Then after a little talk he asked Nolan if he could show him
something of the great river and the plans for the new post. He asked
Nolan to take him out in his skiff to show him a canebrake or a
cottonwood tree, as he said, really to seduce him; and by the time the
sail was over, Nolan was enlisted body and soul. From that time,
though he did not yet know it, he lived as A MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY.
What Burr meant to do I know no more than you, dear reader. It is none
of our business just now. Only, when the grand catastrophe came, and
Jefferson and the House of Virginia of that day undertook to break on
the wheel all the possible Clarences of the then House of York, by the
great treason trial at Richmond, some of the lesser fry in that
distant Mississippi Valley, which was farther from us than Puget's
Sound is to-day, introduced the like novelty on their provincial
stage; and, to while away the monotony of the summer at Fort Adams,
got up, for _spectacles_, a string of courts-martial on the officers
there. One and another of the colonels and majors were tried, and, to
fill out the list, little Nolan, against whom, Heaven knows, there was
evidence enough--that he was sick of the service, had been willing to
be false to it, and would have obeyed any order to march any whither
with anyone who would follow him had the order been signed, "By
command of His Exc. A. Burr." The courts dragged on. The big flies
escaped, rightly for all I know. Nolan was proved guilty enough, as I
say; yet you and I would never have heard of him, reader, but that,
when the president of the court asked him at the close whether he
wished to say anything to show that he had always been faithful to the
United States, he cried out, in a fit of frenzy--
"Damn the United States! I wish I may never hear of the United States
again!"
I suppose he did not know how the words shocked old Colonel Morgan,
who was holding the court.
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