The North Carolina Standard

BLOODY AFFRAY.

The New Orleans Bee of the 10th inst. says:

A rencontre took place yesterday morning, about 10 o'clock, on board the steamboat President, at the foot of Canal street, between Capt. C. C. Rodes, pilot of the President, and Capt. W. P. Stevenson, pilot of the steamboat Swan, in which the former was killed and the latter mortally wounded.

From the testimony elicited at the coroner's inquest it appears that an ill-feeling had for some time existed between the parties. On the day previous to the rencontre, Capt. Stevenson addressed a note to Capt. Rodes. An answer was returned on the following morning, by a person who met Capt. Stevenson on the guard of the President. Capt. S. took the note, and as he read it passed on into the social hall of the cabin.

Capt. Rodes was at the time of Stevenson's entering the social hall, in the after part of the gentlemen's cabin, near the entrance to the ladies cabin. Capt. R. in a few moments advanced towards Stevenson, letting fall a walking cane as he approached him and placing his hand in his bosom—the latter at the same time drawing a pistol.

A gentleman standing by attempted to interfere—Stevenson cried out 'don't come near me' and at that moment discharged his pistol at Rodes, who had almost simultaneously made a spring at him with a 'bowie knife.' The parties closed with each other, the one using the butt of his pistol and the other his knife.

During the scuffle they worked themselves into the passage way that leads to the guards of the boat, where they fell, Rodes on top. Capt. R. then requested the by-standers to part them, saying, we are both dying.

Capt. Rodes died in about five minutes, and Capt. Stevenson was taken to Drs. Stone & Kennedey's hospital. Under a post mortem examination of Capt. Rodes, it was found that the ball shot by Stevenson entered his body at the inner side of the left shoulder, passed obliquely downwards between the second and third ribs, entered the thorax, passed through the left lobe of the lungs and lodged in the mediastinum.

Capt. Stevenson was stabbed in the abdomen, the knife severing the intestines and laying open the rim of the belly. He was cut in several other parts of the body, and had one of his arms nearly dissevered.

After he was laid upon a mattress, to be taken to the hospital, he said that if he had but five minutes to live, he would assert that he was right.—But that no one knew the cause of quarrel between them, and that all knowledge of it would die with him.

The rencontre, it is understood, grew out of a love affair.