“But what brought you to New Orleans? or, more particularly, how came you into this scrape?”
“Wal, Cap’n, bein’ as the last question is the most partickler, I’ll gin yur the answer to it fust. I hed jest twelve dollars in my pouch, an’ I tuk a idee inter my head thet I mout as well double it. So I stepped into a shanty whar they wur a-playin’ craps. After bettin’ a good spell, I won somewhar about a hundred dollars. Not likin’ the sign I seed about, I tuk Jack and put out. Wal, jest as I was kummin’ roun’ this hyur corner, four fellers—them ye seed—run out and jumped me, like so many catamounts. I tuk them for the same chaps I hed seed parley vooin’ at the craps-table; an’ tho’t they wur only jokin’, till one of them gin me a sockdolloger over the head, an’ fired a pistol. I then drewed my bowie, an’ the skrimmage begun; an’ thet’s all I know about it, cap’n, more’n yurself.
“Let’s see if it’s all up with this’n,” continued the hunter, stooping. “I’deed, yes,” he drawled out; “dead as a buck. Thunder! ye’ve gin it him atween the eyes, plum. He is one of the fellers, es my name’s Bob Linkin. I kud sw’ar to them mowstaches among a million.”
At this moment a patrol of night gendarmes came up; and Lincoln, and Jack, and myself were carried off to the calaboose, where we spent the remainder of the night. In the morning we were brought before the recorder; but I had taken the precaution to send for some friends, who introduced me to his worship in a proper manner. As my story corroborated Lincoln’s, and his mine, and “Jack’s” substantiated both; and as the comrades of the dead Creole did not appear, and he himself was identified by the police as a notorious robber, the recorder dismissed the case as one of “justifiable homicide in self-defence”; and the hunter and I were permitted to go our way without further interruption.
Note. Craps is a game of dice.