Aside from a big fat nothing… not bloody much. The Stephens Party book (links to various chapters here and here) is been submitted to two small publishers (respectively one month ago and two months ago) where it seems to have been received with raptures of disinterest. Or at least I assume so, as the silence has been deafeningly… er, silent. Not even the usual form letter of rejection. And I included stamped-self-addressed envelopes, too…

I’ll give it another month or so and then submit it to Tor books, which is the only one of the semi-biggies who even accept direct submissions. However, they will not look at anything which has been sent to anyone else! Nein! That is Absolutely Verboten! Violate the Rules You Vill Be Flogged! Or something dire, like that, I assume. So, I can’t send it to them until the other two places exhibit even more obvious disinterest.

The other angle of approach is to Get An Agent. There are a lot of them, which is good. Show bits and pieces and chapters to enough of them, and the odds are that someone will like it enough… and think it is an easy sell to one of the Big Publishers, and at least there is someone on your side who knows someone, who knows someone who might be persuaded to look on your scribbling with favor. But still, it is pretty exhausting, firing off queries and letters, and sample chapters, as per their various requirements. I’ve been at this since November, actually.

Thus far, I have sent out six or eight queries per week, to various agents who are supposed to have a special interest in historical fiction. Thus far, I have racked up one agent who has looked at the whole manuscript and who loved it, but didn’t think there was enough suspense, or sex in it… and that also no one had ever heard of those people, and another who read two chapters, and said it would be a hard sell… but that I could definitely write, and please let her look at my next book. She also sent me a list of what sort of historical fiction has sold recently. This is not exactly a brush-off, seeing as that was an improvement over the usual raptures of disinterest, and/or form rejection letters, but not all that much immediate help. I think I am handicapped by not having been married to, or had an affair with anyone notorious, plus zilch interest in writing about the supernatural. Or porn. The next book is also a pretty massive project.

I already have a draft of the first fifteen chapters, out of a projected 45. (75,000 words, for anyone who keeps track of this kind of thing.) This will certainly expand to more, as characters and situations take my interest, and as other elements of the story occur. My daughter, among others, has also suggested breaking it into several parts. It would fracture the story arc a little… but it would let me pitch the first segment, already revised and polished, and let me finish the rest of it in something like peace and quiet.

Sorry for the vent, but this has been a crappy week. I didn’t even much enjoy a trip to Borders, to spend the gift card that my sister sent for my birthday: I kept picking up books that were written by crappier writers than me, and thinking that they could get an agent, and a publishing deal, and I can’t even get arrested by the literary establishment. This is probably the reason that writers turn to drink.

Oh, just for grins and giggles, the first chapter of Adelsverein is below the jump. Share it with anyone who might be able to help me get somewhere with it.

Chapter 1 – Palm Sunday

The Mexican soldiers came to march them away from the old citadel on the seventh day after Colonel Fannin had surrendered under a white flag. His little command of volunteers and militia had fought doggedly and hopelessly for a day and a night, pinned down in the open just short of Coleto Creek, tormented beyond endurance by gunfire, thirst and grapeshot. It was the grapeshot that did it finally, and Carl Becker, all of sixteen and a bit had stood in the ragged ranks of the militia and the Greys next to his older brother Rudolph, and watched Colonel Fannin march out of the ragged square under a tattered white banner made from someone’s shirt. It was just sunrise, that hour when everything looks bleak and grey.
“What will happen to us now, Rudi?” he asked quietly. He spoke in German, the language they spoke at home, among the family, but one of the other German boys, Conrad Eigener, who stood next to the Becker brothers laughed curtly and answered,
“With luck, take away our weapons and send us packing… to New Orleans, I think. They mean to break up all the Anglo settlements and throw the Yankees out of Texas. General Santa Anna means business.”
“They said General Cos brought eight hundred sets of shackles with him last year, to drag us back to Mexico City in chains,” Rudi answered, pessimistically, and Conrad spat and said,
“Well, that worked out real well for him. We kicked him in the nuts at Gonzales and he went running home to Mexico City, squealing like a girl.”
“That’s why Santa Anna came back, breathing fire and swearing vengeance,” Rudi answered, “He took it personal, Cos being his brother in law.”
“What will they do to us, then?” Carl asked again. From the Mexican lines came the sound of a bugle call, and Carl could just make out another white flag, and the brilliantly colored uniforms of the men under it, advancing to meet Colonel Fannin and Major Chadwick.
“Nothing like what the Comanche would do, little brother,” Rudi answered, and Carl would remember always how he smiled, a flash of teeth in a face blackened with powder smoke. “They’re real soldiers; they have rules they have to follow. We lost, fair and square, but they have to remember it could be them next time, and treat with us as they might wish to be treated then.”
“All right, then,” Carl answered, reassured. Rudolph was five years older, and he was almost always right.

