Half-way across, we stopped one evening at the mean best tavern in a mean town,—a frowzy county town, with a dusty public square, a boxy church, and a spittley court-house.
Fit entertainment for beast the tavern offered. We saw our horses stabled, and had our supper.
“Shall we go into the Spittoon?” said Biddulph.
“Certainly,” said Brent. “The bar-room—I am sorry to hear you speak of it with foreign prejudice—is an institution, and merits study. Argee, upon the which the bar-room is based, is also an institution.”
“Well, I came to study American institutions. Let us go in and take a whiff of disgust.”
Fit entertainment for brute the bar-room offered. In that club-room we found the brute class drinking, swearing, spitting, squabbling over the price of hemp and the price of “niggers,” and talking what it called “politics.”
One tall, truculent Pike, the loudest of all that blatant crew, seemed to Brent and myself an old acquaintance. We had seen him or his double somewhere. But neither of us could fit him with a pedestal in our long gallery of memory. Saints one takes pains to remember, and their scenes; but satyrs one endeavors to lose.
“Have you had enough of the Spittoon?” I asked Biddulph. “Shall we go up? They’ve put us all three in the same room; but bivouacs in the same big room—Out-Doors—are what we are best used to.”
Two and a half beds, one broken-backed chair, a wash-stand decked with an ancient fringed towel and an abandoned tooth-brush, one torn slipper, and a stove-pipe hole, furnished our bedchamber.
We were about to cast lots for the half-bed, when we heard two men enter the next room. The partition was only paper pasted over lath, and cut up as if a Border Ruffian member of Congress had practised at it with a bowie-knife before a street-fight. Every word of our neighbors came to us. They were talking of a slave bargain. I eliminate their oaths, though such filtration does them injustice.