This story, or legend, or what you will, was told me by an
ex-Confederate soldier, an intelligent man.
“After the war I got back to Texas broke, as were all my people, but I
bought a little farm in Leon County on credit, married, and began to
build a home. I was progressing fairly well when one summer I had a
dream, or vision. I was sleeping on the gallery, my wife and two small
children occupying the bed just inside the door.
“I saw a woman come into the yard through the gate, a strange looking
woman with strange headgear and queer dress, and I marveled that my
fierce watch dogs did not attack her. She came to the side of the
gallery and said in a clear voice: ‘Dig in your little pasture and you
will find treasure.’
“I sat up and watched her go out of the gate, just as she had come, and
could hardly persuade myself that what I saw was a dream. The next
morning I told my wife of the dream—and then forgot it. Now the little
pasture was a few fenced acres near the house where we kept our milk
calves. It was drouth stricken; the soil was hard and dry and had no
growth except a few brambles.
“Not many nights later while I lay as before, the same woman came
again. I saw her plainly in the moonlight. She spoke, very quietly but
distinctly, the same words: ‘Dig in your little pasture. Dig beneath
the white rose.’
“Now I knew that there was no growth in the little pasture excepting
the few brambles I have mentioned. But on my telling my wife of seeing
the woman again in a dream, she said: ‘Come on; let’s look for roses.’
And catching my hand, she laughingly dragged me to the pasture. There,
as sure as I am a Reb, we found a rose bush with two white flowers on
it. Then we got busy, but, after digging down about two feet, I found a
large rock and quit.
“The story got out and I became the butt of many jokes. A few months
afterward my brother-in-law offered me a fancy price for the place and
I quit farming. Later on in the year I noticed that the little pasture
had been plowed—the only mark of improvement noticeable. About the same
time I noticed my brother-in-law buying property, including a fine
family carriage, sending his daughter to boarding school, and getting
himself elected to the state legislature. Maybe there was something
under the roses.”
After the “Reb” had told me the foregoing story, I heard from his wife
that a legend about their farm was current in the settlement. According
to the commonly told account, three men camped one night in the
vicinity of the “little pasture.” In the morning one of them went to a
settler’s cabin nearby to borrow tools, saying that one of their party
had died during the night from wounds received in an Indian fight a few
days before. The man declined all offer of help from the wife and
daughter of the settler—the settler himself being absent—but after the
campers had departed, the women went out, smoothing the ground over the
mound and placing a stone above it.
Now what they buried or why no one knows to this day, but, as was
remarked at the time, their horses bore marks of long travel. The women
of the cabin saw three men arrive; they saw the mound; they saw three
men depart. If a dying comrade was with them, they asked no aid.
It only remains to be said that, though a fine man, Mr. H—, the teller
of this story, was the kind of man who would miss a chance at wealth
rather than incur the ridicule of neighbors or exert himself in raising
a stone.