Again interrupting, General Fry indignantly exclaimed:
"It is an outrage, Colonel Woolford, to attempt to deceive these people by such statements. General Lee was never even imprisoned, and is still alive, the president of a college in Virginia, and highly esteemed by everybody."
The Colonel answered:
"Now, General Fry, you have been treated like a gentleman ever since you came to these mountains; we gave you the best we had to eat, gave you the last drop out of the bottle, and listened quietly to you just as long as you wanted to speak. We don't wear Sunday clothes, General Fry, like you do down in Danville, but just live in our plain way in our log cabins, and eat our hoe-cake, and say our prayers, but if there is anything on God's earth that we do love, it is the truth. It is wrong for you, General Fry, to try and fool these people. Yes, this same magnanimous party that General Fry has been telling you about, what did they do with poor old Jeff Davis after he was captured? Now, I never was fond of old Jeff myself, and I fought four years against him in the last war. But I was on the same side with him in Mexico, I saw him head the charge of the Mississippi rifles, and drive back the Mexican lancers after McKee and Clay and Hardin had been killed at Buena Vista, and I know he was no coward. Well, after he was in prison and as helpless as a child, what did they do with him? Why, they just took him out, and without even giving him a drumhead trial, tied him up and burned him to ashes at a stake!"
Fry sprang to his feet, exclaiming:
"Great God! Jeff Davis is still alive, at his home in Mississippi, and has never even been tried; it is damnable to make such statements to these people, Colonel Woolford!"
The Colonel thereupon, with a deeply injured air, said:
"General Fry, you and I have been friends a life-time. We hooked watermelons, hunted coons, and attended all the frolics together when we were boys. We slept under the same blanket, belonged to the same mess, and fought side by side at Palo Alto and Cerro Gordo; we shed our blood on the same battlefields when fighting to save this glorious Union. I have loved you, General Fry, like a brother, but this is too much, it is putting friendship to a turrible test; it is a little more than flesh and blood can stand."
Pausing for a moment, he apparently recovered himself from the deep emotion he had just shown, then quietly resuming, he said, "What I have said about the way they treated old Jeff is true, and here is my witness." He called out, "Bill, tell the General what you saw them do with old Jeff."
Bill, a tall, lank, one-gallowsed mountaineer, leaning against a sapling near by, promptly deposed that he was present at the time, saw old Jeff led out, tied to a stake and finally disappear in a puff of smoke. At this, General Fry, without the formality of a farewell, immediately shook the mountain dust from his feet, mounted his horse, and, looking neither to the right nor to the left, retraced his steps to Danville, and without delay informed the State Committee that if they wanted any further joint debates with old Frank Woolford, they would have to send some one else.