The All-True Travels And Adventures Of Lidie Newton Part 4

CHAPTER 6.

I Enter Kansas Territory [image]The popular maxim, that "dirt is healthy," has probably arisen from the fact, that playing in the open air is very benificial to the health of children, who thus get dirt on their persons and clothes. But it is the fresh air and exercise, and not the dirt, which promotes the health. -p. 118 I DID NOT SPEAK to Thomas of my moment of fear, for surely that was what it was-the effects of a moment so short that it lasted only so long as it took for the patrons at the table to see the dishes of food and then reach for them, and yet it leaked into and colored every subsequent moment. Even now, as I recall our ride to Lawrence, the rolling golden prairie with its lines of distant trees and its distant dome of blue seem infused with shadows. The road, for the most part, was hard enough, and Mr. Graves knew where all the mirey spots were and avoided them. Nor was there solitude to oppress us-we met men, women, and children, wagons and walkers and riders, and everyone shouted out in the friendly way that westerners have on the road. The landscape was just as we expected it to be and displayed the expected open sort of beauty. Even so, the very sunshine looked dark to me, and the heat of the day, which was waxing moment by moment, seemed cold. I could not imagine any cabin, any town, any society, that would relieve my spirits.

Thomas, on the other hand, admired the country and was pleased as he could be to have arrived, and he spoke to Mr. Graves with thorough animation and lack of reserve. Eavesdropping, I added to my knowledge of my husband.

"I knowed you was a preacher," said Mr. Graves.

"I was for a few months only," said Thomas. "After leaving Harvard College. But the work didn't suit me. When members of my flock sought my counsel, it struck me dumb."

"That an't bad," said Mr. Graves. "Most folks like to talk themselves into whatever it is that they want to do, anyway. I did some work in the preaching line myself, but it didn't pay. Folks expect the word of G.o.d to be free for the asking."

"Then I did some schoolteaching around and about Medford-"

"Well, that don't pay, neither. I done plenty of that, though I only know my tables up to six, but you know, six is half a dozen, and as soon as you know a dozen, you can sell what you got to sell. That's what I told my boys."

"Then I went onto a merchant ship with my brother for a year, carrying loads of rosewood from the Amazon, and then I made sails in my father's factory."

"You may say what you please about the sea," said Mr. Graves. "I an't never seen it, I don't know what's there. I an't never been to New Orleans, even." With this, though I was eager to hear of my husband's maritime adventures, Mr. Graves declared the subject of seafaring a closed one. We jolted along in silence. The ears of the mules flicked forward and back and the wagon squeaked and creaked. Mr. Graves began to hum a tune but broke off abruptly and said, "Got me some warts. You got any warts?"

Thomas allowed that he didn't have any warts at the moment.

"Well, I tried one cure. Worked for me years ago, but it didn't work at all here in K.T. What you got to do is give 'em away to two men riding on one gray horse. Saw a couple of men like that in the spring, so I wrapped up some one-cent pieces in a packet, as many as there are of the warts, and I had those men carry them one-cent pieces to Shawnee, but them warts didn't follow them a-tall. I was disgusted! I looked for those two men on that one gray horse for six months or more, then it didn't work! But now I found another cure, and we got to stop here and put it into effect. Whoa, back, boys!" he shouted to the mules, then jumped down off the wagon and went around to the rear, where he pulled out a neatly wrapped parcel. Thomas gave me a smile. "Here you are," said Mr. Graves. "You know what this is? This is twenty-six grains of barley. That's one grain for each wart." He grinned and set the package by the side of the road. "See them warts?" He flourished his hand in my face. "As soon as some unsuspecting abolitionist comes along and picks up that package, well, them warts will start fading away." He thrust his warty palm under Thomas's nose. "Abolitionist can't resist picking things up. Might be worth four bits! That's what an abolitionist thinks, 'cause they're all Yankees, you know. So when that abolitionist picks up my pretty little package here, he'll be picking up my warts. But he's got to do it on his own. You can't give it to him. He's got to steal it for himself That's the only way it works."

