The All-True Travels And Adventures Of Lidie Newton Part 11

"Frank won't let me go without him!"

Mrs. Wood-who was, along with her husband, always eager to make the Missourians uncomfortable-Mrs. Brown, and I huddled together. The two of them would take Mrs. Wood's buggy and her fast mare. Frank and I would take Jeremiah and borrow a light buggy from another of the ladies. Mr. Graves, it was said, had his place some five miles out, along the Santa Fe road. I explained to the women that I needed to be supplied with a certain liquid commodity over and above the money I would be taking with me. The women hesitated, but then one of them went away. She came back half an hour later, muttering, "It's on the seat of the buggy, wrapped in a quilt."

Mrs. Brown's cousin was not quite as far as Mr. Graves, and her other friend was near to him but off the road a ways. With two buggies, we all agreed, there was more of a chance that one or the other would get through.

"Getting back will be the trick," said Mrs. Wood. "A keg of powder looks like a keg of powder."

"We'll think of something," said Mrs. Brown. "Don't we always?'' They were very self-a.s.sured, these New England dames.

I met Frank lounging along Vermont Street, watching the drilling. He told me that one of our men, Pomeroy, had been taken and another man shot, named Barbour, who was riding his horse south to his claim to see his family after days in Lawrence. He was unarmed.

"We'll take that as our lesson," I said.

Frank perked up.

We had Jeremiah hitched to the buggy in a few minutes and then went back to the Wood cabin to get the money they had gathered. Mr. Graves, of course, was known, at least by repute, to everyone, and my mission was considered less probable of success than that of Mrs. Brown and Mrs. Wood. As we drove south along Ma.s.sachusetts Street, Frank practiced gesturing to me as if I couldn't hear a word. But though there were roving bands of Missourians all along the way, and though I knew we would be relieved of our keg of highly rectified whiskey should any of them stop us, we saw only two or three, from a distance, and no one obstructed us in any way. This was, perhaps, more disconcerting. I couldn't shake the conviction that they were there, hidden in the brush, behind trees, down in the bottoms of the Wakarusa River, which ran south of Lawrence. That they didn't come out gave them mystery and power, and made them all the more deadly. Of course, I upheld the masquerade of deafness, but I listened to Frank's talking and singing with a heart that beat as rapidly with excitement as with fear. Jeremiah moved through the cold air at a steady fast trot, his ears forward and his look as alert as a watchdog's might be, but after a few miles of seeing and hearing nothing, I felt a little oppressed.

"Now, Mrs. Newton-for you see, I recognize you perfectly-" said Mr. Graves when we called him out, "I take the arrival of you two young persons as a sign that my southern friends have shown their usual forbearance in refraining from burning out and looting the n.o.ble city on the hill, or rather, under the hill." I saw that Mr. Graves had altered, or developed, his mode of speaking yet again. He was a mysterious man, possibly more dangerous than he allowed himself to appear.

"Still might," said Frank cheerfully. "They got some fieldpieces over there."

"Do they, indeed," said Mr. Graves, doubtfully. He showed no signs of asking us in, bitter cold though it was, and now that I was here, I realized that I had not developed a plan for gaining his supplies, should he have any. I said, "How are your warts, Mr. Graves?"

He lit up. "Now, ma'am, I'd forgotten that you were a party to, or at least a witness of, that most successful medical strategy. Yes, indeed, not one week after I left that package beside the road, I woke up miraculously-and I say miraculously, but indeed, the remedy was pure science- relieved of that dermatistical burden. I may say that the Indians of Kansas Territory look upon me as nearly a G.o.d."

"Are you running a store, Mr. Graves?"

"A store, a school, a church, a surgical dispensary, of sorts. I have four cows to be milked, and I sell the milk. It's a quiet life, somewhat remote from the concerns of society-"

"But I thought you enjoyed-"

"I go among them, they come to me. It's all much the same. You, for example, have come to me. Bringing with you a most prepossessing young man."

"You a trader?" said Frank.

"I am."

"Look at this, then." Frank pulled a large kerchief from his pocket and opened it on the footboard of the wagon. Mr. Graves stepped over to look. Along with a paper of needles, a tarnished spoon, half a dozen square nails, a small bit for a pony, and the head of a hammer, I was amazed to find myself perusing a pair of woman's earbobs, elaborately fashioned of what seemed to be gold, small diamonds, and large, tear-shaped pearls. Mr. Graves said, "How much you want for that hammerhead, boy?"

"You got money?"

"I do."

