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Chapter 12 Mission duncan’s insides erupted again, keeping him close to camp the next three days. He had his horse saddled one morning to go to Franklin but was too sick for the ride and stayed in bed cleaning his pistols instead. By Wednesday, he thought he felt well enough for the journey to Franklin but it turned out to be quite unpleasant. It rained so hard he says he “could hardly get about,” but he eventually made it to Mrs. Hayes’s place. While looking for a farrier to shoe his horse, Duncan ran into Mannard Anderson, who invited him to spend the night at his house. Duncan checked his horse into a stable and enjoyed sleeping in a bed for a change. When he walked into the barn the next morning, Duncan found his saddle blanket missing; he made the attendant give him another one. He forked over the $2 stable fee and rode over to Mrs. Hayes’s in the rain for dinner. On the way back to camp, he bought a fifty-cent protective guard for his watch, $2.50 worth of tobacco, a $15 bottle of whiskey, and gave Sabine fifty cents. The next two weeks held peaks and valleys for Duncan. Some days were exceedingly boring, others exciting and profitable. He pulled Officer of the Day duty three times, breaking administrative work with four day trips into town. One day he rode to New Iberia where he gave $3 to have his horse shod by Frére, the blacksmith who afterward hosted him for dinner. He paid the ferryman twenty-five cents the next day to cross the bayou with Captain Marsh for a meeting and dinner with Colonel Major. Two others trips in the fortnight were both to Franklin where he replenished his liquor supply with a $15 bottle and stocked up at the local pharmacy with a container of pills for seventy-five cents and a bottle of laudanum for one dollar. Laudanum is tincture of opium, a narcotic mixture of opium derivatives and alcohol. An opiate like laudanum was a popular source of temporary relief for a variety of ailments in the nineteenth century. Duncan was interested in A4950.indb 78 A4950.indb 78 10/17/08 8:54:28 AM 10/17/08 8:54:28 AM Mission 79 laudanum’s potential to cure diarrhea. It had plagued him for three months and he was at wit’s end over how to end it. Despite laudanum’s addictive danger, he decided to try it. It turned out Duncan may not have needed the narcotic to feel better. Eight straight days of profitable gambling left him in jovial spirits after he won a cumulative $460.50 at the poker table. If Duncan drew hot cards that often in Las Vegas today, the casino floor manager would invite him upstairs to a higher stakes game or ask him to leave. His biggest nightly purse was $88, followed by another of $80, two in which he won $70 each, and three from which he pocketed $60, $42.50, and $35. The game in which he won $15 was an anticlimax. The war intruded around 10:30 the night after the streak ended when a bugle blared, marshalling a search party to track down a pack of deserters. Duncan saddled up with all the men he could muster. They rode all night through eight miles of dark swamp before finally calling off the search. The next week, senior officers asked Duncan to value the horses in his and Captain Marsh’s cavalry companies. The Louisiana Confederate command evidently was updating records for its temporary duty Texas units. The job took three days and Duncan had help. A second inspector looked at three of Duncan’s horses, giving one a $400 appraisal and the other two, setting values of $300 each. Duncan remembered the $1.25 Confederate valuation on his horse more than a year earlier back in Texas when his company was in its initial training. This time around, better horses and perhaps better judges of horseflesh came up with higher appraisals. But because of roaring inflation, they were not much better than the first. The job finished, Duncan went back to the card table that night and won $120. Confederate morale had dropped into an abyss by the end of August 1863. News of July disasters at Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Port Hudson, and loss of control of...

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