On to the Alamo by Richard Penn Smith

Author:Richard Penn Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

CHAPTER VIII.

Natchitoches is a post town and seat of justice for the parish of Natchitoches, Louisiana, and is situated on the right bank of the Red river. The houses are chiefly contained in one street, running parallel to the river; and the population I should reckon at about eight hundred. The soil in this parish is generally sterile, and covered with pine timber, except near the margin of Red river, where the greatest part of the inhabitants are settled on the alluvial banks. Some other, though comparatively small, tracts of productive soil skirt the streams. An extensive body of low ground, subject to annual submersion, extends along the Red river, which, it is said, will produce forty bushels of frogs to the acre, and alligators enough to fence it.

I stayed two days at Natchitoches, during which time I procured a horse to carry me across Texas to the seat of war. Thimblerig remained with me, and I found his conversation very amusing; for he is possessed of humour and observation, and has seen something of the world. Between whiles he would amuse himself with his thimbles, to which he appeared greatly attached, and occasionally he would pick up a few shillings from the tavern loungers. He no longer asked me to play with him, for he felt somewhat ashamed to do so, and he knew it would be no go.

I took him to task in a friendly manner and tried to shame him out of his evil practices. I told him that it was a burlesque on human natur, that an able bodied man, possessed of his full share of good sense, should voluntarily debase himself, and be indebted for subsistence to such pitiful artifice.

“But what’s to be done, Colonel?” says he. “I’m in the slough of despond, up to the very chin. A miry and slippery path to travel.”

“Then hold your head up,” says I, “before the slough reaches your lips.”

“But what’s the use?” says he; “it’s utterly impossible for me to wade through; and even if I could, I should be in such a dirty plight, that it would defy all the waters in the Mississippi to wash me clean again. “No,” he added, in a desponding tone, “I should be like a live eel in a frying pan, Colonel, sort of out of my element, if I attempted to live like an honest man at this time o’ day.”

“That I deny. It is never too late to become honest,” said I. “But even admit what you say to be true—that you cannot live like an honest man, you have at least the next best thing in your power, and no one can say nay to it.”

“And what is that?”

“Die like a brave one. And I know not whether, in the eyes of the world, a brilliant death is not preferred to an obscure life of rectitude. Most men are remembered as they died, and not as they lived. We gaze with admiration upon the glories of the setting sun, yet scarcely bestow a passing glance upon its noonday splendour.

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