“Yes, certain death.  It has been, to the most of our tribe.  I begin to feel that I, too, am called.”

“Young man, you love the bright creature yonder with the gentle blue eyes and the steel pens behind her ears—­I see it in your soft glances; you wish to marry her—­but you are poor.  Here, hold out your hand—­here is the beef contract; go, take her and be happy Heaven bless you, my children!”

This is all I know about the great beef contract that has created so much talk in the community.  The clerk to whom I bequeathed it died.  I know nothing further about the contract, or any one connected with it.  I only know that if a man lives long enough he can trace a thing through the Circumlocution Office of Washington and find out, after much labor and trouble and delay, that which he could have found out on the first day if the business of the Circumlocution Office were as ingeniously systematized as it would be if it were a great private mercantile institution.

THE CASE OF GEORGE FISHER

—­[Some years ago, about 1867, when this was first published, few people believed it, but considered it a mere extravaganza.  In these latter days it seems hard to realize that there was ever a time when the robbing of our government was a novelty.  The very man who showed me where to find the documents for this case was at that very time spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in Washington for a mail steamship concern, in the effort to procure a subsidy for the company—­a fact which was a long time in coming to the surface, but leaked out at last and underwent Congressional investigation.]

This is history.  It is not a wild extravaganza, like “John Wilson Mackenzie’s Great Beef Contract,” but is a plain statement of facts and circumstances with which the Congress of the United States has interested itself from time to time during the long period of half a century.

I will not call this matter of George Fisher’s a great deathless and unrelenting swindle upon the government and people of the United States —­for it has never been so decided, and I hold that it is a grave and solemn wrong for a writer to cast slurs or call names when such is the case—­but will simply present the evidence and let the reader deduce his own verdict.  Then we shall do nobody injustice, and our consciences shall be clear.

On or about the 1st day of September, 1813, the Creek war being then in progress in Florida, the crops, herds, and houses of Mr. George Fisher, a citizen, were destroyed, either by the Indians or by the United States troops in pursuit of them.  By the terms of the law, if the Indians destroyed the property, there was no relief for Fisher; but if the troops destroyed it, the Government of the United States was debtor to Fisher for the amount involved.

George Fisher must have considered that the Indians destroyed the property, because, although he lived several years afterward, he does not appear to have ever made any claim upon the government.