And at first it did seem like his brother and the other men were right. The men and boys who were still fit were ordered by their surviving officers to stack their weapons and form up; Carl let his old flintlock rifle go with a pang, but it was what Rudi said to do, and Captain Winn and Colonel Fannin. Rudi had been telling Carl what to do for all of his life, and Captain Winn for most of the last year of it. As far as Carl knew, they were always right. Well, Rudi was always right, the captain was mostly right, but Carl had reservations about their commander.

At sixteen and not quite grown to his height, Carl appeared at first glance to be amiable and not terribly quick. He and his brother had same broad, fair Saxon features, but Carl’s heavy eyelids always made him look a bit sleepy, and so people were deceived into thinking he was a dunce. He didn’t mind letting them think so, for then they were far more open about themselves, more revealing. He and Rudi had grown up, hunting together near the Becker homestead in a little settlement called Waterloo far up on the Colorado; sitting quietly concealed in a thicket, watching for deer or doves. He liked to sit still and watch; the sun dappling through the ever-moving leaves, the flash of a white-wing dove starting up from the ground, and he liked to watch people, too; and sort out what they were thinking. Carl spoke two languages well, understood a third, and even knew some of the Indian signing talk, but he was a quiet youth and not much given to putting himself forward. He knew how it rankled with some of the older men that Colonel Fannin hung back against all urging and advice. Colonel Bowie and all them had died in the Alamo fortress up-river in San Antone, waiting for help after they sent messengers pleading for reinforcements three times.

The Mexicans marched their prisoners back to Goliad; they did not mistreat them particularly, but they shut them up in the old garrison buildings, and left them to sleep on piles of straw. It was very dim inside, for the shutters were fastened down over the few windows. The two doctors were taken away; they were tending the wounded in another part of the presidio, which had once been a mission. After a week of this, Carl was thoroughly bored. He had never before in his life had to spend a week inside, without ever once seeing the sun.
“Did you hear? They’ve brought Colonel Fannin back from Copano,” said Ben Hughes, excitedly. He was Captain Horton’s orderly, and possibly the only one of the prisoners younger than Carl.
“What was he doing there?” Carl asked, and Ben answered,
“Arranging for safe passage, I expect.” He sighed a little, “Say, I might be glad to see ol’ Kaintuck again. I reckon we’ll all have to make our way home again, if we’re paroled. Where will you an’ your brother go home to?”
“I dunno.” Carl thought carefully. “Our Pa took a grant, near Waterloo on the Colorado. We’ve always lived there, since Pa was friends with the Baron an’ came out from Pennsylvania. I don’t rightly know where we’d go, if the Mexicans kick us out of Texas.”
“There’s always someplace,” Ben said, cheerfully, and Carl thought about that. No, there wasn’t; not if you had labored over a place the way that Pa and the family had. It was in your blood, your place, and no one had the right to take it from you, especially not a pack of fancy-dressed soldiers without so much as a by-your-leave, or a bunch of foreigners who only wanted to squeeze out of the settlers what they could in taxes and such. Carl knew about taxes, and working the land, and about Indians raiding, and following a plow with a rifle on your shoulder, and faraway government, and having to scrape for the favor of men with gold braid on their coats, who could take away everything a man had worked a lifetime for with a wave of the hand. No. Such like that wasn’t right, and it had no place in Texas. It saddened Carl to think that Colonel Fannin and Colonel Bowie and them had tried their best but failed to keep that from happening.

In the early morning, the word was passed to the prisoners; gather up those few things they had left to them and prepare to march. “Hurrah for home!” said they, in jubilation at seeing an end to dank and filthy imprisonment. Their spirits rose as they filed out onto the familiar parade ground of the old fort, into fresh air and seeming freedom, and there was sunshine just breaking through the morning fog and the front of the chapel with a bell ringing somewhere, and a great company of Mexican soldiers forming the prisoners up, into three groups of about a hundred men each.
“What day is this?” asked one of the others in same column as the Becker brothers and young Ben. Rudi smiled and answered,
“Sunday, I think. Palm Sunday.” He looked at Carl, and Ben, marching alongside towards the fortress gate, and began to sing.
“All glory, laud and honor
To thee, Redeemer King!
To whom the lips of children
Made sweet hosannas ring!
Thou art the King of Israel
Thou David’s royal son…”

