BORDER 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 readilj^ 
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 
