"The cheap John part of this affair is in Fair Play's letter, in which in one breath he professes to be a temperance man, and says a hotel keeper who violates the law and gets punished gets just what he deserves, and in the next breath tells us that liquor is a necessity, and asks why trouble the man who furnishes it. Surely, we see the hem of the cloak of hypocrisy. Fair Play should also give the public his name, so that people may judge for themselves the value of his peculiar and disinterested view of fair play; farther, some folks are already conjecturing who the author was, and it is not fair to let any one be under the imputation of a thing he did not do, and surely no man need be afraid or ashamed to have his own views appear over his own name. He asks, Who saw the assault? and answers, Nobody. Who saw Hooper try to drown his wife? Nobody. And yet one of these so-called detectives was instrumental in landing him in prison, and people seem to think that he did get fair play. "Fair Play says careful men view this askance. In this town, where naturally the keenest interest is taken in this affair, nearly or quite all of the representative men have condemned the assault in the most decisive manner. "Now, Mr. Editor, let me say that among the great mass of the people of this vicinity, there is no desire to make out that Mr. Smith is either a hero or a martyr. It is a question of law and order on the one hand, and crime and violence on the other. The assault is admitted, and a conspiracy is alleged. No doubt there are landlords in this country who would not implicate themselves in any illegal proceedings against Mr. Smith nor sympathize with the same. Such men are suffering nothing, but it is doubtful if there is a person of ordinary capacity in this vicinity who does not believe that the assault was the outcome of a conspiracy, and men are not slow in expressing the wish that if we have such people living among us that they may be exposed in their true character and punished, whether they profess to be saints or sinners, and the people of this town would extend the same sympathy and offer the same assistance to the accused parties, if they had been the victims of an assault and suspicion pointed to Smith and the Alliance as its instigators. "MERIT LONGEWAY. "_Sutton, October 15th, 1894._" [Illustration: Lead Pipe, Rope and Hat.] "To the Editor of _The News_: "SIR,--Permit me to reply to some of the statements of 'Fair Play' in your paper of October 12th. First, I should like to ask what is meant by poisoning the public mind?