Yet all these charms arrayed against Russell could not convict him. He was acquitted, and, though pursued by the Bulliners, got away. Fate, however, tangled him in the snare of Milo Erwin’s prophecy. “If Thomas Russell is guilty, it may be that the almighty sovereignty, love, was too strong for him, and envy seized him, and John and not Davis [David] was the one he wanted to kill. If he could have wrung this lady from John Bulliner, and unstained her life, I doubt not if the shadow of his own would not have again darkened it; and inasmuch as he did not, it may be that the arrowy words wrung by the hand of passion from each of them were destined to hang quivering in memory’s core till they festered and bled, making an irremedial wound, shaped in the red-hot forge of jealousy, and cured only by the exultant feelings of gratified revenge. These little bubbles of joy that jet up from the tumultuous waters of passion, soon evaporate, and leave but mingled dross and shame to fester and canker the mind of its possessor, who ever after leads a life of infamy and its accompanying wretchedness. Whoever committed the murders is the guiltiest of them all. It was he who with death first knocked at our portals, and with buck and ball opened the flood gates of misery, and let murder rush with living tide upon our people. And today his life is ruined, his hopes blasted, and sooner or later he will come to sorrow, shame and beggary, and have the scorpion thongs of conscience lashing his guilty bosom as he promenades the sidewalks of destiny.” Consider the plight of the Bulliner boys, thus denied justice by the law. “Must they be driven to the bushes by this hard bargain, or be placed for a lifetime at the mercy of assassins, with their hearts enclosed in palisades of sorrow? They saw their father and brother shot down by vandal hands, and their own lives threatened by fiends stalking in midnight darkness.... What could they do but pick up the gauntlet hurled into their faces, and give vent to anger long pent up?... Embassadors were at an end. Words of menace and expostulation were exchanged for the thunders of the shot gun.... The god of the bushes had been invoked.”