BOEDER LIFE IN THE WEST. 223 



only person in that cabin room who had drank a drop of the 

 accursed mixture. The creature's evidently besotted condi- 

 tion had proved a capital foil to the game played by myself, 

 for with such proof of the success of the villainous trick upon 

 one of the party, it was very natural for them to suppose, 

 when they saw my friend H - with his head thrown back, 

 his mouth wide apart, breathing heavily, as if in a sound sleep, 

 upon his trunk, and found, too, that I, a rather boyish look- 

 ing somebody at the best, seemed to have fallen so readily 

 into their gull-trap would soon fall into the same condition 

 towards which Yankee was fast verging. 



I took good care to contribute to this charitable expecta- 

 tion as far as possible, and the fellows now became more un- 

 guarded. One of them deliberately sat down upon the heap 

 of the Yankee's baggage, picked up one of the ill-omened 

 cherry-wood boxes, deliberately weighed it in his hands, and 

 replaced it, looking up at the same time with a broad wink, 

 a nod, and a chuckle into the faces of those nearest to him. 

 I pretended not to notice this. I had so frequently noticed 

 one and another of them as they pretended to stumble over 

 these boxes, pause to weigh them with their feet, that this 

 insolent manoeuvre only served to remind me of the greater 

 imminence of our position, and, if possible, to open my eyes 

 the wider. Things looked very dark to me, it must be con- 

 fessed. Yankee, it was clear enough, was under the influ- 

 ence of some soporific potion, to a degree that rendered him ut- 

 terly helpless it might be that H was really sound asleep 



at all events, he certainly counterfeited it so well as to 

 leave me in absolute doubt and I, a slight youth, left alone 

 to guard these two lives and all this property, of the amount 

 of which I could scarcely conjecture, and I surrounded by 

 six powerful ruffians, with knives in their bosoms, who were 

 growing every moment more insolent with what they sup- 

 posed to be the entire promise of impunity in crime, 

 which the existing circumstances afforded all this ! and I 

 without a weapon, except the arms God gave me, which 



