Without delay the trial commenced, the Frenchman and his wife occupying places in the center, and the court seated on boxes, barrels, and the bed. The evidence taken that night in the cabin was substantially the following:
Two years before Jules Pigget, a native of France, accompanied by his young wife, appeared on the railroad below, and solicited work. They both found ready employment, and lived below Hays, in a dug-out, happy and prosperous. Within a year came another Frenchman, our present Honest Rombeaux. Across the water, he and Jules had been rival suitors for Marie's hand; yet strangely enough, the newcomer was welcomed by the young couple, and took up his abode with them. Matters prospered with all three, and soon Jules was to be appointed tank-tender on the road. That year came the great rain-storm, when so many families in Western Kansas and Texas were drowned. Hundreds of people were living in dug-outs, rude excavations in the banks of streams, with the roof on a level with the bank above, but the room itself entirely below high-water mark—a style of dwelling which, as no great rise had occurred in years, had become quite popular among new-comers.
On the night of the great flood people went to bed as usual. The streams had risen but little. At midnight the rain fell heavily; the firm surface of the plains shed the waters like a roof; streams rose ten feet in an hour, and the foaming currents, roaring like cataracts, came down with the force of mighty tidal waves. Many dwellers in the dug-outs sprang from their beds into water, to find egress by the doors impossible, and were fortunate if they succeeded in escaping through the chimneys or roofs. Whole families were drowned. Fort Hays, at the fork of Big Creek, and supposed to be above high-water, was inundated, six or eight soldiers being swept away, while the remainder were obliged to seek safety on the roofs of the stone barracks. Large numbers of mules, picketed on the adjacent bottoms, were drowned. Their picket-pins fast in the earth, the animals were swept from their feet by the rising waters, and towed under by the firmly-held lariats. Emigrants encamped on the bottom heard the roar of the flood; with no time to harness, they seized the tongues of their wagons themselves, but the rising tide gained on them too rapidly, and they were glad to save life at the expense of oxen and goods. The horrors of that night are indescribable, and, to crown all, they took place amid a darkness that was total. Above, was the roar of waters descending; below, the answering roar of the floods, as they rolled madly onward, carrying in their strong arms the wreck of farms, and corpses by the score.
On that night Jules, the husband, perished. Honest Rombeaux and Marie, however, were rescued from the roof of their dwelling at daylight; and afterward, when the flood had subsided, the body of Jules was taken from the wash in the fire-place. And now came suspicion, and pointed over the shoulders of the throng gathered around; for there was an ugly wound half hidden in the dead husband's hair, and his fingers were bruised. Some men did not hesitate to say boldly that when Rombeaux escaped through the chimney, Jules stayed behind to assist his wife out, and that when he tried to follow, he was struck on the head by his quondam rival, and, still clinging to the chimney's edge, his fingers were pounded until their hold was loosed, and the victim sucked under the roof, against which the waters were already beating. The man and woman, however, claimed that it was the whirl of the waters against pegs and logs which had disfigured the corpse. Three weeks afterward they were married.
"And now, gentlemen," said our foreman, rising from his barrel, when the evidence was all in, "the question for the jury to decide is, Was it the water that did it?"
A doubt existing in the case, we gave the prisoner its benefit; but there was murder in the air, and Rombeaux knew it. Before morning he had departed—Marie said for La Belle France, but, as the citizens generally believed, really for Texas.
The next twenty-four hours constituted a regular field-day for the Professor, being distinguished by an event which, from a scientific stand-point, was among the most important of our entire expedition. This was the discovery of a large fossil saurian, which we came upon while exploring quite in sight of Sheridan, and not more than half a mile from its eastern outskirts.
Descending the side of a deep, desolate rift in the earth, we found ourselves among unmistakable traces of violent volcanic action. The ground was strewn with black sand, and with yellow pebble-like masses, apparently impure sulphur. There were numerous round cones also, looking like diminutive craters, with edges and surface composed of bubble-like lava, the material having evidently hardened while still distended by the struggling gases. The appearance, to use a homely comparison, was somewhat that of several low pots, over the edges of which boiling molasses had poured, and then burned by the heat of the fire. Some scattered objects, which at first we took for stumps of huge trees, upon examination we found to be pillars of mud and rock, upheavals, apparently, from volcanic action, and not the work of the floods, which, in those primeval times, we knew, must have poured down the valley. They would have answered, without much difficulty, for druidical altars, had we only been in the land once inhabited by those long-bearded, blood-thirsty priests of old.
Two or three poisoned cayotes and a dead raven were lying near some bleached buffalo skulls, on which, as we presently discovered, daubs of lard mixed with strychnine had been placed, and licked off by the victims; and straightway, as genius of the scene, an unshaven, woolen-shirted little man appeared in view, busily engaged in skinning a wolf. We saluted him, and the response in French-English told us his nationality at once. We found his name to be Louis, and his proper occupation that of watchmaker. But as the pinchbeck time-pieces of the frontier did not furnish enough repairing to take up his entire time, he had many spare hours, and these he devoted to securing pelts. As buffalo were not now in the vicinity, he larded their bones, with the success of which we were eye-witnesses.
Louis was a wiry little Gaul, very positive in his ideas about every thing. An animated conversation sprang up at once between him and the Professor, and it soon became amusingly evident that his geological ideas did not entirely accord with those of the Philosopher. A sudden turn in the colloquy developed a fact of keen interest to even the most unscientific member of our party.