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"Let Ajax perish in the face of day." Who has not shuddered over the description of that Arkansas duel, fought by two naked combatants, with pistol and bowie-knife, in a dark room? One thrills to think of those first few moments of breathless, sightless, hopeless, hushed expectation, then the confused encounter, the slippery floor, the invisible, ghastly terrors of that horrible chamber.
Moreover, the strain of the saddle was already beginning to tell severely on Waite, weakened somewhat by years, and the pursuers were compelled to halt oftener on his account. The end of the second day found them approaching the broken land bordering the Arkansas valley, and just before nightfall they picked up a lame horse, evidently discarded by the party ahead.
Suddenly Arkansas Bill remarked, "I can't stan' it any longer," and walked rapidly toward the sick man's hut, and knocked lightly on the door, and looked in. There lay the sick man, his eyes partly open, and on the ground, apparently asleep, and with a very purple face, lay Mrs. Blizzer. "Do somethin' for her," gasped the sick man; "give her a chance, for God's sake.
By the middle of the month, the levees at Panther Forest, Arkansas; Alsatia, Louisiana; and Roosevelt, Louisiana, had succumbed, and a thousand square miles of fertile plantations were from five to seven feet under water. Rain-storm after rain-storm caused the stream to swell, undermined dikes, and broke new crevasses all the way from Vicksburg to New Orleans.
All the information received during the months of January and February, 1864, indicated a movement against me in the early spring; and in the latter month it was ascertained that Porter's fleet and a part of Sherman's army from Vicksburg would join Banks's forces in the movement, while Steele would coöperate from Little Rock, Arkansas.
Benjamin and Slidell of Louisiana, Hemphill and Wigfall of Texas, Iverson of Georgia, and Johnson of Arkansas, voting "nay." The question at once recurred on the amendment of Mr. Clark being a substitute for the Crittenden Resolutions, declaring in effect all Compromise unnecessary. To let that substitute be adopted, was to insure the failure of the Crittenden proposition.
About one hundred and twenty miles below the Ohio they reached the vicinity of the Arkansas River, the point near which the voyage of Marquette had ended and that of the followers of De Soto began. Here, for the first time in their journey, they met with hostile Indians.
Two years later, Douglas, then in the Senate, once more sought to test the Squatter Sovereignty idea regarding the new western lands, but once more a cold silence met his attempts. Six months after that time the same bill, with the intent of attaching Nebraska to the state of Arkansas, was killed by Congress, because held to be dangerous.
Until toward the end of June, the Polk and Livingston, the last vestiges of the Confederate navy on the Mississippi spared from the general wreck at Memphis, lay far up the Yazoo River, with a barrier above them, designed to cover the building of the ram Arkansas. This formidable craft was approaching completion at Yazoo City.
Fording the shallow Arkansas, trailing their way through prairie and timber, reaching and skirting the scorching stretch, riding all day, consumed with thirst, from green-mantling pool to pool, till the last lay sixty miles behind them, and men and horses made desperately for the stream, dashing in together to drink their fill, when they found it again foaming down the centre of its vast level plain, that receded twenty miles on either side without shrub or hillock, finally their path wound in among the hills, and a day dawned that Ray will never forget.
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