He was just twenty-five and a man of twenty-five does not voluntarily undertake the hardship and privation of clearing virgin land and establishing a plantation in a new country just for the money; not a young man without any past that he apparently cared to discuss, in Mississippi in 1833, with a river full of steamboats loaded with drunken fools covered with diamonds and bent on throwing away their cotton and slaves before the boat reached New Orleans;—not with this just one night’s hard ride away and the only handicap or obstacle being the other blackguards or the risk of being put ashore on a sandbar and at the remotest, a hemp rope.