"Let Dame Fortune only deal me trumps," said I, "and I'll promise never 'to look into my neighbor's hand.'" Gentle reader, you smile at my humility; well, then, it's clear you are neither a secretary of state nor a railway director,--that's all.
We dropped anchor off Galveston just as the sun was setting; and the evening being calm, and the reflection of the houses and steeples in the water sharp and defined, the scene was sufficiently striking. The city itself was more important as to size and wealth than I had anticipated, and the office of the "Texan Expedition," held at the "Moon," a great coffee-house on the Quay, impressed me most favorably with the respectability and pretensions of my "Co-expeditionaries." Old Kit presented me to the secretary--a very knavish-looking fellow in spectacles of black gauze--as the winner of the great prize, which, to my excessive mortification, I learned was at Houston, about eighty miles farther up the Bay.
I apologized for my careless dress by stating that my baggage had been unfortunately left behind at New Orleans, and that in my haste I had been obliged to come on board with actually nothing but the few dollars I had in my pocket.
"That's a misfortune easily repaired, sir," said the gauze-eyed secretary; "you can have your 'credit' cashed here just as liberally as at any town in the country."
"I have no doubt of that," responded I, somewhat tartly, for I did not fancy this allusion to banks and bankers; "but all my papers are in my portmanteau."
"Provoking, certainly," said he, taking a long pinch of snuff,--"ain't it, Kit?"
But Kit only scratched his nose, and looked puzzled.
"No," said I, "my credits are all on a Northern house; but I fancy my name is tolerably well known. You 've heard of the Cregans, I suppose."
"Cregan--Cregan," repeated he a couple of times; then, opening a huge ledger at the letter C, ran his eye down a long column. "Crabtree--Crossley--Croxam--Crebell--Creffet--Cregmore. It is not Cregmore, sir?"
"Ah, well, there's no Cregan. There was a Cregmore was 'lynched' here, I see by the mark in the book, and we have a small trunk waiting to be claimed, belonging to him."
"That ain't the fellow as purtended to be winner of the wagon team that was lotteried here a twelvemonth since, is it?" said Kit.