The writer was acquainted with the family of this Charley Hayes. They were decent sort of people; but when a young boy Charley went on the plains, where he became a brutal ruffian. A good many years ago there was a story current in Atchison county, that when this Hayes was acting as wagon-boss on the plains, in a train owned by Russell, Majors & Waddell, that one of the teamsters having offended him he tied him up to a wheel of one of the train wagons, and, holding a pistol in one hand, he cowhided him with his black-snake whip with the other. And this teamster was a white man. But there are avenging furies that follow a man, even though the law does not reach him. There is a man now living in Atchison county whose truthfulness has never been questioned, and he stated that he spent a winter in the Missouri River bottoms, sleeping in the same cabin with Charley Hayes, and that it seemed as if the devil had a mortgage on the ruffian's soul, and tormented him in his sleep with images of the horrors that awaited him in the future world. That it seemed as if he was wrestling in mortal struggle with the men he had maltreated and murdered, and that they were choking him to death. Hayes afterwards died of a consumption presumably brought on by his dissipated habits and by his debaucheries. Meantime the writer had started for Illinois the preceding summer, had been prostrated for four weeks with a fever, and late in the autumn of 1856 had returned to Kansas, there to remain. The times were becoming quiet, the peaceful counsels of such leaders as Stringfellow and Abell were beginning to take effect, and it evidently would be safe for the writer to go to work on his claim. But he needed a supply of corn, and had to go over into the Missouri River bottoms to buy it. A heavy snow had fallen. I had a heavy, well-trained yoke of oxen, and my faithful riding horse was obedient in every place. Myself and brother-in-law had made a heavy Yankee sled that would hold all the load that was put on it. I borrowed from my neighbor, Caleb May, two additional yoke of oxen, but they only knew how to pull in a big freighting team, and were not leaders. But putting my own heavy oxen behind, my wild steers in the middle, and my horse in the lead, I made out a good freighting team. But I had to pass through Atchison. The business men of the place had already made this overture to me. They had said: "You can come to Atchison during the day time and we will guarantee that you shall not be molested, but we would rather you should not be here in the night. The South Carolinians are here, and there are other desperate characters here, and in the night we do not know what might happen." And so, on the strength of such an agreement, I had done business in Atchison, and to get my corn across the river had gone over one day and back the next.