"K.T. money? Or U.S. money?"

"Silver money."

Frank whispered to me, "I got that for an old bucket I found. How much should I ask?"

"Fifty cents."

"Four bits," said Frank to Mr. Graves.

"Pah!" said Mr. Graves. "An't got a shaft. I can get a new hammer with a shaft made in Cincinnati, Ohio, for four bits."

"If," said Frank, "you intend to wait to do your hammering, but if you want to hammer now, this is the hammerhead I got."

Mr. Graves laughed and put his hand in his pocket. He handed Frank two quarter dollars and pulled his ear for him. Frank handed him the hammerhead.

"Mr. Graves," I said, "how are you supplied for, uh, powder and lead?"

"My needs are taken care of. Powder and lead have come under heavy demand lately, I will say."

"Other things, too, I'm sure," I said, c.o.c.king my head toward the wrapped-up keg of whiskey.

Mr. Graves now looked directly at that and, I think, realized for the first time what it was. He grew very smooth, saying, "When the first two are in requisition by my compatriots, the last is highly likely to be wanted, as well."

"Yankee owned, Mr. Graves, but Kentucky made, I'm told."

Mr. Graves walked around the buggy. The keg of whiskey seemed to take on a rather queenly bearing, wrapped as it was in a crazy quilt made of silks and satins. He looked again, then walked forward to Jeremiah's head and gave his ears a tickle. Jeremiah flicked them back and forth.

"Sir," said Frank.

"Yes, son?" said Mr. Graves.

"Them earbobs are the real thing. They come from New Orleans, and when they were new, they cost three hundred dollars."

I said, "Frank Brereton, how did you get hold of such a thing? Who in the world would give those to you? If you picked them up on the street, you have to return them to their rightful owner!"

"I didn't pick them up on the street. I an't a thief."

"I am not a thief."

"I know you an't. I an't, either."

I pursed my lips in frustration, while Mr. Graves said, "Let me see those again, boy. I need to get a feel of them."

Frank pulled out the kerchief and untied it. Now all three of us looked shamelessly at the earbobs. All I could tell was that the gold had a clean look. Mr. Graves took them up and cradled them in his hand. After a moment, he put them back, his expression sober, and said, "You young people have taken a great risk coming here. There were Missourians here all night last night."

"Then," said Frank, "you must be clear out of whiskey."

Mr. Graves turned on his heel and walked into his cabin, closing the door behind him.

We sat there for a long time, but the door didn't open. At first we were quiet, but then Frank plucked my sleeve and said, "Mrs. Lacey gave 'em to me. She said they were nothing to her. If Mr. Lacey was to get killed for having no ammunition, she could never wear'em, anyway."

Jeremiah shook his head, rattling his harness, and I was impatient, too. Though we were standing in the lee of the cabin-store, the wind whistled around it and seemed to swirl into the buggy and drive out all possible warmth. I said, "Well, we can't wait all day for nothing. It's past noon already."

I threw off the quilt I was wrapped in and got down from my seat. I was going to turn Jeremiah around, but too many items-cases, barrels, and kegs-were stacked in the way, so I led him forward and saw that the easiest way was around the cabin. I pulled my shawl more tightly around my face and ducked my head. Jeremiah rattled his bit at having to go into the wind, and we stepped forward.

Behind the cabin, sitting on some stacks of hay, were three kegs of powder. I murmured, "Hey, Frank," and pointed. He jumped off the buggy seat and ran over to the kegs. I was amazed they stood there in full view. Mr. Graves could have hidden them behind a stove he had also stored there, or covered them with pieces of sailcloth and wagon wheels. Those, too, were near at hand. On the one hand, Mr. Graves's store was five miles from Lawrence. On the other, the "war" had been going on for almost a week. "This one's mostly empty," called Frank. And then: "But this one's full." It weighed some twenty-five pounds, probably a quarter of Frank's weight. He hefted it out of the hay and carried it over to the buggy. After a moment, I helped him lift it onto the seat. Then we unwrapped the keg of whiskey and, together, carried that over to the spot where the powder had been. I looked around carefully, but I didn't see any evidence of b.a.l.l.s. I even peered through a c.h.i.n.k between the logs of the cabin wall, but there was nothing to be seen-the s.p.a.ce had been well mudded and papered over on the inside. There was no sign of Mr. Graves.

