"You are not admired servant, horse, or dog, beard, mustache or a wife. If you get caught hazing you are dismissed. Some are. You must not send or accept a challenge to a duel."
-- Francis Henney Smith, VMI Superintendent

Tales of Christian's "interview" with Tom Blackburn began to crawl out of the McDowell Hotel and evolve almost as soon as the boys left the bar.

Hugh Laughlin, the bartender who said he had hidden rather than see something he'd rather not see, said he saw Blackburn and Christian emerging from their encounter in the hotel passageway. "Both looked changed," he testified. "Both seemed to be in better humor and looked satisfied."

Laughlin was right about Blackburn. Almost as soon as he got back to the VMI barracks, Tom Blackburn told his roommate, Robert Carson, all about the affair.

Christian, he said, had admitted to his face he was "acting properly" or "doing his duty", and that he even "admired" Blackburn "for his noble principles."

According to Carson, Blackburn was smiling as he told the story and seemed to be genuinely in "good humor."

Cadet James White Humes, who had accompanied Blackburn and George Baylor Horner on the search for Christian, told Cadets Robert McKinney, Edward Alexander Langhorne, and no doubt a number of others congregated in Cadet Richard Taylor's that he believed the matter "had been adjusted."

Richard Taylor said he heard that Christian was "very frightened and seemed glad to get out of the scrape." Taylor agreed that, when all was said and done, "everybody thought all parties were satisfied."

Cadet Edward Alexander Langhorne, a young man with a particularly fine-tuned sense of personal honor, disagreed. He knew both Christian and Blackburn and had been with Christian at McDowell's both before and immediately after the "interview." Ned Langhorne insisted that Christian, far from being mollified or intimidated, has said quite clearly to him that "the affair was not done with."

Thus, several versions of the story continued to spread around the VMI barracks.

Cadet John Howard Sharp, nearly half a century later, claimed that Christian's line about Blackburn's "noble principles" had been "told all around." As he remembered the line, Christian said: "I admire you Mr. Blackburn for the course you took under the circumstances and would have done just as you did."

Blackburn, he said, "coldly made no reply" to Christian's remarks" but "with a sneer turned his back on him and left him."

At Samuel McDowell Moore's House, where Blackburn's cousin Mary Evelyn Anderson was still in residence, news of "the interview" had apparently produced a universal sigh of relief.

Moore's fourteen year old daughter, Sallie Alexander, wrote that to everyone's delight, Blackburn and Christian had shaken hands and "parted friends."

Blackburn, she wrote in her memoirs, had admitted to Christian "that he knew nothing personal about him" and "had only heard about him from hearsay."

Sallie had no doubt heard the story from Christian's rival for Mary Evelyn Anderson's affections, Blackburn's close friend, roommate, and the man who would eventually marry Mary Evelyn, Cadet Alexander Broadnax ("Sandy") Bruce.

Blackburn had talked to Bruce soon after the "interview," on Saturday evening, when Bruce was on actually on his way to visit Mary Anderson. Well aware that Bruce, and not Christian would be walking Mary Evely Anderson to church on Sunday, Blackburn asked Bruce to tell her "he had taken some notice" of the affair with Christian.

According to Bruce, Blackburn didn't go into detail and made no mention of how Christian had conducted himself.

Like nearly everyone else in the Cadet Corps, Bruce seemed to think the "affair" was over and said so to Mary Evelyn and the Moore family.

But Christian, who stood a "smallish" 5'8", was no doubt physically intimidated by his encounter Tom Blackburn. Blackburn was some four inches taller than Christian, significantly heavier, and brought with him to the hotel not only a reputation for settling matters with his fists and friends, but two such friends in uniform.

Thus, at around 3:00 PM on Saturday, Christian walked into J. M. Pettigrew's store, to pick up an equalizer.

He picked out a "six-barreled revolver," one of several pistols Pettigrew claimed Christian had been "considering" for "a month past."

When Pettigrew asked Christian how he intended to pay for the weapon, the notoriously penurous orphan law student told him, "he was looking for money every day," and would pay "when he got it."

Pettigrew, a well-known Lexington merchant, and one of the directors of the local bank, later swore he had no idea that Christian "had a difficulty with any one." He let him take the pistol on credit.

Christian knew a little about pistols. Before entering law school in Lexington he had been asked to leave the Virginia Baptist Seminary for threatening its president with one.

His selection of the pepperbox (and perhaps the notion that he might well be able to get away with using it) may also have been inspired by recent events at the nearby University of Virginia.

On December 21, 1853, the day after Christian had asked Mary Anderson to "walk out" with him, the Governor of Virginia had pardoned a former UVA student from Amherst County, a "graceless scamp" named John Singleton Mosby, for using just such a weapon to shoot a student named George Turpin.

Turpin was tall, handsome, and popular, with a reputation as a brawler and campus bully.

Mosby, it was true, had served time, but in the end had both regained his freedom and redeemed his "honor." Chief among the arguments that won over the Governor were Mosby's claims of self-defense and allegations of prejudice on the part of the jury toward the well-known and highly popular victim of Mosby's pepperbox.

Whatever he was thinking, Christian, pistol in hand, quickly returned to his room in McDowell's Hotel.

There, shortly after 3:00 p.m. he showed up in William R. Winn's room. Another law student, W. M. Morris, showed up a few minutes later.

By all accounts Winn and Morris were the first to hear Christian's version of the encounter with Blackburn and friends.

It was also, apparently the first time Christian told anyone the details of what he considered an unbearable and now terribly public humiliation at the hands of Mary Evelyn Anderson.

Winn and Morris reacted predictably, though perhaps not in precisely in the way Christian might have preferred.

"I asked why he did not knock Blackburn down?" Winn later testified.

Morris, equally shocked by what he considered a blatant insult, asked why he "didn't pitch into him?"

Christian offered the boys three good reasons.

First, he said, the taller and heavier Blackburn "could whip six of him."

Second, he believed at the time that Blackburn was armed.

Third, Christian said, there were several Cadets present at the "interview" while he, "had not a friend" in sight.

In fact, the more he talked about it, the more Christian said he believed he had been set up. It was a "preconcerted affair" he told Winn and Morris. While he was in the office (and bar) at McDowell's, he said, "one of the Cadets" had taken his heavy, silver-headed walking stick "out of his hands."

There were also, he said, several Cadets standing about the door of the hotel "some of whom came up with Blackburn."

Christian then asked Winn and Morris what he should do.

Morris replied there was but one response possible for a gentleman: "Christian had been basely slandered . . . he would either have to challenge Blackburn or encounter him in a street fight."

Christian reiterated that a formal challenge was out of the question, now remembering that Colonel Smith, the VMI Commandant, kept his cadets under such tight scrutiny there would be no way for Blackburn to get away to engage in a formal duel.

Then, the law student noted, there was the law.

Duelling was illegal in Virginia and Christian, who had just had to ask for credit to buy his new pepperbox, had no money to set up a challenge in some place like North Carolina unless, he said, he could himself get "away to Richmond or Lynchburg" for a loan.

As for a simple street fight, Christian once more made himself absolutely clear.

"Well," he said to Morris, "you wouldn't let Blackburn beat me to death, would you?"

Morris, by now worried that Christian might well do nothing at all, replied that, if it came to a street brawl, he would "pull him off if I saw him on you."

[Continued - to be completed]