Carl joined his treble voice to his brothers’ tenor, until someone farther back said,
“Is this a funeral, or something, boys? We’re going home!” and launched into “Come to the Bower!” and the men around them laughed and joined with them, and Rudi set his arm around his brothers’ shoulder and said,
“As long as we are together, we’ll be all right, little brother.”
Carl saw there were people at the gate, watching them march past; two well-dressed women and a little girl, with an officer and a sergeant attending them. The officer had more gold braid on his fine coat than any of the others, so Carl reckoned that he was one of their high officers. The younger woman looked very sad and distraught. She turned and spoke to the older woman and the officer, and seemed to point at Carl and Ben. She looked as if she would weep, and Carl wondered why. The gold-braid officer spoke to the sergeant, who bawled for the column to halt, and the officer came right up to the Becker brothers and Ben Hughes.
“You two… you are just boys, too young for this. Senora Alavez would have you stay. She insists.” At a nod from the officer, the Mexican sergeant took Ben by the arm and pulled him away from the column, and would have taken Carl, but that Carl resisted, saying,
“He is my brother, Pa told us we should stay together.” And Rudi set his arm around Carl’s shoulders and glowered at the officer. He looked at them for a long moment, seeming to chew on his mustache, before he said again,
“It would be better for you to go with Senora Alavez, boy.”
“I’ll stay with my brother,” Carl said firmly, and the officer looked sad, and answered,
“So, then. If that is your choice. Go with your brother, boy. Go with God.”
He nodded curtly at the sergeant who bawled at the column to move again, and the last sight Carl had of Ben was of him standing between the two women, watching after them with a bewildered look. The officer looked as if he too were about to weep like the younger woman, and Carl wondered why.

They went out of the gate, and turned left, a ragged column, two or three abreast, with a single file of guards on either side. It seemed like a lot of guards; there had not been so many when they were marched from Coleto Creek into the old citadel. The American volunteers and the Texians were jubilant, the guards grim and unsmiling. They would not look directly at the men they escorted, or meet their eyes. When he was much older Carl knew how that could be, but the boy that he was then only noticed without wondering why.
“This is the road towards Victoria,” Rudi noted with satisfaction. “I recognize that brush fence, you can see the river though that gap. I guess they’re going to march us all to…”
There was a quick rattle of shouted Spanish, a command so quick that Carl didn’t comprehend it, and suddenly the file of Mexican soldiers on their left faced right and shouldered through the prisoners, falling into line with their fellows on the column’s right, who had faced about themselves, and raised their muskets.

To the end of his life, Carl remembered how very long the next moments seemed, as if time slowed to an eternity, and suddenly every sight, smell, and sensation was vivid and pure, etched in the crystal of memory. The smell of sweat and dirty clothing, of damp wool and wood smoke, the clear green odor of new leaves and turned earth, the clean scent of running water wafting up from the river. Cheerful voices and song, abruptly dying away… shock and sudden comprehension, musket-fire in a sudden cloud of black-powder smoke, and Carl knew in a blinding flash why the woman at the gate and the gold-braid officer looked so sad, why the Mexican soldiers wouldn’t look them in the eye. Rudi turned towards him in that instant of comprehension, and shoved him towards the gap in the brush fence, spun the gawky, sixteen year old Carl around, away from the Mexican soldiers. For just that moment, Rudi put himself between the black eyes of the musket-barrels and his little brother, just as the world erupted in a hell of point-blank fire and a cloud of powder-smoke and shouting. He shouted
“Run, Carl! Make for the river, they’re…”
And at that moment, Rudi’s head exploded in a shower of blood and white bone, and his body fell lifeless as a sack of old clothes, falling as men screamed and groaned, and a voice that Carl barely knew as his own was screaming too, screaming his brothers’ name, but he was already moving as Rudi commanded in his last breath, plunging through the gap in the brush fence and pelting across the meadow beyond it.

