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| THE SLAVE-HUNTING TRAGEDY. . 357 cells to greet, cheer, and offer them aid and counsel in their hour of sore trial. The friends of freedom remained calm even while the pro-slavery party were fiercely raging and gloating over the prospect, as they evidently thought of the satisfaction to be durived from teaching the abolitionists a lesson from the scaffold, which would in future prevent Underground Rail Road passengers from killing their masters when in pursuit of them. Through the efforts of the authorities three white men, and twenty-seven colored had been safely lodged in Moyatnensing prison, under the charge of treason. The authorities, however, had utterly failed to catch the hero, William Parker, as he bad been sent to Canada, via the Underground Kail Road, and was thus " sitting under his own vine and fig tree, where none dared to molest, or make him afraid." As an act of simple justice it may here bo. stated that the abolitionists and prisoners found a true friend and ally at least in one United States official, who, by the way, figured prominently ia making arrests, etc., namely: the United States Marshal, A. E. Roberts. In all his intercourse with the prisoners and their friends, he plainly .showed that all his sympathies were on the side of Freedom, and not with the popular pro-slavery sentiment which clamored so loudly against traitors and abolitionists. Two of his prisoners had been identified ill the jail as fugitive slaves by their owners. When the trial came on these two individuals wore among the missing. How they escaped was unknown the Marshal, however, was strongly suspected of being a friend of the Underground Rail Road, and to add now, that those suspicions were founded on fact, will, doubtless, do him no damage. In order to draw the contrast between Freedom and Slavery, simply with a view of showing how the powers that were acted and judged in the days of the reign of the Fugitive Slave Law, unquestionably nothing better could be found to meet the requirements of this issue than the charge of Judge Kane, coupled with the indictment of the Grand Jury. In the light of the Emancipation and the Fifteenth Amendment, they are too transparent to need a single word of coniment. Judge and jury having found the accused chargeable with Treason, nothing remained, so far as the men were concerned, but to bide their time as best they could in prison. Most of them were married, and had wives and' children clinging to them in this hour of fearful looking for of judgment. |