Now that we had made our trade, we quickly wrapped the keg of powder in the quilt. The day was far gone past noon. I led Jeremiah the rest of the way around the cabin and out into the prairie track. I'd forgotten about bands of Missourians, but now I remembered them and thought that I saw some men and horses some distance away. We jumped into the buggy, and I whipped Jeremiah into a gallop. The cold wind made our eyes tear up so that we could see nothing and had to trust to Jeremiah's sense of direction. Nor could I see whether people were following us, but I acted as if they were. I never looked back to see if Mr. Graves came out of his cabin, but I knew I had given him two boons, and they were a barrel of highly rectified whiskey and the right to say that we black abolitionists had stolen his powder-he hadn't aided us of his own volition. Jeremiah was all the horse we thought him to be: he flew with the buggy back toward Lawrence, only breaking to a fast trot when we were nearly there. Perhaps there were stories behind us-of men who almost caught us, or saw us, or shot at us, but we didn't know them.

There was only one story ahead of us. Two men, bearded and wrapped up in hats and coats, stood their horses broadside in our path as we neared Lawrence. We could see the light of the fires up ahead and even smell them faintly. I simply drove Jeremiah at these men, thinking to push through, but at the last moment, one of them grabbed Jeremiah's bridle and hauled us to a halt. The other man trotted over to the buggy. He trotted to the wrong side, to Frank's side rather than to the side that the keg was on. I was sure they were Border Ruffians, since that was how they were dressed, but I never heard them speak, because as soon as the one man put his hand on Frank's arm, Frank held out his other hand and said, "Here's something for you, sir!" When the man opened his hand, Frank dropped the earbobs into it, and I shouted, "Get on, Jeremiah!" and I have to say that my whip flicked the man who was holding Jeremiah's bridle. He let go, I drove on, and Frank looked back in the gathering gloom. After a moment, he sat up in the buggy seat, grinning. "They're looking at them. The one man just whooped, and now it looks like they're about to have a fight over them."

"Frank Brereton! We might very well have got through without you giving those Ruffians Mrs. Lacey's earbobs!"

"Might of, but then she would of been awfully disappointed, I think."

Back at the Woods' cabin, Mrs. Wood and Mrs. Brown had themselves just returned. They'd been more successful than we had, having gotten both powder and lead, and they had also had more adventures evading the enemy. They made quite a picture, for they had torn the wadding out of their dresses and petticoats and inserted the powder and lead. They had gone out thin and come back fat, and the Missourians had smiled, tipped their hats at the ladies, and waved them on! We spent the whole evening making more cartridges, or rather, the women did. Frank was much happier prowling around the town. That night, Thomas and I slept downstairs at the Free State Hotel. In spite of the death of Barbour, whom everyone considered to be the unarmed victim of the Missouri Ruffians, and who later was buried with a soldier's funeral, the "war" seemed to wind inexorably down. Our readiness to defend ourselves was not met by equivalent eagerness on the other side to attack us, and so when Governor Shannon served as peacemaker, the proslave faction was happy enough to go home. Of course, there was also a blizzard, and they were living out in tents. Mrs. Bush said that the real reason the Missourians went home was that they ran out of whiskey and it grew too cold to play cards. It was true that Mr. Bisket, who had been captured and held by the Missourians after leaving Frank and me on the road, was required each of his five nights as a prisoner to help hold up a blanket against the wind so that his captors could play euchre beside the fire.

CHAPTER 13.

I Discover Something About Advertising [image]Every mistress of a family should see, not only that all sleeping-rooms in her house can be well ventilated at night, but that they actually are so. Where there is no open fireplace to admit the pure air from the exterior, a door should be left open into an entry, or room where fresh air is admitted; or else a small opening should be made in a window, taking care not to allow a draught of air to cross the bed. The debility of childhood, the la.s.situde of domestics, and the ill-health of families, are often caused by neglecting to provide a supply of pure air. - p. 311 AFTER THE WAKARUSA WAR (as it came to be known) was over, Thomas and I were once again faced with the question of where to live and what to do. Our joy at the war's end was soon driven out by what ended it - the snow and the cold. Each night seemed colder, and in fact, each night was colder. The stove at the hay house soon failed to warm that interior at all, and a mug of water placed next to it froze as quickly as though it were standing out of doors. We all retired to our quilts early in the evening, shortly after sunset, and it was the rankest cruelty to be called out of them for any reason. As the nights progressed, however, it quickly became apparent that the largest stack of quilts wasn't insulation enough for sleeping on the ground, outdoors or in, and Thomas and I began looking around for another place to stay. We discussed returning to our claim, but as the snow continued to fall, that got farther and farther away. Soon there was no question of such a thing; it was cold in Lawrence, but there was plenty of food to be had: not only pork and beef and venison, prairie chicken, turkey, rabbits, and squirrels, but apples of two or three different varieties, both green and red, pumpkins, other squashes, and sweet potatoes. Mr. Stearns had stacks of sealed cans of oysters from far away, and there was, of course, corn flour and meal, wheat flour, lard, salt, sugar, honey, and maple sugar, almost everything, for a price, except eggs, which froze in the cold, and b.u.t.ter. But in Lawrence we really didn't need eggs-the water was so full of lime that it leavened any cakes and made them light and delicious.

