We returned to Austin the sick guest of the Rev. Mr. Whipple, three weeks in the fellowship of the sufferings of the ancient Job.
GOV. HAMILTON--THE THIRTY NEROS--THE OLD GERMAN AND HIS WIFE--THE FIGHT WITH INDIANS--A NATIVE TEXAN'S OPINION OF GERMANS.
Before we left Austin Governor Hamilton sent out a strong detachment to the adjoining county on the north, and had arrested sixteen members of the vigilance committee, whose whole number was thirty, and whose business had been during the war to hunt up and kill Union men. The sixteen were brought to Austin and lodged in prison to await trial. Eight of them turned States' evidence, and testified that the thirty had killed, in their own county, exactly their own number. They showed the officers where fourteen of the victims were buried, in one place.
We were invited to dine one day with a friend at the house of their legal counsel. From him we gathered the facts. He said that he considered their defense desperate to the last degree; but he was bound by his professional oath and honor to see that they had a just and impartial trial.
One of the victims of the fiendish malice of these thirty Neros was an old, white-haired German, eighty years of age, who was suspected of Union proclivities. They went to the house where the old German and his aged wife were living together alone, in peace and quiet, and made the pretext to the old lady that they wanted her husband as an important witness in some case, which partly quieted her fears. They placed the old man in the saddle, and ordered him to ride in front. As he was passing out the gate of the front yard, the villains shot the old man in the back, and he fell to the earth dead! The old lady standing in her door-way saw it all, gave one long, wild scream, and fell forward to the ground! The wretches left, nor let the grass grow under their feet till safe in their hiding places.
The thunderbolt of insanity had passed through the soul of the wretched old wife, and when we left Austin she was a hopeless maniac in the Insane asylum. We wish to say that these things were generally unknown outside the localities where they transpired during the war.
To the northwest of Austin, a hundred miles away, we heard the report that a serious fight had occurred between the State Militia and two or three hundred Indians, who had come down from the mountains to steal horses and cattle. That the Indians fought in ambush, and made many of the whites bite the dust. But when the lying spirit of the war was over, the truth came out that these Indians were a colony of German refugees fleeing from Texas persecution to Mexico. But few of them ever reached there.