs really forming part of one and the same enterprise), now seated himself on his judicial bench and committed the whole party for trial on charge of murder in the first degree; and at the October term of his court proceeded to try and condemn to penalties prescribed by the bogus laws some eighteen or twenty of these prisoners, for offenses in which in equity and good morals he was personally _particeps criminis_--some of the convicts being held in confinement until the following March, when they were pardoned by the Governor.[18] _Inter arma silent leges_, say the publicists; but in this particular instance the license of guerrilla war, the fraudulent statutes of the Territory, and the laws of Congress were combined and perverted with satanic ingenuity in furtherance of the conspiracy. The vigorous proceedings of Governor Geary, the forced retirement of the Missourians on the one hand, and the arrest and conviction of the free-State partisans on the other, had the effect to bring the guerrilla war to an abrupt termination. The retribution had fallen very unequally upon the two parties to the conflict,[19] but this was due to the legal traps and pitfalls prepared with such artful design by the Atchison conspiracy, and not to the personal indifference or ill-will of the Governor. He strove sincerely to restore impartial administration; he completed the disbandment of the territorial militia, reënlisting into the Federal service one pro-slavery and one free-State company for police duty.[20] By the end of September he was enabled to write to Washington that "peace now reigns in Kansas." Encouraged by this success in allaying guerrilla strife, he next endeavored to break up the existing political persecution and intrigues. [Sidenote] Marcy to Geary, August 26, 1856. Gihon, p. 272.