We moved for a time into the Free State Hotel, right beside the Woods' cabin, where we ladies had made cartridges. The Free State Hotel was famous, and meant to be so. Not only did it stand four stories of stone, but it had round, fortress-like windows in the fourth story, which the Missourians viewed as designed for defense, if not, indeed, for aggression. Governor Robinson, General Lane, and the others had made the Free State Hotel their headquarters during the "war." It was a large, imposing building, and the Missourians considered it just another way that the people of Lawrence were attempting to lord it over everyone else. In spite of its importance, though, and the money that had been spent on its building, winter had obstructed the completion of its interior-one reached all four stories by way of a staircase made of rickety boards, through which you could see all the way to the cellar, if you dared to look down. I did not, but climbed as close to the wall as I could, holding on to the carved banister that had been installed before the stairs and planning how I would catch myself if the steps gave way. But they never did so, even under the burden of the sickly and feverish men and women who were carried up and down on pallets.

While we were installed at the hotel, the const.i.tution that had been written at the Topeka convention came up for a vote. What with the "war" and the weather, I don't suppose that as many people in K.T. had a chance to read it as the Free Staters had hoped, but the voting in Lawrence was heavy, and all our friends cast their ballots. Elsewhere, the Missourians got up to their usual tricks. One man told us, and he a reporter for some eastern newspaper, that at Leavenworth he had witnessed the Missourians coming in boatloads to our Kansas election. Kansas elections had been overrun by Missourians every time before, and so, I suppose, this was what the elections officials expected, but the Missourians had other ideas: once enough of them got there, they stole the ballot box! One man tried to hide the box under a table and then run away; he was caught outside the store where they were voting and beaten with clubs! A Missourian with an ax raised it over his head to strike, and only was prevented by being unable to get in a clear blow! After that, the Missourians got the ballot box and took it away, and the Free Staters, who weren't as well armed as we are in Lawrence, didn't dare to go after it. There was tremendous gloating on the part of the Missourians, especially as the evening progressed and they got deeper into whatever barrels of highly rectified whiskey they could find to warm themselves up. They also threatened, loudly and clearly, to destroy the presses and the office of the Free State paper there, the Register, but these threats apparently were met with promises of reprisals against the slave-power paper, called the Herald, the one that so savagely and so frequently called for the death of all abolitionists.

It wasn't much different in any river town, and in Lawrence we fumed, our hatred, and I might also say our fear, of the Missourians sharply renewed. But the weather and the season cooled us rather quickly. According to the election, Governor Robinson now became the governor, and after it, we all were careful to call him that.

What drove us away from the hotel was the illness. There was fever everywhere, and as the weather got colder, more and more of the sick were brought to the only really st.u.r.dy building, which was the Free State Hotel. At least the thick stone walls, thicker by far than the thickness of an ax-hewn shake, kept the wind out. But there came to be feverish and delirious men and women in every room, and anyone who was healthy was obliged by charity to help care for them, especially in the nights, when the cold grew to be more than any man-made thing-be that trousers or shirts, socks or boots, quilt or cloak or shawl or hot drink or fire-could stave off. The more you craved to be huddling in your quilts with your head m.u.f.fled by pillows, the more you were obliged, it seemed, to stir up fires, hunt for wood, boil some ice into water. After two weeks, Thomas and I were both hollow-eyed and exhausted, more or less resigned to succ.u.mbing to the fever ourselves, as most of the nurses did sooner or later.

