For the purpose of properly carrying out the _rôle_ of a truthful historian of actual occurrences, we will change the scene, for a short season, and, leaving McKenna to seek adventure with Pat Dormer and his associates, in Pottsville, take a view of acts performed in the same portion of the country, several years anterior to the time heretofore alluded to. The Mollie Maguires were more than usually active and bloodthirsty in 1865. On the 25th of August of that year, David Muhr, superintendent of a colliery, was killed in Foster township. He was shot on the public highway, in the broad light of day, within two hundred yards of the house he was employed in, and where a large number of men were congregated, all of whom heard the report of firearms, and many being involuntary witnesses of the transaction. While this was the fact, no reliable testimony could be elicited by the Commonwealth, when the matter was under investigation, fixing the commission of the butchery upon any suspected party. Nobody knew the men, where they had come from, or where they had flown to. It was reported that signals had been seen burning that night on the hills, soon after the occurrence, and it was surmised they were built by confederates, to aid the principals in the murder to make their way to safety. Again, on the tenth of January, 1866, Mr. Henry H. Dunne, a well-known citizen of Pottsville, and superintendent of one of the largest coal-mining corporations in all that circuit of country, was murdered on the turnpike, within two miles of the city, while riding home in his carriage, from a visit to a colliery over which he had control. Even up to the present date, no arrests have been made, nor has any information presented itself which promises to lead to the apprehension of the assassins. That they killed Mr. Dunne through complicity in some labor troubles was always the prevailing belief. [Illustration: _“The fatal shots were discharged by the assassins, from their ambush, near the road.”_]