The unfortunate Moses now became intimately acquainted with misery. Sleep forsook his pillow, and after several nights of wakefulness, he began to meditate upon the various methods of putting one's self to death; but for a number of days his conclusions were unsatisfactory. He put the muzzle of a pistol in his mouth, but there was a mutiny among his fingers, and they rebelliously refused to obey his will, and pull the trigger. He seated himself on a beam in his father's barn, with one end of a rope around his neck and the other securely fastened to the beam, when he suddenly recollected that a man who is hanged usually turns black in the face and presents a hideous appearance. He stood on a brow of a precipice, overhanging a deep and turbid stream, and was about to leap into the water below, when he recoiled with horror at the prospect of being eaten by the fishes, and thus deprived of decent sepulture.
Moses now wisely determined to pass away without any unnecessary suffering. He supposed that on the shelves of the apothecary, in Mapleton, were potent drugs which would put him in a condition of somnolency, during which he could easily glide out of this sublunary state of existence. So he proceeded to the town, and having procured the proper material for his purpose, was hurrying homeward with deadly intent, when he inadvertently ran against a man who was standing in the street reading a newspaper to a crowd of people. The rapidity with which Moses was walking caused him to collide with great force, and nearly overthrew the reader of the paper. The man turned round, and, grasping Moses by the collar, shook him fiercely.
"I beg pardon!" exclaimed Moses, aroused, by the rude shaking he had received, to a consciousness of his surroundings,--"I beg pardon! I did not see."
"Did not see!" said the man. "Where are your eyes that you can't see a whole crowd of people?"
"I beg pardon!" reiterated Moses, meekly.
"It is granted; but mind how you walk next time!" And with this admonition, the man resumed the reading of the paper, as follows:
"Immense discoveries in the placers! Captain M. reported to have already fifteen barrels buried!"
"Fifteen barrels of what?" asked Moses of a man standing near him, and who happened to be M. T. Pate.