Just then, though, Mr. Bisket found us a place to stay, through himself getting suddenly married to a widow that he met at the beginning of the war, a few days before he was captured. Mrs. Bisket was not so tall as Mr. Bisket but twice as big around, and Thomas and I thought he must have married her for the warmth: her cheeks were always red, and she never wore more than a light shawl over her shoulders in the coldest weather. She and her first husband had brought a great carved rosewood bedstead all the way from Connecticut at huge expense, and a second bedstead as well, though a humbler one, of maple. She kept all her feather beds and quilts fluffed up and inviting. Her name was Louisa. Her property amounted to a brick storefront with two rooms above on Ma.s.sachusetts Street, two blocks down from the Free State Hotel. Louisa had a stove in each room and checkered oilcloths on the floors. She showed us around with pride. "I said to my first husband, Mr. Wheelwright-isn't it funny that Mr. Wheelwright was a wheelwright?-that I would not be traveling to Kansas Territory as a wretch, but as a woman of property. We shipped our goods from Boston to New Orleans, then up the river. We brought three wagons from Independence. We sold the extra two and the mules, at a tidy profit, I must say." She smiled beatifically, as so many New Englanders did when proclaiming similar sentiments. Thomas and I moved in that same day. Since Mr. Bisket now had two wagons, three mules, and a horse, as well as a ready-made home to live in and a ready-made inclination toward prowling around and contriving this and that, he set himself up in a sort of business. Hauling was what he called it, but hauling was only its excuse. He might haul a barrel of apples and, say, a load of wooden shakes to a man on Pinckney Street, and stay there awhile to help nail up some shakes, then be offered the job of clearing some brush or chopping some wood or, as December progressed, clearing snow. Sometimes both wagons would be required, and on those occasions, Thomas would drive the second. So it was that we supplemented our diminishing funds after we moved into Lawrence. And then Thomas's father sent him a quant.i.ty of sailcloth, and this we sold by the piece from the old wheelwright shop below. Needless to say, this life suited my nephew Frank right down to the ground; he slept in the shop below and came and went as he pleased.

We and our friends weren't the only ones to come in from the prairie. Every house had two or more families living there, and each of the hotels had half a dozen strangers living cheek by jowl in each room. The streets were full of Delawares, too, and Indians of other tribes, all of whom declared that even the oldest of their number hadn't seen such cold in their lifetimes.

It had to be as cold in Missouri, which of course was only a few dozen miles distant, but it seemed to many of us that the cold was an especial mockery of our ambitions, for of course, many had come on the promise of the sunny, warm, dry prairie winter. Since only September I, Thomas Newton and I had found blistering heat, relentless winds, cracking tempests, cold wet misery, and cold frozen misery. And during the month of October, we'd seen fires everywhere, snaking over the prairie and dimming the blue sky with smoke. The fires, like much of the weather, had a grand and powerful beauty of their own, if you could lift your mind out of fear and discomfort long enough to appreciate it, but anyone who had hoped that Kansas Territory would gently embrace men and their civilization was quickly and repeatedly disabused of these notions. In Lawrence, there was considerable talk of California, more as the winter deepened. The New England women-Mrs. Bush, Mrs. Jenkins, Mrs. Lacey, Mrs. Bisket-began to talk more frequently of the neat villages and towns that they'd left behind. These Yankees weren't the impoverished emigrants that most westerners were or derived from. They had emigrated on principle rather than out of need, and many had left houses and farms and thriving businesses behind, though, as Mrs. Bush reminded us, and perhaps herself, "Prospering in New England takes plenty of contrivance, too. I won't hide from you that I was looking for things to be a bit easier here than there."

I didn't say what I had been looking for in K.T.-something I myself didn't know, something alien and unexpected, perhaps. If that had been it, then I had certainly found it.

On the day before Christmas, it was said by those who knew that it was seventeen degrees below zero. On Christmas morning, it was thirty below. I reckoned that we were colder by fifty or more degrees than we'd been on our last days on our claim, when we'd felt ourselves so unbearably cold. But cold as it was, the people of Lawrence, and we with them, kept up the flow of commercial and political activity. It went the same as with everything else: The first time your fingers or nose or toes got a touch of the frostbite, you were shocked and terrified. The fourth time, or the fifth, you were hardly impressed at all.

Louisa Bisket, ensconced in our stone building, kept the stoves burning hot with big chunks of black walnut that Mr. Bisket hauled in from the banks of the Kaw, as behooved a woman of property. She was a good cook, too, especially at concocting soups and stews. Her appet.i.te for conversation was a grand one, and she couldn't hear enough, or say enough, about Mr. Bisket.

"I love the way he talks," she said. "He's delightfully expressive. Now, Thomas is a quiet sort-he barely says a word, though he reads beautifully and has such a deep, powerful voice, but Mr. Bisket! Well, he has a way with words, and a flow of talk! When I first met Mr. Bisket, well, my head turned right around. I knew..." She lowered her voice. "Everyone is quite aware that it's been a mere six weeks since Mr. Wheelwright suffered his unfortunate accident, and I was heartsick, as you can imagine...."