The fence and the cloud of black-powder smoke screened him just long enough from the executioners. He gained the river bank, two and three steps and water deeper and deeper around his legs until he flung himself into the current and let it take him, diving under and holding his breath until it felt as if his lungs would burst. He came to the surface and floated on his back, looking up at the sky, the blue Texas sky that Ma had always said was the exact color of his eyes. He held very still, until the current drifted him around a bend and fetched him up in a thicket of rushes on the other side. From there Carl could hear the crackle of musket-fire in the distance… no, not from where he had run from, but farther away towards the north and the road to San Antone. The horror of realization chilled him, striking deeper in his bones than the spring-cold river water; three columns of Fannin’s men, three roads away from the citadel, and three executions. With a clarity that struck him as numb as the current, Carl remembered also the wounded, the orderlies who attended them, and the doctors. Yet another execution, then. For all that pretty young Senora Alavez and the high officer with gold braid, knew of it and protested it or and were appalled… it was happening. At that moment Carl Becker knew two things with absolute clarity; he would never put any of his faith in any man who wore a fancy uniform… and he would never, ever again go into a fight where he did not absolutely trust the man who led him not to surrender.

Eight Years Later

Two young men sat in a quiet corner of a shabby tavern in Washington-on-the-Brazos, a place full of smoke and loud voices. They lounged with their backs to the wall, and although at their ease and passing a bottle between them, they seemed ever watchful, their eyes wandering over the crowd. One or the other of them glanced at the door, every time it opened to admit another patron. They appeared to have just spent a couple of days hunting, dressed in rough and travel-stained canvas trousers and work shirts. The taller of the two men wore a buckskin jerkin, and smiled often in mild amusement. He also seemed to defer to his companion, extending a certain amount of respectful regard. Neither of them looked important at first glance, or even a second, and yet others seemed to keep a careful distance from the tall, fair man with the weathered face of an amiable and not too shrewd ploughman. His companion was slight, appearing barely old enough for the need to shave, and bore himself with the demeanor of a school-boy of good family, but they both carried a brace of Paterson Colt revolvers as easily as other men wore a pocket-watch and chain.

The noisiest cluster of patrons in the tavern orbited around a splendidly uniformed gentleman in a coat hung with foreign decorations, tall riding boots and fine doeskin breeches which fit so tightly as to appear to have been painted on. The state capitol had officially relocated, but important men were still partial to doing business at Washington-on-the-Brazos.
“I was sorry to hear about your father,” said the young-looking man, presently. “He sold off the property, didn’t he?”
“All but the home place,” answered Carl Becker, “I left it for my sister. Her man died a bit ago, left her with four children. I still have my land certificate… just never found a likely place to settle on.”
“Will you be back, when we’re funded again?”
“Dunno.” He looked across the room, and his eyes lighted once more on the splendidly uniformed gentleman.

“Who’s the swell, Jack? He looks like a popular man.”
“He’s a prince,” replied Jack, and when Carl looked as if he would chuckle, he added, “Didn’t you hear of him? Genuine, all-wool and a yard wide, honest-to-god high-bred aristocrat.”
“I’ve been out chasing Comanche along the south fork all these months,” Carl returned, with an air of mild apology, “It keeps me from mingling in polite society, much.”
Jack chuckled, warmly,
“Well, since that’s what I sent you to do, and what you are paid so munificently for…”
“We get paid?” Carl put on a face of mock amazement and Jack laughed outright.
“In promises and the thanks of grateful citizenry… pity you can’t eat promises and thanks, but never mind. Be thankful the Rangers are supplied with ammunition, at least. The Prince has been a nine-day wonder. He landed in New Orleans last July, and has been making a lordly progress ever since. A bit like a circus, I’m thinking. Half the folk that come to meet him are coming to see a real live prince, like in the books, and the other half are looking to see the elephant and the high-wire dancers.”
“Did he bring along any of those?” Carl asked, as he poured himself another two fingers from Jacks’ bottle of fine bourbon whiskey. Being that Jack was a gentleman, they were drinking it from cups.

“No, but he has two valets to help him into his pants of a morning,” Jack answered, as Carl had a mouthful, and choked as half of it went down the wrong way. “Kindly do not waste the finest panther-piss I can afford by spitting it all over the table, hoss. It’s the truth, and there are witnesses. He rides a white horse…”
“Bet the bugs eat the damn thing alive,” Carl interjected, and Jack held up his hand. He was enjoying this,
“The Prince also travels with his personal huntsman, chef-du-cuisine and architect. He also stops frequently to lecture those who own slaves on the immorality of our peculiar institution.”
“Tactless of him on that,” Carl said only. “Especially round these parts.” His opinion of the unnamed Prince was in equilibrium: approval of the sentiment warred with his disapproval of the arrogant tactlessness of expressing it. And he had never cared much for fancy uniforms.
“He also objects to sharing quarters and meals with other travelers, spends money like water, dresses like a fop in a stage-play, conducts himself as if he is the aristo villain in every novel ever written, and has ambitions to plant a colony of German settlers on four million acres of land between the Llano and the Colorado.”
“Good thing I didn’t have a mouthful, then,” Carl said only. “He’s not serious, is he, Captain? The Penateka and the Jicaralla might have something to say about that.”
“Like ‘Come to the feast brothers, the table is laid’?” Jack nodded, with a flash of grim amusement. “Hans brought him here tonight so we could talk try and talk sense into him. Since you and Hans both still speak his lingo, I thought that might cut some of the ice, anyways.”

