page_339 < previous page page_339 next page > Page 339 sold your soul, as Faust sold his to Mephistopheles. Your Lieutenant became your master; you found it convenient to believe his version of every thing, and to justify him in every thing, and you ended in making all his devilments your own, and adopting the whole infernal spawn and brood, with additions of your own to the family. You told me in August, that you had been prepared to judge me favorably, until you read my address to the Indians on resigning my command, but after that, you could not judge me fairly. I did not in the least doubt the fact; but I did not believe the reason. What, moreover, had you to judge in regard to me? You were not sent to judge any body. Hindman was the criminal you were to operate upon. And, if you were sent, or had otherwise any right, to judge me, you administered the sort of justice that is in vogue in hell. Before you saw me, you heard him. You adopted all his views, and never asked me a question in regard to our controversy, or as to my own action, or the condition of things in the Indian Country. I had been infamously and assiduously slandered, from the moment when I began to resist his illegal, impolitic and outrageous attempts to deprive the Indian Department of every thing, to make it a mere appanage of, and appendix to, North-Western Arkansas, to take the Indians again out of their own country, and to compel me to unite in that insane and miserable "expedition into Missouri," which was projected and planned by Folly, mis-managed and misconducted by Imbecility and ended, as I knew it would, in disaster and disgrace. Lies of all varieties were ingeniously and laboriously invented at and about Head Quarters, and despatches, by special and fit agents, to be industriously circulated throughout the Indian Country and Texas, as well as Arkansas. The Indians were told that I had carried away into Texas the gold and silver belonging to them; while the Texans were made to believe that I was paying their moneys to the Indians. It was reported, in Bonham, Texas, by officers sent from Hindman's Head Quarters, that I was defaulter to the amount of $125,000 and at last there crawled out from the sewer under the throne, and sneaked about the Indian Country and Texas, the damnable lie, that an Indian had been taken, bearing letters from me to the Northern Indians, or, to the enemy in Kansas; or, as another version had it, from Gen. James H. Lane to me; and  < previous page page_339 next page >