“Yes, Mrs. McLaine; I am worse than a widow—I am the wife of Sam Hildebrand!”
The good woman stood amazed and said nothing; but the look that Mr. Shumate gave Crittenden was truly comical: he drew up his neck, threw his head a little back, and exclaimed:
“Well—my—God! and you are not Sam Hildebrand—are you?”
“Oh, no sir! I am not; but his wife here is my cousin.”
They continued on to Illinois, and as soon as all military operations against me in Missouri had subsided, I left the State; and since that time I have been wandering through the Southern States as a peaceable citizen.
The Governor‘s reward against me, of course, is still unrepealed; and I hope that it will be chiseled into one of the pillars of the State Capitol, that it may be handed down to posterity in the same category with two rewards offered during the last generation—one for a feasible northwest passage, and the other for the invention of perpetual motion.
Let the legend pass down the corridors of time to the latest generation, that the strange flickering light sometimes seen at night in the dreary lowlands of the South is none other than “Jack with his lantern” trying to get the reward by finding Sam Hildebrand.
If the strange hallucination should ever enter the mind of a man that I could be captured, let him immediately send for a physician, have his head emptied and filled up with clabber to give him a better set of brains.
All fighting between “Uncle Sam” and myself has ceased long ago. He came out of the war unconquered—and so did I.
It will be a long time, however, before he gets entirely over the effects of our fight. I am hale, and have the free use of my limbs; but his southern arm is paralyzed, he is terribly in debt, can only see out of one eye, and his constitution is broken; he has the KuKlux nightmare, the Salt Lake cancer; the African leprosy, the Fenian rickets, the bondholder‘s cramp, and the Congressional blind staggers. The war left me out of debt, with a good horse, and forty dollars in cash.