“Why?” Carl asked, simply, and Jack looked across the room at the Prince, and his orbiting followers. Among them was another man in the same rough and simple clothes as the two of them. He met Jack’s eye and nodded, and Jack said,
“He and his friends back in Germany already gone a fair way towards that plan for a colony of their folk. He says they’re going to charter ships and bring them over by the thousands, single men and families both. Hell, they’ll make every other impresario look like a rank amateur if they can pull it off. Which I most sincerely doubt, and you’ll know why as soon as you’ve spent ten minutes in conversation with him.”
“Straight from the Old Country,” Carl remarked thoughtfully. “Into the country between the Llano and the Colorado. So, how many sharpers saw him coming, then?”
“Every damn one this side of the Mississippi for sure. Myself, I mislike the thought of what will happen to any that he does manage to bring over, if he doesn’t get bored and drop the whole thing like a child with a toy he’s tired of. He doesn’t strike me as one with real leader potential… Some of the rest of them may have what it’ll take, but I think he’ll strand lot of greenhorns in the way of a Comanche war party, unless he gets put into the way of a ration of sense.”

Across the room, the man who had met Jack’s eye spoke to the Prince and directed his attention towards the two men in the corner.
As he turned towards them, Carl got a clear look at him, for the first time: a well-fed man in his thirties, with immaculately barbered whiskers, the whole of him as sleek and brushed as a pedigree horse on race-day, arrogance sitting in every line of his countenance. There was a sulky droop to his mouth, as if like a small child he would be capable of tantrums if thwarted. But now he smiled, like the same child presented with a wonderful and unexpected treat, and advanced across the room, all a-beam, with Hans Rahm at his elbow.
“Captain Hays… such a profound pleasure, even in my home we have heard of the daring adventures of your Rangers… such astonishing feats of valor beggar the imagination. I am honored to join you, and to share your confidence regarding our great project.” He sat down at the same table, and behind his back, Hans Rahm briefly rolled his eyes.

Carl was privately amused to note Jack coloring up like a girl, and saying dismissively.
“Pretty exaggerated, most of those tales. I hardly recognize myself when I hear folk repeat them…”
“But surely…” the Prince began, but Jack continued,
“Most of us, we do what is needful. Texas is a damned dangerous place, for all else you have heard about it. Folk struggle here as much as anywhere else, ‘gainst the Mexes on one side, and the Comanche on the other, even before they get a living out of the land…”
“But it is such beautiful land,” the Prince enthused, “Your lieutenant Rahm has been telling me about the most beautiful place that he has ever seen, where springs of water come up out of the ground so forcefully, they form domes of water almost as tall as a man.”
“Oh, the Fountains,” Carl said, “Thirty miles from San Antone, on the Comal. The Veramendis own it, I believe. And it is beautiful” The Prince continued, as if he had not heard,
“Such a romantic sight, in a beautiful valley full of trees! And such a land could be made even more fair and productive, with the settling of German farmers and craftsmen on our grant. The common settler sort here, so improvident… they do not even pull out the stumps of trees from their dooryards or even grow vegetables. No, we can do much better than that.”
Carl kept his face straight, that mild and deceptive look that ever deceived folk that didn’t know him into underestimation, but behind it he thought on how hard it was to clear the land and wrestle a crop out of it, and wondered if the Prince had ever chopped down a tree in the whole of his privileged life. Or even if he had been up into the limestone hill country, above the rich coastal plains and piney-woods. Apparently not.

