Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/564

548 But affairs had become too much disturbed for the undertaking to be safe, and he was stopped before he had made more than a few days' journey. Life at his ranch was imperiled by Indian depredations, and he was obliged to abandon all—even his books and his precious collections of Secondary and Tertiary fossils, his field and his cattle—and return to the towns. At Austin he was invited to join the staff of the Confederate army, to help supply a seriously felt lack of scientifically educated officers, with the inducement added that he would thereby be enabled to avoid requisitions. He answered: "I would sooner cut off my right hand than serve that cause. Let the requisitions come; they may watch me as an obdurate or make a prisoner of me, but a soldier of the planters—never!" He returned to San Antonio, where he hoped to be able to weather the storm in obscurity; but, being threatened with a conscription, he claimed the protection of the Belgian consul at New Orleans, without effect. There was a powerful party in the region opposed to the Confederacy, and he allied himself with it. Then came the arrest, in October, 1861, of Mr. Charles Anderson, Unionist, at the head-waters of the Rio San Antonio, with the accounts of which the papers of the time were filled. Houzeau, with a Northern lady, his neighbor, formed a plan to rescue Mr. Anderson, and carried it out with admirable daring and brilliant success, himself accompanying the suspect on horseback at night to a point down the river, whence a straight road led to freedom, and taking care of his business papers. Desperate but vain efforts were made to discover the "traitor" who had helped Mr. Anderson off.

In February, 1862, Houzeau learned that the Vigilance Committee were about to make a descent upon him. He had compromised himself by defending the freedom of the negroes whom Anderson had set free to prevent their being sold by Confederate officials. He prepared to flee, first taking care to write an account of the rescue of Anderson. Knowing that the Unionist party desired to send a memorial to the President of the United States, and wishing to be useful to them before going off, he told them that if they would prepare the memorial he would take charge of it. Not being able to carry his own papers with him, he burned them, for there was not a leaf among them, he said, that did not contain something in condemnation of slavery. With the Unionist memorial stuffed in the barrel of his shot-gun, he started off under the guise of Carlos Uso, Mexican driver of six oxen, in the train of Alejandro Vidal, for Brownsville and Matamoras. The story of the journey of thirty-five days, as told by him in his correspondence, reads like a chapter of Uncle Tom's Cabin. He had to remain in Matamoras nearly a year, till January, 1863, waiting for the French blockade to be raised, before he was able to take