“He had four pistols and also a revolver. He had the larger pistols in his belt. I did not see his sword until after the rencontre. He had it drawn when I came up to him. I supposed it was a bowie-knife.”
After a brief parley as to the disadvantages of a position first selected, and the choice of a second, the word was given to advance and fire. The principals were two hundred yards apart when the word was given.
“Mr. Ritchie fired at the distance of twenty-five or thirty yards. Mr. Pleasants fired his first pistol within about fifteen or twenty feet of Mr. Ritchie.... At the third shot they were more rapid. Mr. Pleasants advanced. At the third fire Mr. Ritchie’s form became obscure; Mr. Pleasants still advancing, I saw him within six or seven feet of Mr. Ritchie. It was then that Mr. Pleasants fired his second pistol.”
Thus the eminent surgeon, who had refused to come to the field as the friend of both parties, but yielded when asked to serve in his professional capacity. He remarks, parenthetically, here:
“I am now giving my recollection of events transpiring in a short time and under great excitement.”
Perhaps, in spite of the great excitement, the training of his calling held his senses steady, for his story of the fight is graphic and succinct.
“I saw Mr. Pleasants level his second pistol; I heard the report; I saw Mr. Ritchie stagger back, and I remarked to Mr. D.” (the man who had been overpersuaded to witness the murder as a “mutual friend”), “‘Ritchie is a dead man!’ I so inferred, because he had staggered back. Then I heard several discharges without knowing who was firing. I saw Mr. Pleasants striking at Mr. Ritchie with some weapon—whether a cane or a pistol, I do not know. I also saw him make several thrusts with a sword-cane. He gave several blows and two or three thrusts. I do not know if the sword was sheathed. During this part of the affair I saw Mr. Ritchie with his sword in his hand. I did not see him draw it. I saw him in the attitude of one making a thrust, and did see him make one or two thrusts at Mr. Pleasants. I remarked to Mr. D., ‘Let us go up, or he’ll be stabbed!’ Two or three times the cry was made, ‘Stop, Pleasants! Stop, Ritchie!’ We went up. Mr. Pleasants was tottering; Mr. Ritchie was standing a few feet away, the point of his sword on the ground; he was perfectly quiet. Mr. Archer took Mr. Pleasants’ arm and laid him down. He was on the ground when I reached him. Before I got to him I saw Mr. Ritchie leaving the ground. He walked a short distance, and then ran.”
It transpired afterward that not one of Pleasants’s balls had struck Ritchie. The presumption was that the elder man was wounded by his opponent’s first fire, and fired wildly in consequence. He received six balls in various parts of his body. But one of his bullets was found, and that in the gable of a building out of the line of the firing. The ball was embedded in the wood, nine feet above the ground. Mad with pain and blinded by rage, the wounded man struck at the other’s face when they were near together—some said, with the useless pistol, others with his sword-cane or bowie-knife. When the fugitive reached the carriage in waiting at the foot of the hill, his face was covered with blood. His physician was in the carriage, and examined him at once. But for the cut lip he was absolutely uninjured.
The sun was just rising when John Hampden Pleasants was lifted into the carriage and borne back to the city. He knew himself to be mortally wounded from the moment he fell.