And this teamster was a white man.
But there are avenging furies that follow a man, even though the law
does not reach him. There is a man now living in Atchison county whose
truthfulness has never been questioned, and he stated that he spent a
winter in the Missouri River bottoms, sleeping in the same cabin with
Charley Hayes, and that it seemed as if the devil had a mortgage on
the ruffian's soul, and tormented him in his sleep with images of the
horrors that awaited him in the future world. That it seemed as if he
was wrestling in mortal struggle with the men he had maltreated and
murdered, and that they were choking him to death. Hayes afterwards
died of a consumption presumably brought on by his dissipated habits
and by his debaucheries.
Meantime the writer had started for Illinois the preceding summer,
had been prostrated for four weeks with a fever, and late in the
autumn of 1856 had returned to Kansas, there to remain. The times were
becoming quiet, the peaceful counsels of such leaders as Stringfellow
and Abell were beginning to take effect, and it evidently would be
safe for the writer to go to work on his claim.
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