He arranged the package on a clump of gra.s.s and climbed back into the wagon. "I know plenty of charms and cures. Most people here in K.T, they call me Mr. Graves, because I'm so respected for my healing powers, but I don't make much of it, because it's a gift, you see, from the Lord, and I can't take the credit."

After we'd gone forward a few yards and Mr. Graves had looked back at the package three or four times, he said, "I'm sure sorry for you that you can't watch the healing, but it could take a day or so, and I know you want to be finding your place and setting yourselves up before then, but it would do you good to see it."

"Perhaps it will happen more quickly than that," said Thomas.

"You can't tell," replied Mr. Graves. "No, one thing about this life is true, and that is that you can't tell."

Mr. Graves's flow of conversation remained strong throughout the day and only petered out after we'd settled on the prairie for the night. We settled on the prairie for the night because Mr. Graves said that it was a quiet night, warm and clear, and taken all in all, the open prairie would surely be more congenial to us than the nearby cabin of Paschal Fish, "because I am an observant man, Mrs. Newton, and I have noticed that you have something of a distaste for expectorating, and between us, ma'am, Paschal Fish's clientele have a genius for expectorating, and since the man himself makes a practice of never looking down or taking off his boots, he don't know quite how it affects others."

The sunlight seemed to evaporate off the prairie like steam off a vat of boiling water, leaving behind darkness that had already been there; on the other hand, the pale prairie flowers all around us shone against the gra.s.ses with a prolonged, dusky brilliance until the darkness simply extinguished them suddenly and at last. Night on the prairie was not like any other night I had ever seen: the blackness was below us and the light above, field upon field of stars stretched over our heads, rolling in every direction until your eyes lost the ability to see them. The bright pale road of the Milky Way beckoned toward Santa Fe in one direction and Iowa in the other, wide and smooth. After a bit of this, Mr. Graves pulled some sticks of wood from the wagon and built a fire. "No use," he said, "in taking chances. Better all around that folks know we're here. I been thinking about it, and this is what we'll do. If anyone rides up, we'll put on that we're sleeping, and then when they shout out and rouse us, we'll try to discern their views on the goose question by the way they talk. Now, if they talk like they're of your party, you can speak up, and if they seem to be of my party, why, then, I'll vouch for you."

I said, "Mr. Graves, what is this question about geese?"

"The goose question is slavery, ma'am. If you are a proslavery man, then out here we say that you are sound on the goose." He was smoking a pipe, and he tamped it down and put some more tobacco in it, then said, "I'll tell you something. Anyone out here who is one hundred percent sound on the goose question wants to talk about it. You folks don't, so you see that give me the first inkling that you an't sound on the goose question. But I don't ask. And I only tell you this for your own good. And Lawrence is a den of black abolitionists, so it won't matter when you get there, but when you are away from there, then you got to talk like you're sound on the goose, or susss-p.i.s.ssshhhhuns will be aroused."

Thomas asked, "Why do they call it the goose question?" but Mr. Graves shook his head. "No one knows. Anyway, I don't."

I glanced at Thomas, wondering if he had noticed, as I had, that Mr. Graves's mode of speech had changed. He now spoke more roundly and fluently, as if his former "Ruffian" expressions had been a trick. This gave him an air of mystery to me and made me wonder about him, but I only had a minute or two to ponder this, for as soon as he fell asleep, we unrolled ourselves from our blankets and sat close beside one another, unable to sleep. The night before, I had been afraid of shots through the floor, and the night before that, of a boiler explosion on the Independence. Each scene seemed to have pa.s.sed in an earlier lifetime, as distant from these stars and this fire as the Roman Empire. The prairie was full of sounds-the wind through the gra.s.ses, but also the yipping of what I later learned were coyotes; the whine of mosquitoes, but also the liquid call of night birds. Nor did every traveler stop with the darkness-I heard the clip-clop of horses' hooves, the calls of one man to another. They didn't molest us, though.

