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 o'clock on Monday morning, and probably he might have escaped at any time before noon. By that time he had been completely invested, in a little town hemmed in by a broad river and high hills. Why did he not go? A great deal of conjecture has been wasted on this point. A newspaper reported him as saying this, after his arrest: "A lenient feeling towards the citizens led me to parley with them as to a compromise; and by prevarication on their part I was delayed until attacked, and then in self-defence was compelled to entrench myself." He certainly never admitted that his sacrifice of himself and his men was deliberate; but he never lamented it, and to his brother Frederick he wrote after his condemnation. "I am fully persuaded that I am worth inconceivably more to hang than for any other purpose."

There was scattered fighting all that forenoon of October 17. Brown ran