"It is doubtful if the Michigan man ever heard the stentorian call of the captain, for sound travels only thirteen hundred feet to the second, and the cow was certainly going considerably faster than that; and, besides, he was himself engaged, with a terrific earnestness, in a vain effort to extricate a word out of his throat, which stuck like a wad in a smutty gun--a word of undoubted Saxon origin and of expressive force, and which has saved more blood-vessels from bursting than the lancet of the phlebotomist, for as he streamed past there was left floating upon the air a long string of d's, thus: d----d----d--d--d--d-d-d...! "No one who did not hear them could ever conceive of the awful sputtering, hissing sound that they caused in the atmosphere as they came out of the mouth of the mad and stuttering Michigander; and as he and the cow bored a hole through the reeds on the bank of the river, and, hitting a cypress stump, ricochetted into the water, that fiery string of d's, still hot and sputtering, reached half across the field. [Illustration: "LUFF HER UP! LUFF HER UP!"] "The splash of the two as they struck the water brought the old captain to his feet, and, in spite of his rheumatic leg, he rushed toward the river, crying:-- "'_Man overboard! Man overboard! Gone clean over the forechains! Life-floats to port and starboard!_' "With such a frightful catastrophe, gentlemen, the remembrance of which actually makes me nervous, my last speculation in Texas ended. Going over the whole matter with the captain that evening,--a process which took us well into the night,--it was our united opinion that the speculation was a failure. This conviction was mutual and profound. The cow was not only gone, but she had shown such disinclination to be domesticated, and such a misapprehension of the true purpose of life, that the prospect was truly disheartening. "'Why, damn it, colonel,' said the captain, 'we've no evidence that the old cow wanted to be milked!' "To this discouraging conclusion of the captain's I was compelled to give a sorrowful assent. I recognized that my speculation was in arrears, as it were, and that it would never figure up a profit. "Therefore, next day I divided my few personal effects between the captain and the noble men who had risked their lives for an idea; who had seen the tragedy played out and the curtain rung down to my last appearance, as it were. And, with the few dollars which alone remained of the fortune which I took with me to Texas, I mounted my horse and started northward, to join that noble army of martyrs, that brotherhood of sufferers, that fraternity of the busted, whose members are legion, and who are known as '_Ex-Texans_.'"