"Cap., I'm a-going to chance him once more,--just this once; and if we
don't fetch him this time, the thing for us to do, is to just throw up
the sponge and withdraw from the canvass. That's the way I put it up."
He had brought a lot of chicken feathers, and dried apples, and leaf
tobacco, and rags, and old shoes, and sulphur, and asafoetida, and one
thing or another; and he, piled them on a breadth of sheet iron in the
middle of the floor, and set fire to them.

When they got well started, I couldn't see, myself, how even the corpse
could stand it. All that went before was just simply poetry to that
smell,--but mind you, the original smell stood up out of it just as
sublime as ever,--fact is, these other smells just seemed to give it a
better hold; and my, how rich it was! I didn't make these reflections
there--there wasn't time--made them on the platform. And breaking for
the platform, Thompson got suffocated and fell; and before I got him
dragged out, which I did by the collar, I was mighty near gone myself.
When we revived, Thompson said dejectedly,--

"We got to stay out here, Cap. We got to do it. They ain't no other
way. The Governor wants to travel alone, and he's fixed so he can
outvote us."

And presently he added,

"And don't you know, we're pisoned. It's our last trip, you can make up
your mind to it. Typhoid fever is what's going to come of this. I feel
it acoming right now. Yes, sir, we're elected, just as sure as you're
born."