Louis,  appeared  for  the  defendants.  A  separate  trial  was  granted
and  the  two  seconds  were  acquitted.  The  transaction  was  con-
demned, yet  as  it  clearly  appeared  that  the  seconds  intended  no
harm,  the  verdict  was  generally  approved.*  ISext  Bennett  was  to
be  tried,  but  having  learned  that  the  testimony  elicited  in  the  other
cases  was  damaging  to  him,  he  broke  jail  and  made  his  escape
into  Arkansas.  His  whereabouts  was  some  two  years  later  dis-
covered, and  by  means  of  artifice,  ("which  was  not  approved,'*
says  Reynolds,  the  judge,  who  sat  in  his  trial),  he  was  taken  back
to  Belleville,  tried  in  1821,  at  a  special  tenn  of  the  court,  con-
victed of  murder,  sentenced  and  executed.
Gov.  Bond  was  strenuously  and  clamorously  besieged  for  a
considerable  time  with  petitions  praying  a  pardon  for  the  doomed
man,  but  without  avail.  He,  who  on  the  field,  as  we  have  seen,
was  unwilling  to  take  an  advantage  of  his  deadly  foe,  would  not
yield  to  entreaty  in  this  case,  and  William  Bennett  dangled  at
the  rope's  end  till  he  was  dead,  in  presence  of  a  great  multitude
of  spectators,  who  doubtless  took  in  a  great  moral  lesson.  To
the  advocates  of  the  code,  his  fate  must  have  appeared  peculiarly
hard.  They  may  have  well  conceived  that  Bennett,  in  ignorance
of  the  sham  int^ended,  by  putting  a  ball  into  his  rifle  was  but
doubly  assuring  his  defense  against  an  adversary  who  was  enti-
tled to  an  equal  chance  with  him.  But  fatal  dueling  was  murder
in  the  eye  of  the  law,  as  it  ever  should  be.
