losing heart. Now, the firing entirely ceased,
except a shot or two at intervals. The wounded
men were groaning with pain, and their
comrades were trying to carry them off. The
Luddites broke and separated towards Huddersfield;
one man fell in the mill-dam; others slunk back
to the Dumb Steeple Field; a few crept up
the beck.

Mr. Cartwright, listening, could hear the heavy
groaning of the poor wretches left under the
windows wounded, but he was afraid to go out
lest it should be afterwards said he had murdered
the stragglers in cold blood. Then, the victorious
defenders rested and rejoiced, or kept
the alarm-bell going. On a friend arriving,
Cartwright went cautiously out and examined
the field of battle, and removed the wounded
men to a public-house near. When the day
broke, Cartwright went and examined the
ruined mill: the windows were destroyed, the
doors chopped and broken, the paths to Huddersfield
strewn with malls, hatchets, and hammers.
There was a Luddite's hat floating in a dismal
way about the mill-dam.

That night many glimpses were obtained of
the retreating rioters.

Some of the frightened Luddites were soon
tracked. On the night of the attack on Rawfold
Mill, a man named Brooks, who was wet
through and without a hat, called at High
Town on a man named Naylor, from whom
Mellor, the leading spirit all through this bad
affair, borrowed a hat for his coadjutor. On
the day after, a woman living at Lockwood
saw a great many cloth-dressers come to the
house of a man named Brook, whom she heard
evidently telling "some sorrowful tale." She
could tell that, by the motion of his hand. She
heard only a few words, and those were:

"That of all the dismallest dins anybody ever
heard, that was the dismallest, and that you
might have heard it half a mile, and I had
rather be clemmed to death than be in such a
stir again."

Before any of the men could be arrested, the
irritation produced by the failure of the attack
on Rawfold's mill had led to a fresh crime. A
day or two after the repulse, the croppers at
Mr. Wood's mill at Longroyd's Bridge were
talking together, lamenting the loss of life
among the Luddites at Cartwright's mill.
Mellor, always foremost, then said there was
no way of smashing the machinery but by
shooting the masters. No one present seems
to have protested against this proposition.
Mellor, who had been to Russia, had brought
back with him a large pistol of a peculiar kind,
with a barrel half a yard long. It had been
sold to a man named Hall for some pigeons. This
pistol was borrowed on the afternoon of the 28th
of April. At Hall's house, Mellor loaded this
pistol so heavily, that Hall asked Mellor if he
meant to fire that? He thought the piece would
jump back. Mellor replied, coolly, "Yes; I
mean to give Horsfall that." About five o'clock
that day, Mellor came into a room at Longroyd
Mill, where a man named Walker was at work
with three other men, and asked him to go
with him and shoot Mr. Horsfall. The man did
not then consent; but half an hour after, Mellor
came again, put a loaded and primed pistol
into his hand, and told him he must go with
him and shoot Horsfall. Walker examined the
pistol, found it nearly full, and consented.

This Mr. Horsfall—the man whom the four
Luddites waited for in the narrow strip of a
plantation on the Huddersfield road—was an
excitable impetuous man, violent in manner,
but kind and forgiving to his own workpeople.
Against the Luddites, however, he was always
implacable. Though he had offered to his
neighbours, the Armitages, to pull down the
obnoxious frames, he had been heard to express
his wish to ride up to the saddle-girths in
Luddite blood. The children, as he rode through
Lingard's Wood, used to run out and cry,
"I'm General Lud!" and he would invariably
pursue the urchins with his horsewhip. This
rash and impulsive man was about forty,
and in the full flush of vigorous manhood. It
was said that the Luddites had, on the night of
the defeat at Rawfold's, tossed up a shilling to
settle whether Cartwright's mill or Horsfall's
mill should be first attacked.

The other men were in a wood twenty
yards nearer Huddersfield. They were to fire
after Mellor and Thorpe had fired.

This was at about six o'clock. At about half-
past five Mr. Horsfall has mounted at the door of
the George Hotel, Huddersfield, rash and defiant
as usual, and ridden off. A few minutes after he
was out of sight, Mr. Horsfall's friend, a Mr.
Eastwood of Slaithwaite, who had often expostulated
with the daring and obnoxious millowner
on the imprudence of his intemperate language
about the Luddites, called at the George to
propose, for protection and companionship,
to ride home with him. On hearing he had
gone, he cantered quickly after him, hoping to
overtake him. About six, Mr. Horsfall pulled
up his horse at the Warren House Inn at
Crossland Moor. Finding there two of his old
workpeople, Mr. Horsfall gave each a glass of
liquor in a friendly way. He did not himself
alight, but on the saddle tossed off a steaming
glass of rum and water, and then rode off flushed
with the grog. A man named Parr was about a
hundred and fifty yards behind him. All the
way from Huddersfield there had been an
intermittent stream of people returning homeward—
farmers in gigs, labourers with carts, and young
squires riding gaily back to their country
places.

When Mr. Horsfall comes abreast of the
plantation, Parr sees four men in dark-coloured
clothes stooping about under the boughs. All
at once there comes a crack, as of a gun, and a
puff of smoke. Mr. Horsfall's horse jibs
around, and the rider falls with his face on the
horse's neck. Two shots had been fired. By
a great effort the wounded man raises himself
painfully up by the horse's mane, and calls out
"Murder!" At that moment a man in a bottle-
green top-coat (one of the four in ambuscade)