CHAPTER XI.
THE BACK TRACK.
The location of our recapture was about ten miles from Boston, Texas, and our captors were taking us to that place.
On the way we stopped at a farmhouse to get a drink, and I begged the woman for some thread with which to mend my clothes. She searched around and found a ball, giving me several lengths of thread from it. I then asked her for some patches, and she hunted up a pair of old pants of very small size, evidently a boy's pair. They were corduroy, and it seemed a shame to cut them up, but she said it was all she could do. While she had been gone for the pants I had stolen a ball of thread, which had been left within reach, and I felt some qualms of conscience over it, but necessity had urged me to do it, and I left the matter for necessity to settle with conscience. The pants were carefully stowed away for future use.
Proceeding on our way, we killed time and enlivened our weary tramp by telling stories. One of our captors developed a capacity for lying which was simply astounding. He was not a graceful, elegant liar, telling stories that you might doubt, but could not dispute, but was one of the class of liars who distort facts that are well known and calmly make statements which you know are false. His stories were all upon the subject of eating and big eaters. We stood it until he told a story in which he claimed that he knew a man who had cooked and eaten, at one meal, a rock fish weighing thirty-six pounds, clinching the matter by asserting that he knew it to be a fact, inasmuch as he had seen it done. Then we concluded to shut the mouth of such an egregious and palpable liar.
Burnbaum asked me about my friend down in Baltimore, who was such an enormous eater, and, after some persuasion, I told the following story:
A colored man, called Eating Tom, stopped at a dining stall kept by a widow in Marsh Market one fine morning, and asked the charge for breakfast. The woman kept a table set for twelve, and had provisions cooked and ready for a like number. Being told that twenty-five cents was the price, Tom paid the quarter and took his seat, calling for everything in sight, until he had eaten all the cooked victuals the poor woman had, when he demanded more food or the return of his money, saying that he had paid for his breakfast and had not had enough. At this, the widow began to cry, which attracted the attention of a fat, burly policeman, who ordered the gluttonous brute to leave. Tom and the policeman soon got into a dispute as to what constituted a meal, and the negro offered to bet his opponent a guinea that he was yet sufficiently hungry to be able to eat a bundle of hay as large around as the fat policeman's body. The money was put up in my hands, the policeman procured the hay—the nastiest salt marsh hay that he could find—and compressed it to the required size by means of a strap. By this time quite a crowd had gathered. The strap was cut and the hay expanded so that it looked like a wagon-load, but the negro, with a broad grin and without hesitation, commenced his task with apparent relish, and soon ate up every particle of the hay. Being the stakeholder, and an eye-witness, I was compelled to pay over the money to Tom.
CAPT. CHARLES BURNBAUM.