CHAPTER III.

The colonel’s physician advised him to take medicine, to reduce his system, and give him the appearance of one rapidly sinking under a pulmonary affection.  He consented, as such a plan was considered the most likely to succeed.  It will be readily seen, that the design was to work upon the sympathies of the officers, and thus procure his enlargement.  Nor were they disappointed.  The colonel’s health began to fail.  The drugs acted their appropriate part.  Some of his friends made vigorous exertions to have him removed to the hospital, declaring it necessary for the continuation of life.  Others were actively engaged in giving forth intimations, and expressing their fears that he would die before his trial came on, always taking care to assert their confidence of his innocence.  This was a mere ruse, to trick the officers into a consent for his removal.  But they had mistaken the character of the men with whom they were dealing.  They were not to be moved by exhibitions of suffering humanity.  Their hearts had become insensible to human misery and they resisted all appeals to sympathy.

There was now but one alternative for the friends of the prisoner.  They must apply the drugs more assiduously, till they made a mere skeleton of their subject; and then try the virtue of the “almighty dollar.”  This now seemed to be the only thing that would move the hearts of seven-eighths of the police judges, marshals, wardens, and prosecutors.  Such were the administrators of public justice, at that time, in New Orleans.  The greater part were men, who, at some period of their lives, had been steeped chin-deep in infamy.  Some were men of wealth and liberally educated.  They were men who would shrink from giving an account of their early years.  Several were verging upon three score years and ten.  All the wealth they possessed had been plundered from another set of villains, whose misfortune was, a want of sagacity in escaping the rapacity of their more accomplished compeers.  That there were a few honourable exceptions must be admitted, but I could not with a good conscience assert, that one-eighth of the police was as honest as is generally the case with those city officers, for I have facts to the contrary.

The whole of that Southern Sodom at an early date had been inundated with this “secret band of brothers,” or this fraternal band of land pirates.  As they became wealthy they ceased their usual occupation, and began to speculate in a different way.  Having it in their power, they would rob even their nearest friends, thus overleaping that common law of “honour among thieves.”  They would do this with the utmost impunity, whenever they saw proper.  There was no redress.  The very officers were, many of them, under fictitious names and would assume deceptive titles, for the more successful perpetration of their villany.