“So you might,” Jack signaled the tavern-keep for another bottle and two more cups, “But it’s just not gonna happen overnight. And my friend here is going to tell you why.” He jerked his chin at Carl, “This is Carl Becker… he’s one of my Rangers, just come back from a long scout into the Ilano country. Carl, this is Prince Karl Solms-Braunfels, the head of the… what is it again, I can’t never get my tongue around the whole of it. Too much of a mouthful.”
“Verein zum Schutze deutscher Einwanderer in Texas,” Prince Karl said, rather huffily, “The Society for The Protection of German Immigrants in Texas… and I am not the chief, but rather deputized by the group to come to Texas and oversee the beginning of our great work here. Becker… that is a proper German name, are you one of us?”
“My grandfather was born in Kassel and served in the Landgrave’s army,” Carl answered, in German. He forbore to mention that his grandfather was reputed to have deserted that army at first opportunity, and switched back to English for his commanders’ sake. “My father came to Texas as a young man. He was one of the Baron Bastrop’s settlers, when Texas still belonged to Mexico.”
“Splendid… so many of our people are here already, and have prospered,” Prince Karl’s enthusiasm was undimmed. “So many profitable enterprises, so many hard-working true-blooded Germans. This could be a veritable new German homeland, but a better and finer one, lighting the way for all.”
“Not if you’re still planning to send them all west to the Ilano, it won’t.” Carl said, flatly. A cloud fell over Prince Karl’s countenance.
“Why not?”

And Carl told him, unsparingly and in great detail; speaking in calm and level tones of depredations and ghastly atrocities, of the finding of bodies of settlers brutally tortured while still alive, and mutilated in horrific fashion after death; of babies and their mothers killed out of hand, of the ravishment of women, of children taken away and raised by the Indians, turned against their own. Carl left out nothing, not a single nauseating detail, and when he paused for breath, the Prince looked positively ill and said,
“But to have inspired them to such unnatural brutalities… are you sure than in some manner… somehow you have provoked them to such ferocities…”
Jack barely managed to veil his disgust, as he said
“They were doing all that to their tribe’s enemies with great energy and enthusiasm long before we ever set foot across the Mississippi. Just ask some of our Lipan scouts about the days of their fathers, if you doubt it. The point is you’d be planting how many of your colonists right in the middle of that, hundreds of miles beyond existing settlements!”
“And hundreds of miles from Galveston and the coast…” murmured Hans Rahm quietly.
“And sheltering… where? While they plant crops?” Carl added, and the Prince looked annoyed.
“But we have already considered all those matters,” he sounded peevish, like a schoolboy unfairly reproved, “My associates are seeing hiring transportation of our people, and to building houses for all… we shall see to everything, and the best of everything. We shall make our own port, so our people will not need to pass through Galveston and be tempted into idleness and the wasteful ways of the people there.” He looked brighter, as if he had just thought of a splendid idea, while Carl considered the irony of the Prince lecturing slave-owners, while still speaking of German immigrants in such a possessive manner, and Hans Rahm again remarked quietly,
“Remember this, Prince Solms… Texas has a way of making equals of us all; however you might try to keep your grant a separate entity.”
“We shall need to hire men to protect our people, of course… I would be honored if Captain Hays would advise me.”
“Carl might be free for a while,” answered Jack, “And you couldn’t do better, stake my honor on it… but the Rangers would be calling him back within the year.”
“Splendid!” Again, Carl was reminded of a child given a longed-for treat, “We can offer a very nice salary, and a generous grant of land… and we can fit you out with a suitable uniform or even my household livery…”
Carl shook his head,
“I’ll do the work…” he answered, and it was more because Jack thought it was a good thing more than he actually favored it himself, “But I won’t wear your uniform.”
“But why not?” Prince Karl had that sulky-child look again, “There is honor in it… you would have authority and a future, in being associated unmistakably with the Adelsverein… why not indeed?”
“Because I don’t care for uniforms,” Carl replied.

His employment with the Prince lasted all of five or six months, and bored him immeasurably for nothing ever came of it besides riding back and forth between Galveston, and San Antonio and Washington on the Brazos, and along the coast for a bit, as the Prince looked for the perfect place to land his pet immigrants. He got some amusement from playing the silent and vaguely dangerous frontier roughneck to the Princes’ entourage, who were intrigued, apprehensive and condescending by turns and sometimes all three at once. Then the day came when the Princes’ secretary explained, with a look of hideous embarrassment that the Adelsverein line of credit was unaccountably overextended, and therefore his months’ wages could just not be paid.
“A letter of credit, then?” He asked the secretary, who shrank back against the chair in which he sat, and Carl momentarily regretted having played up the dangerous roughneck. “Never mind, then. I’ll be riding back north in the morning, if anyone asks. It looks like Texas is going to be annexed after all, and that will mean trouble.”
“Surely not,” said the secretary, looking rattled, and Carl sighed,
“How long have you been here? There’s always trouble… if not from the Indians, than from the south, and sometimes all together.”

And for some considerable time, Carl thought he had heard the last of the Prince, and the Adelsverein.