"I thought," I said, "that Mr. Wheelwright died of a fever...."

"Well, he did, but you know, it came on as a result of ... well, he was trying to get our wagon across the river, and he fell in, and he couldn't swim! He just about drowned then, and he never recovered. When he went down with a fever three days later, I said right then to myself that he wasn't to live."

She looked genuinely stricken. She was ironing tiny pleats into one of her petticoats, while I sewed a shirt of a sort for Frank, who had grown in K.T. by an inch or two. She had the ironing board pulled as close as possible to the stove, but even so, it was so cold that the iron chilled in the air as soon as she lifted it, and the work went slowly. My sewing was twice as awkward as usual, and every five st.i.tches or so I nearly had to put my fingers right on the stove to thaw them.

"But I must say, though it sounds hard, that it's for the best that Mr. Wheelwright and I had no children. Mr. Wheelwright was not sympathetic to imperfection. A very learned doctor in Ma.s.sachusetts, who was familiar with all the latest systems, said that it was clear to him that this daily working with circles, this daily seeking after what you might call rolling perfection, well, it made the man a bit inflexible." She lowered her voice. "I made myself clear to Mr. Wheelwright. I was not going to be brought to compromising my own standards. I was an older bride, twenty-five, you know, and we, as a rule, are a stiff-necked bunch. And so Mr. Wheelwright and I had made our peace."

"Mr. Bisket is younger than Mr. Wheelwright, then?"

"Oh, yes. Mr. Wheelwright was nearly sixty. I may be wrong, but it seems to me that Mr. Bisket looks to me for guidance. That is not the ideal most people hold, the husband looking to the wife for guidance, but I can't see why it shouldn't work, can you?"

I thought of my sisters and my mother, and their husbands. It had been a long time since any of them had looked to her spouse for guidance. I said, "I don't feel I know much about marriage. I've only been married since the summer."

"My dear," she said, "as far as I'm concerned, you can be married for twenty or thirty years in our day and not know a single thing about marriage if you don't strive to learn. We live in fallen times. My learned doctor friend in Ma.s.sachusetts felt that relations between men and women were certainly different in former times, to the benefit of all. Woman should not be subject to male whim, as we are, but should live in full exercise of her capacities. I, for example, was never ill another day in my life after I made my position clear to Mr. Wheelwright."

It was more difficult to live as two couples than as one. Since there were two rooms, the question always arose of where we would sit in the evenings. Thomas and I didn't feel comfortable sitting in our room, which we might have preferred once in a while, because to do so seemed unsociable. And yet Louisa and Charles, as I now began addressing Mr. Bisket, must have craved some time alone, too. If Louisa had been thrifty and warmed only their room, the larger of the two, we wouldn't have felt the waste of leaving our room empty while we sat with them, but she was prodigal in all things, one of her significant attractions in a world where frugality was the norm and the frugality of others always worthy of remark. It seemed as though to live smoothly, we needed one room or three. Two was just the wrong number. But I dared not complain, even to Thomas, or, indeed, to myself. Every day, I saw others who were sick and shivering.

Louisa had strong opinions about slavery, too, which she did not hesitate to detail. She was more radical than her husband and more outspoken by nature than Thomas, so she often held the floor on the subject when we sat about the stove in the evenings. In her mind, and according to her learned doctor friend and many of the best people, she said, back in Boston, the lives of women and those of slaves were not so much different. When Charles and my husband smiled or squirmed at this (and glanced about at Louisa's grand furnishings), she caught them up short. "Now," she said, "you are looking at my things and judging the general estate of woman by a very particular, and I might even say peculiar, gauge. A slave may wear beautiful clothes, read and write, and do his master's business with perspicacity and care, and he may even have some appreciation of and grat.i.tude for his lot in life, and he may certainly be attached to his master, but his circ.u.mstances do not therefore reflect or mitigate the circ.u.mstances of millions of others who live under the thumb of someone else, who have no freedom and no money and no say in their own fate. Just because one person has made a separate peace with one other person, the whole inst.i.tution is not thereby redeemed.... How do you regard your corset, Lydia?"

I have to say that this was a question I had never before been asked. I didn't know quite how to reply.

"I regard my corset as a saddle." She went on, "We've all heard of slave gangs where they bridle the troublesome slaves so as to both a.s.sert and proclaim control. Well, we women are similarly tacked up, though with corsets rather than bridles. They stifle our breath and cut us in two and shape us to the liking of our masters."

