merciful role in it was the part he played one chill November morning
when he put Richard Coverdale to the wall and ran him through.

As you have guessed, I was Coverdale's next friend and second in this
affair, and but for the upsetting news of the Tryon tyranny in
Carolina,--news which reached me on the very day of the meeting,--I
should there and then have called the slayer to his account.

How my father who, Presbyterian and Ireton though he was, had always
been of the king's side, came to espouse the cause of the "Regulators,"
as they called themselves, I know not. In my youthful memories of him he
figures as the feudal lord of his own domain, more absolute than many of
the petty kinglings I came afterward to know in the German marches. But
this, too, I remember; that while his rule at Appleby Hundred was stern
and despotic enough, he was ever ready to lend a willing ear to any tale
of oppression. And if what men say of the tyrant Tryon's tax-gatherers
and law-court robbers be no more than half truth, there was need for any
honest gentleman to oppose them.

What that opposition came to in '71 is now a tale twice told. Taken in
arms against the governor's authority, and with an estate well worth
receiving, my father had little justice and less mercy accorded him.
With many others he was outlawed; his estates were declared forfeit; and
a few days later he, with Benjamin Merrill and four more captivated at
the Alamance, was given some farce of a trial and hanged.

When the news of this came to me you may well suppose that I had no
heart to continue in the service of the king who could sanction and
reward such villainies as these of the butcher William Tryon. So I threw
up my lieutenant's commission in the Blues, took ship for the Continent,