Chapter I · SOUTH-WESTERN LOUISIANA AND EASTERN TEXAS. (continued 2)

Washington.—The inn, here, when we arrived, was well filled with guests, and my friend and I were told that we must sleep together. In the room containing our bed there were three other beds; and although the outside of the house was pierced with windows, nowhere more than four feet apart, not one of them opened out of our room. A door opened into the hall, another into the dining-room, and at the side of our bed was a window into the dining-room, through which, betimes in the morning, we could, with our heads on our pillows, see the girls setting the breakfast-tables. Both the doors were provided with glass windows, without curtains. Hither, about eleven o’clock, we “retired.” Soon afterwards, hearing something moving under the bed, I asked, “Who’s there?” and was answered by a girl, who was burrowing for eggs; part of the stores of the establishment being kept in boxes, in this convenient locality. Later, I was awakened by a stranger attempting to enter my bed. I expostulated, and he replied that it was his bed, and nobody else had a right to his place in it. Who was I, he asked, angrily, and where was his partner? “Here I am,” answered a voice from another bed; and without another word, he left us. I slept but little, and woke feverish, and with a headache, caused by the want of ventilation.

While at the dinner-table, a man asked, as one might at the North, if the steamer had arrived, if there had been “any fights to-day?” After dinner, while we were sitting on the gallery, loud cursing, and threatening voices were heard in the direction of the bar-room, which, as at Nachitoches, was detached, and at a little distance from the hotel. The company, except myself and the other New-Yorker, immediately ran towards it. After ten minutes, one returned, and said—

“I don’t believe there’ll be any fight; they are both cowards.”

“Are they preparing for a fight?”

“O, yes; they are loading pistols in the coffee-room, and there’s a man outside, in the street, who has a revolver and a knife, and who is challenging another to come out. He swears he’ll wait there till he does come out; but in my opinion he’ll think better of it, when he finds that the other feller’s got pistols, too.”

“What’s the occasion of the quarrel?”

“Why, the man in the street says the other one insulted him this morning, and that he had his hand on his knife, at the very moment he did so, so he couldn’t reply. And now he says he’s ready to talk with him, and he wants to have him come out, and as many of his friends as are a mind to, may come with him; he’s got enough for all of ’em, he says. He’s got two revolvers, I believe.”

We did not hear how it ended; but, about an hour afterwards, I saw three men, with pistols in their hands, coming from the bar-room.

The next day, I saw, in the streets of the same town, two boys running from another, who was pursuing them with a large, open dirk-knife in his hand, and every appearance of ungovernable rage in his face.

The boat, for which I was waiting, not arriving, I asked the landlady—who appeared to be a German Jewess—if I could not have a better sleeping-room. She showed me one, which she said I might use for a single night; but, if I remained another, I must not refuse to give it up. It had been occupied by another gentleman, and she thought he might return the next day, and would want it again; and, if I remained in it, he would be very angry that they had not reserved it for him, although they were under no obligation to him. “He is a dangerous man,” she observed, “and my husband, he’s a quick-tempered man, and, if they get to quarrelling about it, ther’ll be knives about, sure. It always frightens me to see knives drawn.”

A Texas drover, who stayed over night at the hotel, being asked, as he was about to leave in the morning, if he was not going to have his horse shod, replied:

“No sir! it’ll be a damn’d long spell ’fore I pay for having a horse shod. I reckon, if God Almighty had thought it right hosses should have iron on thar feet, he’d a put it thar himself. I don’t pretend to be a pious man myself; but I a’nt a-goin’ to run agin the will of God Almighty, though thar’s some, that calls themselves ministers of Christ, that does it.”