It has been said that all is fair in love and war; and that the end justifies the means. I have an abiding respect for the Confederate soldier who did his duty in the light in which he saw it at that time. Yes, I have an admiration for him. He was an American, and did he not fight on with a dogged perseverance even after the backbone of rebellion broke at Gettysburg, a victim of a hopeless and mistaken course, staying with his forlorn hope to the end, and as a rule accepting the results? Yes; all true soldiers have a profound respect for the enemy that will meet him in the open, his true colors and garb in evidence, the honest tell-tale of who and what he is. This is not only true in a military sense, but it is true in a moral and political sense. But fiends incarnate, who respect neither moral, civil, nor military law, should be hunted like cougars. But, be it said to the credit of the Confederacy, these border freebooters had no legal status. Such was the position of Quantrill and his followers. Go to Aubrey, Olathe, Shawneetown, Lawrence, Centralia, Mo., Rossville, Ark., and the hundreds of lonely ravines and hollows along the Missouri border, where death reaped a greater harvest in the period of four years from '61 to '65 by murder in guerrilla warfare than any like area since time began. The first camp-fires of the slaveholders' rebellion were kindled on Kansas soil, five years before P. G. T. Beauregard fired the shot on Fort Sumter that was heard around the world, and saddened every home in our land. The horde of Border Ruffians that had bent every energy from 1856 and 1857 to fasten the system of human slavery in Kansas Territory having dismally failed, after leaving a trail of blood and carnage behind them, "silently folded their tents" and recrossed the border. But when actual hostilities came in 1861 on a national scale, the spirit of revenge came to the front and Kansas must suffer. Men of desperate character from Kentucky, Mississippi and Louisiana came out, and up to join the Missourians to help them even up with Kansans for their failure to make Kansas a Slave State. And what a field for operations! At that time the border on both sides of the line was sparsely settled, from Kansas City to the Indian Territory and to the Arkansas line, thus affording many quiet hiding-places between depredations committed.