By this time, as any intelligent reader will easily divine, our whole group was in a condition of mild excitement. Several of us had resided in Texas, and we felt that we stood at the threshold of a history,—a history with infinite possibilities in it. For myself, I knew not how to proceed. My position as a host forbade me to interrogate. The sorrows of life are sacred, and my sensitiveness withheld me from thrusting myself within the enclosure of my guest's recollections. That his experiences, could we but be favored with a narration of them, would be entertaining,—painfully entertaining,—I keenly realized; but how to proceed I saw not. I remained silent.
"Yes,"—it was the stranger who broke the silence,—"I am a busted ex-Texan!"
I am a Busted ex-Texan.
The relief that came to me at the instant was indescribable. The path was made plain. We all felt that we were not only on the threshold of a history, but of a narration of that history. The ladies fluttered into position for listening. I could but see it, and so I am bound to record that I saw Dick irreverently punch the major. It was a punch which carried with it the significance of an exclamation. The major received it with the face of a Spartan, but with the grunt of a Chinook chief.
"Friend," I said, "we are accustomed to beguile the evening hours with entertaining descriptions of travels, often of personal incidents of the haps and hazards of life; and, if it would not be disagreeable to you, we would be vastly entertained, beyond doubt, by any narration with which you might favor us of your Texan experiences and of the fortunes which befell you there."
For a few moments, the silence remained unbroken, save by the crackle of the fire and the soft movement in the great firs overhead,—a movement which is to sound what dawn is to the day; not so much a sound as a feathery suggestion that sound might come. It was a genial hour, and the mood of the hour began to be felt in our own. The warmth of it evidently penetrated the bosom of our guest. He had eaten. He was filled,—appreciably so at least, and that happy feeling, that comfortable sense of fulness, which characterizes the after-dinner hour, pervaded him with its genial glow. He loosened his belt,—another tremendous nudge from Dick,—and a look of contentment softened his features. Whatever storm had wrecked his life, he had now passed beyond its billows, and from the sure haven into which he had been blown he could gaze with complacent resignation, if not with happiness, at the dangers through which he had passed. I am sure that we were all delighted at the brightening appearance of our guest, and felt that, if the story he was to tell us was one which included disasters, it would at least be lightened by traces of humor and the calm acceptance of a philosophic mind.
"I was born in the State of Connecticut," so our guest began his narration. "I came from a venturesome stock, and the instinct of commercial enterprise may be regarded as hereditary in my family. My grandfather was the first one to discover the tropical attributes of the beech-wood tree. He first perceived that it contained within its fibres the pungency of the nutmeg. With a celerity which we remember with pride in our family, he availed himself of the commercial value of his discovery, and for years did a prosperous trade on the credulity of mankind. He was a man of humor,—a sense which has been to some extent transmitted to myself,—he was a man of humor, and I have no doubt he enjoyed the joke he was practising on people, fully as much as the profits which the practical embodiment of his humor brought to his pocket. My father was a deacon, a man of true piety and eminently respectable. He was engaged in the retail-grocery business,—a business which offers opportunities to a person of wit and of an inventive turn of mind. The butter that he sold was salted invariably by one rule—a rule which he discovered and applied in the cellar of the store himself; and the sugar which he sold, if it was sanded, was always sanded by a method which improved rather than detracted from its appearance."