get it out and bury it in another place. Of course,
people got to avoiding him and shaking their heads
and whispering, because, the way he was looking and
acting, they judged he had killed somebody or done
something terrible, they didn’t know what, and if he
had been a stranger they would’ve lynched him.
Well, as I was saying, it got so he couldn’t stand it
any longer; so he made up his mind to pull out for
Washington, and just go to the President of the United
States and make a clean breast of the whole thing, not
keeping back an atom, and then fetch the letter out and
lay it before the whole gov’ment, and say, “Now,
there she is — do with me what you’re a mind to;
though as heaven is my judge I am an innocent man
and not deserving of the full penalties of the law and
leaving behind me a family that must starve and yet
hadn’t had a thing to do with it, which is the whole
truth and I can swear to it.”
So he did it. He had a little wee bit of steamboat-
ing, and some stage-coaching, but all the rest of the
way was horseback, and it took him three weeks to get
to Washington. He saw lots of land and lots of vil-
lages and four cities. He was gone ‘most eight weeks,
and there never was such a proud man in the village as
he when he got back. His travels made him the greatest
man in all that region, and the most talked about; and
people come from as much as thirty miles back in the
country, and from over in the Illinois bottoms, too,
just to look at him — and there they’d stand and gawk,
and he’d gabble. You never see anything like it.
Well, there wasn’t any way now to settle which was
the greatest traveler; some said it was Nat, some said
it was Tom. Everybody allowed that Nat had seen
the most longitude, but they had to give in that what-
ever Tom was short in longitude he had made up in
latitude and climate. It was about a stand-off; so both
of them had to whoop up their dangerous adventures,
and try to get ahead THAT way. That bullet-wound in
Tom’s leg was a tough thing for Nat Parsons to buck
against, but he bucked the best he could; and at a
disadvantage, too, for Tom didn’t set still as he’d orter
done, to be fair, but always got up and sauntered
around and worked his limp while Nat was painting up
the adventure that HE had in Washington; for Tom
never let go that limp when his leg got well, but prac-
ticed it nights at home, and kept it good as new right
along.
Nat’s adventure was like this; I don’t know how
true it is; maybe he got it out of a paper, or some-
where, but I will say this for him, that he DID know
how to tell it. He could make anybody’s flesh crawl,
and he’d turn pale and hold his breath when he told
it, and sometimes women and girls got so faint they
couldn’t stick it out. Well, it was this way, as near as
I can remember:
He come a-loping into Washington, and put up his
horse and shoved out to the President’s house with his
letter, and they told him the President was up to the
Capitol, and just going to start for Philadelphia — not
a minute to lose if he wanted to catch him. Nat ‘most
dropped, it made him so sick. His horse was put up,
and he didn’t know what to do. But just then along
comes a darky driving an old ramshackly hack, and he
see his chance. He rushes out and shouts: “A half a
dollar if you git me to the Capitol in half an hour, and
a quarter extra if you do it in twenty minutes!”
“Done!” says the darky.
Nat he jumped in and slammed the door, and away
they went a-ripping and a-tearing over the roughest
road a body ever see, and the racket of it was some-