Now, Mr. Fowler, the acting Master of the “Morning Light,” was an old sailor, who had hardly been on shore for forty years. But in his early boyhood he had watched the Indians at their work, and caught from them, as boys do, some of their simple medicines and arts. For years and years these facts had slept undisturbed in his mind. If any one had asked him, he would have said they were forgotten; but now, under the pressure of our wants, they, one by one, came back. With this long-time worthless knowledge, Mr. Fowler was now busily and usefully employed. He made Indian baskets of all shapes and sizes, and even bent his ash-slips into fantastic dishes. He made Indian brooms and fly-brushes, and wooden bowls, and wove grape-vine and black-jack into high-backed, deep-seated, sick-room chairs. Where others saw only weeds or firewood, he found remedies for half our diseases; and when the surgeon’s physic gave out, Mr. Fowler’s laboratory was rich in simples.
We went out on parole that afternoon, Mr. Fowler carrying his basket, and I, an axe. He called attention to the fact that these pecan nuts would be ripe by-and-by, and that those persimmons would be worth coming after when the frost should have sugared them, and he filled his basket as he walked and talked. Before long, we saw some clean black-jack vines hanging from the top-most branches of a tree. We tugged and strained a few minutes, and then a splendid vine came down, not thicker than a lady’s finger at the root, yet forty feet in length. It was flexible as a rope, and as I coiled it up, I said to Mr. Fowler, “I have got my blanket line.”
Having cut an ash stick for a broom, and a pecan log for an axe handle, we went back to camp, where, soon after, Mr. Fowler was busily engaged in pounding his ash stick to loosen the splints, and I, at work on the severest manual effort of my life, viz., whittling with a soft-bladed penknife, out of flinty pecan wood, an orthodox American axe-helve.
Some weeks passed, and then one of those events occurred which are doubly mortifying if you are then on the wrong side of the enemy’s lines. I was lying ill in my bunk when an excited individual rushed into the barracks and made me better by the announcement, that the train had brought up great news from Houston. Blunt was coming down through the Indian Territory with his rough borderers, and all the troops in Texas were to be hurried northward to repel the invasion. For several days and nights trains ran by our camp loaded with soldiers who howled horribly to our guards, who howled, horribly back to them. The Houston Telegraph came filled with orders of General Magruder, directing the movement of his forces, and naming twenty-seven different battalions that were to hurry forward immediately. The General did not publish such orders ordinarily, and this one looked like haste, excitement and alarm.
One night, about ten o’clock, an engine was heard hurrying up the road. As usual it stopped at the water-tank near our camp. In ten minutes important news had leaped from the engine to head-quarters; from head-quarters to the guard-house, and from the guard-house straight through the line of sentries into our bunks. The news was this: twelve Yankee gun-boats, twenty-four large transports, and six thousand men lay off Sabine.
The next day the train confirmed the news. We learnt, too, that Union men, in Houston, were bold and defiant, and talked openly of a change of masters. Our guards were in a ferment. They talked with us freely, and confessed that there were not three hundred troops between Houston and Sabine. “Your folks will seize the railroad and march straight on to Houston,” they said, “and then Galveston will have to go, and like as not you’ll be guarding us within a week.” “What splendid strategy,” said everybody. “Blunt has drawn all the forces in the State up to Bonham—there is nothing to prevent our coming in below; Magruder is completely out-generalled. We must forgive the two months of idleness since Vicksburg and Port Hudson fell.”
Another day came, and the excitement increased; another, and affairs seemed in suspense; a third, and there was a rumor that two gun-boats had been sunk, their crews captured, and that the “Great Expedition” was “skedaddling” (such was the ignominious term applied) back to New Orleans. There came yet another day, when we sat waiting for the train.
“The cars are late,” said one. “It is past three o’clock, and they should have been here at two.”
“That’s a good sign,” said another; “it shows they have something to keep them. When they come you will see Magruder is sending off his ordnance stores.”
“Then you don’t feel any fear about that rumor?”