rillas; women's tongue were busy telling Union neighbors "their time was now coming." General Fisk, with all his force, had been scouring the brush for weeks in the river counties in pursuit of hostile bands, composed largely of recruits from among that class of inhabitants who claim protection, yet decline to perform the full duty of citizens on the ground that they "never tuck no sides." A few facts will convey some idea of this warfare carried on by Confederate agents here, while the agents abroad of their bloody and hypocritical despotism - Mason, Slidell, and Mann in Europe - have the effrontery to tell the nations of Christendom our Government "carried on the war with increasing ferocity regardless of the laws of civilized warfare." These gangs of rebels, whose families had been living in peace among their loyal neighbors, committed the most cold-blooded and diabolical murders, such as riding up to a farm-house, asking for water, and, while receiving it, shooting down the giver, and aged, inoffensive farmer, because he was a radical "Union man." In the single Sub-District of Mexico its commanding officer furnished a list of near 100 Union men, who, in the course of six weeks, had been killed, maimed, or "run off" because they were "radical Union men or damned abolitionists."

About the 1st of September Anderson's gang attacked a railroad train on the North Missouri road, took from it twenty-two unarmed soldiers, many on sick leave, and after robbing placed them in a row and shot them in cold blood. Some of these bodies they scalped, and put others across the track and ran the engine over them. On the 27th this gang, with numbers swollen to 300 or 400, attacked Major Johnston with about 120 men of the Thirty-ninth Missouri Volunteer Infantry, raw recruits, and, after stampeding their horses, shot every man, most of them in cold blood. Anderson a few days later was recognized by General Price at Boonville as Confederate captain, and with a verbal admonition to behave himself, ordered by Colonel Maclean, chief of Price's staff, to proceed to North Missouri and destroy the railroads, which orders were found on the miscreant when killed by Lieutenant-Colonel Cox about the 27th of October ultimo.

On the 28th, when information of Ewing's fight and price's presence at Pilot Knob came to hand, General Smith, discovering the enemy on his front moving to west and north, in pursuance of his orders to hold "the most advanced position compatible with the certainty of keeping between the enemy and Saint Louis," determined to leave De Soto and retire behind the Meramec, a stream which, at from ten to fifteen miles south of Saint Louis, offers considerable obstacle to the passage of a hostile force with wagons and artillery. General Ewing, finding Marmaduke's and Fagan's rebels division before him, and his position commanded by a numerically superior artillery, acting on suggestions made when discussing with him the possibilities of the position, on the night of the 27th spiked his heavy guns, blew up his magazine, ammunition, and supplies, and with the field battery and remains of his command retreated through the hills toward the Meramec Valley, hoping to reach a point on the railroad from whence he could move to Saint Louis. But, as will be seen from his reports, the enemy pursued him, harassed his rear on the march, which he directed along a ridge where the enemy could not flank him, and overtook him near Harrison's Station, where, seizing and extending the temporary defenses constructed by the military, he displayed such vigor that after harassing him for thirty-six hours and making several attacks, on the approach of a detachment of Sanborn's cavalry the rebels left him and he escaped with all his command to Rolla. The enemy's strength and position thus developed, my