I would have to say that Thomas did not care for Louisa. He was careful to inform me that while he didn't object to her sentiments, he could not quite like her manner, but I found it arrestingly daring and nothing if not genuine. Charles was hog happy, as Roland Brereton would say. He was fed, warmed, loved, and told what to do, and his sentiments about every matter quickly came to mirror his wife's. K.T., he said, was the making of him, and it was true that in after years he prospered as well as any of our friends, died the father of eight and the grandfather of thirty-six, and spent sixteen years in the Kansas state legislature. And General Lane (later Senator Lane) always claimed that he admired Louisa Bisket and was admired by her in return, which was, of course, a recommendation to some and not to others.

We spent our holidays cozily enough, and in the new year, Lawrence looked about as up-and-coming as a frozen town could look. There were sleighs and drags everywhere in the streets, and building continued in spite of the weather and the sickness. Not long after New Year's Day, regular mail was established between Leavenworth and Lawrence, and there were plenty of goods everywhere, not only food. As Mrs. Bush would say, "Some days the Ruffians want to shoot us, and some days they don't, but they never stop wanting our money."

Charles was one of the carriers for mail and goods from Leavenworth, and in typical K.T. fashion, a few days after the route was established, he and Thomas made up their minds to combine a little trade with a little politics.

The situation was this: Our Topeka convention, which we Free Staters had held in October, called for elections to state offices on January 15 (they'd been imagining a different January 15 than the one we got-a mild, sunny day and not a bitter, bl.u.s.tery one). The men of Lawrence voted properly, on the fifteenth, but the next day everyone heard that as a result of the fracas in Leavenworth the month before, the Free Staters there had been afraid to vote. The result was that they planned to gather at a certain farmhouse in a village eight miles from town on the next day, the seventeenth, and cast their ballots. Some men from Lawrence, including the mail carrier, Charles, and his a.s.sistant, Thomas, wished to be present and well armed, just to insure that the voting was carried out in good order.

The men got up long before dawn and headed for Leavenworth, with Charles's hot little gelding and Jeremiah in the traces. We resolved the question of Frank's going along by the men's sneaking out without him, which obliged him to sulk about the wheelwright's shop all day. But for all Frank's enthusiasm for the excitements of our life, on the one hand, and Thomas's growing belief that events in Kansas must be brought to a climax in order for the slavery issue to be resolved once and for all, on the other, I often feared what Frank had gotten into with us, and I caught myself wondering how I would phrase the news of some disaster in a letter to my sister. Not all disasters, it now appeared, might come through the general bearing of arms by parties who hated one another; these days I also wondered how I might tell her that her boy had frozen to death.

Louisa and I were anxious throughout that day and into the next. We stayed up all night and kept sending Frank out into the street, as if there might be something to hear all the way from Leavenworth. As it turned out, we were worried with good reason, for the Missourians had indeed discovered the voting. The night before, they had attacked the farm where it was to take place, and in the morning, before our husbands got there, they'd attacked a party of voters heading out to the farm. There were so many Missourians that the Free Staters ran off for fear of their lives and never got to vote at all. Shortly after Thomas and Charles got to the farm, the Missourians came around for the second time that day and shot off their guns into the air and vowed to break up the ballot boxes "and a lot of heads into the bargain" and to "hang some black abolitionists" or "throw 'em out onto the ice," but the Free Staters gathered inside shot off their Sharps carbines and drove them away. No one knew how many Free Staters were prevented from voting or chased away, but all those who got through swore they'd done so at peril of their lives. Our husbands decided to stay the night-everyone was sure that members of a group who styled themselves the "Kickapoo Rangers" would attack the farmhouse-but after a while, a man, his son, and his nephew decided to hazard a dash for home. These three did get chased, and trapped in a fence corner. The man and one of the boys had to try and hold off the "Rangers," while the other boy ran back to the farmhouse for help. Thomas and Charles were in the house, and they happened to be the only two with Sharps rifles, as all the other Lawrence men had left. Charles, who was a better shot than Thomas, agreed to go out with the party of rescuers, who were in the charge of a Captain Brown, still another Brown, a man of thirty-five or so, well liked by all the Leavenworth people, who was a committed Free Stater.

