"Inoffensive, _which_? Mebbe you know these people an' mebbe you don't. I do! and a dern'der lot of unhung cutthroats an' hoss-thieves you can't find nowheres. As for hangin', you needn't give yourself no worryment 'bout that. They're safe enough to hang me if they ketch me, an' I guess I sha'n't hang no higher if I go right on my own gait. If you don't want to employ me you needn't; theys enough corn an' bacon in th' Obion bottom to keep me awhile yet, and money ain't no 'count down here; but, by King! if I kin git a chance to tell you anything that them 'uns don't want you to know, you bet your skin I'll do it, an' you kin trust me every time, for I ain't goin' to lie,--not to your side, not if I know it. Why, you talk to me about inikities. I don't want to do no man any hurt; but my old dad _he_ was _con_scripted, an' me an' my brother Jake had to take to the bresh to save ourselves, an' then Jake he was shot in cold blood right afore my eyes, an' I made up my mind then an' there that I wouldn't give no quarter to the whole State of West Tannisy till this war was over an' ther' was some stronger hand than mine to do jestis an' to furnish revenge. That's all I've got to say about it. You needn't give yourself no oneasiness 'bout my doin's, I'll answer for the hull on 'em; an' p'r'aps the last thing you'll hear of Pat Dixon will be that he's hangin' to a tree somewheres down Troy way. I know I'm booked for that if I'm ketched, and till I am ketched I'm goin' my own gait." We had become too much accustomed to this state of feeling among the scanty Union population of the Southwest to be so shocked by it as we ought to have been, and it was not without sympathy with Dixon's wrongs that I let him go, with an earnest caution that he should mend his ways, if only for his own sake. It remains only to say that he _did_ go his own gait, and that he went it with a desperation and an _élan_ that I have never known equalled; and that, months later, after our snug quarters at Union City had been turned over to a feeble band of home-guards, word came that they had been burned to the ground, and that Pat Dixon, betrayed at last into the hands of the enemy, had been hanged in the woods near Troy. We could find no fault with the retribution that had overtaken him; for, viewed with the eyes of his executioners, he had richly merited it: but we had learned to like him for his frank and generous qualities, and to make full allowance for the degree to which his rough, barbaric nature had been outraged and inflamed by the wrongs inflicted on his family. * * * * *