“I was hunted down like a wild varment,” he has told us, “and in this hunt every little paper in the district, and every little pin-hook lawyer, was engaged.” He was accused of receiving pay for sessions from which he was absent, and his wrath was kindled by these charges of dishonesty in doing what every other Congressman had done. His district was “gerrymandered,” and all the political weapons of his opponents were set to work. In the language of the cowboy of a later generation, “they wore their guns, and they wore ’em mighty low.” Davy was beaten by a smart and entirely unscrupulous scheme. He says that the “little four-pence-ha’penny limbs of the law” gave notice all over the district of dates upon which Crockett would appear to explain his actions in Congress and his reasons for his opposition to Jackson. When crowd after crowd gathered at the time and place announced, the absence of Crockett――entirely unaware of the trick that was being played――was laid to his fear of facing the issues raised. He was afraid, the “four-pence-ha’penny lawyers” cried, and the disappointed voters went to their homes stirred with doubt and resentment. When the votes were counted in August, Davy was in the majority in seventeen counties, but in Madison County, the home of the Murrell outlaws and their allies, his opponent had enough to overcome all that Davy had in the rest of the district. In Mark Twain’s “Life on the Mississippi,” he has told a story of the methods of the Murrell gang, a story too sickening for repetition. The existence of such a fraternity of criminals had a great influence upon the history of Texas and its neighbors, the United States and Mexico. Under the great cottonwoods in the swamps of Madison County, men met who had plundered and burned ships and cut throats all the way from Curaçoa to the Bahama Banks and Barnegat; who had both filled and emptied the unspeakable barracoons of the slave-trade on the Guinea coast; who had been midnight assassins in Paris and Madrid, brigands from the ruins of the Appian Way, pirates from every maritime nation of the globe; and always besides, there was the more or less gentlemanly gambler of the Mississippi river-boats, ready to lead or follow where there was promise of plunder. There were secret signs, passwords, and grips, relay stations on their highways of crime, and everywhere confederates who ranked with the first citizens in unsullied reputations and sober living. The gang sold slaves trained to run away, to be sold again and then again, until led into the tangled pathways of some reeking swamp, to die the death of a dog at the hands of men who left no danger of detection overlooked. In 1835 their operations as gamblers upon the great river, and as robbers and swindlers along its shores, led to their being driven out of the jurisdiction of the courts and vigilance committees of the frontier. They went to Texas, because there was no other place to which they dared to go. Here their reckless