P.S. I broke open this letter to write you some more. The
foregoing pages were written at night. I expected to mail it
next morning before leaving Evansville; but the boat for which I
was waiting came down about three in the morning; so I had to
hurry on board, bringing the letter along. As it now is I am not
sorry, for coming down, on my way to St. Louis, as far as
Paducah, there I learned from a colored man at the wharf that,
that same day, in the morning, the master and the family of
fugitives arrived off the boat, and had then gone on their
journey to Tuscumbia, but that the "white man" (Mr. Concklin)
had "got away from them," about twelve miles up the river. It
seems he got off the boat some way, near or at Smithland, Ky., a
town at the mouth of the Cumberland River. I presume the report
is true, and hope he will finally escape, though I was also told
that they were in pursuit of him. Would that the others had also
escaped. Peter and Levin could have done so, I think, if they
had had resolution. One of them rode a horse, he not tied
either, behind the coach in which the others were. He followed
apparently "contented and happy." From report, they told their
master, and even their pursuers, before the master came, that
Concklin had decoyed them away, they coming unwillingly. I write
on a very unsteady boat.

Yours, N.R. JOHNSTON.


A report found its way into the papers to the effect that "Miller," the
white man arrested in connection with the capture of the family, was
found drowned, with his hands and feet in chains and his skull
fractured. It proved, as his friends feared, to be Seth Concklin. And in