Of course, the lawyer had no remorse of conscience, in swearing that the note had never been his, but the tavern-keeper and two witnesses swore to his having given it, and the poor fellow was condemned to recash and pay expenses. Having not a cent, he was allowed to go, for it so happened that the gaol was not built for such vagabonds, but for the government officers, who had their sleeping apartments in it. This circumstance occasioned it to be remarked by a few commonly honest people of Galveston, that if the gates of the gaol were closed at night, the community would be much improved.
Three days afterwards, a poor captain, from a Boston vessel, was summoned for the very identical bank-note, which he was obliged to pay, though he had never set his foot into the Tremont Hotel.
There is in Galveston a new-invented trade, called "the rag-trade," which is very profitable. I refer to the purchasing and selling of false bank-notes, which are, as in the lawyer's case, palmed upon any stranger suspected of having money. On such occasions, the magistrate and the plaintiff share the booty. I may as well here add a fact which is well known in France and the United States. Eight days after the Marquis de Saligny's (French chargé d'affaires) arrival in Houston, he was summoned before a magistrate, and upon the oaths of the parties, found guilty of having passed seven hundred dollars in false notes to a land speculator. He paid the money, but as he never had had in his possession any money, except French gold and notes of the Banque de France, he complained to his government; and this specimen of Texan honesty was the principal cause why the banker (Lafitte) suddenly broke the arrangement he had entered into with General Hamilton (chargé d'affaires from Texas to England and France) for a loan of seven millions of dollars.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
We had now entered a tract of land similar to that which we had travelled over when on our route from the Wakoes to the Comanches. The prairie was often intersected by chasms, the bottoms of which were perfectly dry, so that we could procure water but once every twenty-four hours, and that, too often so hot and so muddy, that even our poor horses would not drink it freely. They had, however, the advantage over us in point of feeding, for the grass was sweet and tender, and moistened during night by the heavy dews; as for ourselves, we were beginning to starve in earnest.
We had anticipated regaling ourselves with the juicy humps of the buffaloes which we should kill, but although we had entered the very heart of their great pasture-land, we had not met with one, nor even with a ground-hog; a snake, or a frog. One evening, the pangs of hunger became so sharp that we were obliged to chew tobacco and pieces of leather to allay our cravings; and we determined that if, the next day at sunset we had no better fortune, we would draw lots to kill one of our horses. That evening we could not sleep, and as murmuring was of no avail, the divine entertained us with a Texan story, just, as he said, to pump the superfluous air out of his body. I shall give it in his own terms:--
"Well, I was coming down the Wabash River (Indiana), when, as it happens nine times out of ten, the steam-boat got aground, and that so firmly, that there was no hope of her floating again till the next flood; so I took my wallet, waded for two hundred yards, with the water to my knees, till I got safe on shore, upon a thick-timbered bank, full of rattle-snakes, thorns of the locust-tree, and spiders' webs, so strong, that I was obliged to cut them with my nose, to clear the way before me. I soon got so entangled by the vines and the briars that I thought I had better turn my back to the stream till I should get to the upland, which I could now and then perceive through the clearings opened between the trees by recent thunder-storms. Unhappily, between the upland and the little ridge on which I stood there was a wide river bottom [24], into which I had scarcely advanced fifty yards when I got bogged. Well, it took me a long while to get out of my miry hole, where I was as fast as a swine in its Arkansas sty; and then I looked about for my wallet, which I had dropped. I could see which way it had gone, for, close to the yawning circle from which I had just extricated myself, there was another smaller one two yards off, into which my wallet had sunk deep, though it was comfortably light; which goes to illustrate the Indiana saying, that there is no conscience so light but will sink in the bottom of the Wabash. Well, I did not care much, as in my wallet I had only an old coloured shirt and a dozen of my own sermons, which I knew by heart, having repeated them a hundred times over.
[24] River bottom is a space, sometimes of many miles in width, on the side of the river, running parallel with it. It is always very valuable and productive land, but unhealthy, and dangerous to cross, from its boggy nature.
"Being now in a regular fix, I cut a stick, and began wittling and whistling, to lighten my sorrows, till at last I perceived at the bank of the river, and five hundred yards ahead, one of those large rafts, constructed pretty much like Noah's ark, in which a Wabash farmer embarks his cargo of women and fleas, pigs and chickens, corn, whisky, rats, sheep, and stolen niggers; indeed, in most cases, the whole of the cargo is stolen, except the wife and children, the only portion whom the owner would very much like to be rid of; but these will stick to him as naturally as a prairie fly to a horse, as long as he has spirits to drink, pigs to attend to, and breeches to mend.