Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays

[233] Kansas, he had taken Fort Scott with twenty-two men against sixty-eight, yet this was quite a different affair. For myself, I had at that time such confidence in his guidance that the words of the Scotch ballad often rang in my ears:--

I could ha'e ridden the border through
Had Christie Graeme been at my back.

Lithe, quick, low-voiced, reticent, keen, he seemed the ideal of a partisan leader, and was, indeed, a curious compound of the moss-trooper and the detective. Among his men were Carpenter, Pike, Seamans, Rice, Gardner, Willis, and Silas Soule,--all well known in Kansas. The last three of these men had lately been among the rescuers of Dr. Doy from jail at St. Joseph, Missouri,--a town of eleven thousand inhabitants,--under circumstances of peculiar daring; one of them personating a horse-thief and two others the officers who had arrested him, and thus getting admission to the jail.

The first need was to make exploration of the localities, and, taking with him one of his companions,--a man, as it proved, of great resources,--Montgomery set out by night and was gone several days. While he examined the whole region,--his native Kentucky accent saving him from all suspicion,--his comrade penetrated into the very jail, in the guise of a jovial, half-drunken Irishman, and got speech