Not long after that, the two parties converged. The Free Staters were on the verge of driving off the proslave party, when a larger party of these Kickapoo Rangers arrived. Now there was what I suppose would qualify in Kansas as a bona fide battle. Brown on his side drew up his men in a line, and the others did, too. The firing commenced, and Charles said that he had never been so scared in his life, even when he was taken prisoner by the Missourians during the "war" and threatened with hanging. After a while, the Missourians got into some houses nearby and fired at the Free Staters, who were in the open. Captain Brown made Charles lie down behind a s...o...b..nk and keep firing with his Sharps carbine, while the others went more slowly, muzzle-loading after each shot. Pretty soon, though, the Free Staters themselves retreated to some of the nearby buildings, and then the battle petered out, as no one's rifle had enough range to do much damage in these circ.u.mstances. Brown had the men retreat to the cabin where the election had taken place and where Thomas still was, with some other men and the ballot box. Two of the Free Staters were hit and slightly wounded. About the Missourians, they were soon to find out.

The cabin was crowded, and after a while men began to agitate to leave, both to get back to the safety of their own homes and to remove the ballot box to a safer place. Finally, Captain Brown decided to take a buggy and a wagon and seven men and try to get back to Leavenworth. Thomas and Charles resolved to wait until morning and come on to Lawrence, as they had the mail with them and no need to go back to Leavenworth.

As they were making their way down the road, Captain Brown and his men pa.s.sed another wagon but ignored it. Then, coming around a curve in the road, they saw two more wagons and were surrounded and taken. These, again, were the Kickapoo Rangers-there is a town up by Leavenworth called Kickapoo, and it is full of the lowest sort of characters-and they took away the weapons of all our men and dragged them off to a local store where the owner sympathized with the slave power, all for the sake of working to death a little Negro boy of some ten years.

Now was when the real horror commenced, for the Kickapoo Rangers were drunk as they could be, and instead of destroying the ballots and paroling the men, which is what they said they were going to do, the southerners got a length of rope from the owner of the store (gratis, I presume) and threatened all the prisoners with hanging. It turned out that one of their number had been killed, a man named Cook, and they were howling for revenge. There was a proslave man who was more reasonable, some sort of army man named Captain Martin, and he argued for the release of all the prisoners. Eventually, he managed to engineer the escape of all of them except Captain Brown, who was being held in a separate room. Another man went off to Leavenworth to try and bring some men to help, but no one would come.

When the news came back to Lawrence of what they did to Captain Brown, we were convinced at last and permanently that the Ruffians were animals-worse than animals, merciless fiends who had no thoughts in their heads except of the most brutal sort. They killed him with hatchet blows and kicks, then got drunker, then threw him in the wagon and drove him home to his wife, where they threw him in the yard and shouted, "Here's Brown!" and drove off, laughing. Some people said that he was still alive and died in her arms, but others said that he was dead. It was shocking enough either way.

Charles and Thomas knew the beginning of this story by the time they got home, but not the end. They had met Captain Brown and liked him; he was not an old man by any means, but someone like US. After everything was known, they were speechless in the way you get when some vile thing has brushed past you. All of Lawrence was talking of nothing else, but they didn't want to talk of it at all.

We sat silent around our fire the next few evenings. Louisa knitted busily and I attempted to sew, but Thomas and Charles said nothing and did nothing. When I suggested that Thomas might read from one of his books, he said, "I can't think which one," and Louisa didn't dare suggest that Charles sing, one of his favorite amus.e.m.e.nts. Louisa and I traded glances over and over. I was not sure what she was thinking, as she was of an especially, you might say uniquely, sanguine temperament, and K.T. seemed to suit her very well; but I was thinking fearful and bitter thoughts, all mixed in together. I was of course glad that my husband had escaped without injury, but that gladness gave way to horror every time I thought of Mrs. Brown, who seemed, in my mind, to be myself in a different dress. I hated the Missourians for these deeds with a fresh hatred-as fresh as if my friends and I hadn't known for months how the Missourians were. But I also resented our men, even Thomas and Charles, for going off and getting into it. I could both imagine and not imagine what they had seen, and I couldn't throw off the feeling that they hadn't needed to witness it and therefore to bring it home; and so, while I knew they weren't at fault, I seemed to feel, some moments, as if they were. And yet, Thomas's dejection aroused my pity, too. No authorities on marriage that I had encountered had ever discussed this welter of uncomfortable emotions that seemed to go with the condition. I feared that K.T. was going to bear me down in the end. I suppose we all did so.

On the other hand, the speed of events didn't give us much leisure to ponder them, and it was hard to tell whether that would, in the end, contribute to our salvation or our destruction.