He felt sure, and finally, against my better judgment, I told him we would take a trip to the region he had spoken of, partly upon lumber business and partly to look over the ground in connection with the insurance work. He was as pleased as a child, and all his morose feelings vanished at once. We first went down the Mississippi River to visit a lumber tract that had been offered to me the year before upon very easy terms, hoping to buy it, using some Chicago securities as payment, and by selling at once to raise the money we so much needed at Fort Worth. We found upon reaching our destination that this tract had been sold. We then went East to the Tombigbee River in search of another similar tract, and here Pitezel wished to have it appear that while he was traveling upon horseback through the extensive swamps he had met his death accidentally, or had been killed for what money he was supposed to have carried. He was known in that locality under his own name, having transacted a number of legitimate lumber deals there the year before. After wandering with Pitezel for several days through those swamps, being eaten by fleas and terrified by snakes, he walking ahead, as he said, to drive them away, but, as I later found, to escape their anger by passing out of their reach, leaving them for me to contend with, I flatly refused to go farther with the scheme, but told him instead that I would interest some of the planters in a canning factory. With the machinery which I was able to furnish from Chicago I felt sure that, before sixty days, we could realize $15,000 in cash and lumber therefrom. He would not hear to it, however, and opposed me more strongly than I had ever known him to do previously. He told me that at that time he was liable to arrest in Kansas, in Terre Haute, Ind., and Fort Worth, Texas, and that since his domestic trouble some years before in Chicago he had cared less than ever, and he had been determined ever since he left Texas, where he had drank more heavily than before (which also worried him), that he would leave the country, and now, if he could not do so, he would, upon my refusal to go on, go through with his scheme alone. His words were, “I can furnish a body, and, the way I feel now, I do not care how quickly I do it.” Seeing how downhearted he was I complained no more, but talked with him of other things, and finally told him that I would next day go to Mobile, and if I could procure a suitable body there, would return with it. If not, I should go direct from Mobile to St. Louis, where he must join me, and, after doing some work there, we would go to Chicago and organize a company among certain lumber firms we knew, and return South later and make what money we could by exchanging this stock and machinery for the canning factory into lumber and other products. I therefore left him, as he supposed, to go to Mobile. This I did not do, and have never been in that city in my life. I returned at once to St.