Upon reaching Fort Worth, I found that some to whom money was owing had filed mechanics’ and furnishers’ liens against the property, and this so alarmed the party who was to have made the large loan that he withdrew from his agreement, and this resulted in a large number of the other creditors becoming alarmed, some two or three proposing to cause my arrest for having obtained the material for the building under false pretenses of payment. I had never been arrested, and I had the same horror of it that I would of being shot. Especially terrible seemed the methods prevalent in the South, where I had seen, from time to time, convicts chained together, with hardly any clothing, and if I could believe the reports our “Mascot” had given us, with less food and more inhuman treatment than was accorded the slaves of that region forty years ago. I therefore raised what money I could, paying all of it, save $200, to the poorer laborers who had worked for me, and immediately left the city, intending to secure the loan in St. Louis or Chicago. From time to time, during my residence in Fort Worth, I had bought from different parties six good horses, paying for them, it is true, for the most part with notes guaranteed by Lyman as the owner of the real estate there. I make no claim that these notes have been paid, but I do claim that the transactions were lawful, that no mortgage or other encumbrance existed against any of the horses, but they were, however, subject to attachment by any parties whom I was owing, and to avoid this I instructed “Mascot” to take them to Denison, Texas, and ship them from there to St. Louis. Upon reaching Denison he shipped five of the horses, but failed to accompany them himself, or to send $300 worth of other material, including much of my clothing, one carriage, a watch I had loaned him, and $80 cash given him to pay the freight upon the stock; nor did I hear from him again until July, 1895, when, as an inmate of an Arkansas prison, he was willing in exchange for his liberty to tell of matters of which he could not have known even had they existed. After reaching St. Louis, I immediately tried to negotiate the loan I had failed to secure in the South. Pitezel was feeling much annoyed at my failure there, for he had expected a rather more liberal payment therefrom than he had received during the few preceding months, owing to the fact that while he had been in Texas it had been necessary, in order to appear that he was the owner there, that he should carry the bank account in his name, and before he had known it, during his drunkenness, he had been robbed little by little of nearly $1,000. Therefore, when I told him that we should be short of money for some time longer, he again advocated the insurance scheme, saying that it could be carried out in the Southern Lumber Co.