Thomas held my hand between his. I did not have the tiny hand you read about in books-it did not disappear between the two of his-but I was just as ready to have it held. The requirements of traveling had given us little leisure, and arrangements on the steamboats and in the hotel after Saint Louis had conspired to keep us apart. Always in the past I had accepted without much thought the flocking of men with men and women with women. It was no surprise to me that Mr. Graves presumed that my husband's conversation would be with him. Once he had made me a comfortable place to sit and helped me into it, it was clear that Mr. Graves considered me well taken care of. Once in a while, he would address some informative remark to me, as a courtesy to Thomas's manhood, as if not wishing to imply ignorance on Thomas's part. Perhaps this was the key to his differing modes of expression, too: he lowered his style to a manly roughness for Thomas, elevated it for me. And if Thomas attempted to have any private conversation with me, Mr. Graves would eavesdrop and hem and haw, waiting to stick in his two cents' worth. He wasn't the first to distinguish between us; this was the way men and women behaved, were supposed to behave. I was perfectly familiar with it, but now Thomas and I seemed to be like two souls in separate lifeboats (speaking of maritime adventures-and I had never seen the sea, either; when I read about a governor of Illinois who had recently been much laughed at when he went to Baltimore and asked in all innocence, looking at the tide, if the place flooded like that twice a day every day, I hadn't gotten the joke), who could never quite reach each other, never quite get close enough to converse. Except that now that we were that close, I could not begin to think what we would say to one another. He said, "Every time I set out on what seems very much like an adventure and imagine myself lost in some vast solitude, I discover when I get there that there are plenty of men before me, and that they are all great talkers."

"That is certainly true of Mr. Graves," I said. "But I must say that I didn't mean to find vast, solitary places here in Kansas. I meant to find pleasant new towns with all manner of services that had sprouted out of the prairie like mushrooms. That's what all the bills in Horace's store promised. s.p.a.ce enough for all mankind, but no inconvenience."

Thomas laughed.

"I've been reading Miss Beecher. I understand that my duties as a wife will include making ball fringe for our carpets and regular dishes of light egg custard."

"Are you afraid, Mrs. Newton?"

"Of egg custard?"

But he didn't laugh this time. I dropped my eyes. I wanted to be precise, and he rubbed his thumb over mine and then looked at me soberly.

I pondered, wanting to answer truthfully, at all costs, but suddenly not knowing exactly what that meant: Are you afraid? Just at that moment, in fact, I was quite serene, possibly because Mr. Graves was so comfortably asleep that he cast a radiance of a.s.surance that covered us, too. On the other hand, I had been afraid the night before and just that morning, with a fear so new and overpowering that it was as if I had never felt fear before. That feeling seemed to be right beside me; I could find myself slipping into it if I didn't pay attention. I said, "I should be, but I'm not. Just like on the steamboat. You know it could blow up any minute, but it just seems like it won't. This is wild country, though. The woman sleeping by me last night said she just prayed they didn't get liquored up and shoot through the floor."

"I thought of that. Compared to Boston, or, in fact, any place I've ever been, everyone you meet is armed to the teeth."

I coughed, but Thomas seemed oblivious to the fact that we ourselves carried an a.r.s.enal. It occurred to me that Kansas and his own activities there must have until very recently presented themselves in a rather abstract way to Thomas. I said, "How many slaves are there in Kansas Territory?"

"I don't know."

Mr. Graves turned over in his sleep, as if any discussion at all of the goose question concerned him. I said, "Are you afraid? You've been on the sea. You've been to the Amazon."

"And to the Indies. And to Cuba. And also to Haiti. And parts of New York City aren't so friendly, either. But in those places the reasons men have to kill you are simple-they want your money, most of the time, or something else you have. And the reason they have to kill each other is simpler still-family enmity. Here it seems like anything is a reason to kill you-disagreement on the slavery question is one thing, but just how you talk or how you look is another, or, maybe, just how the killer feels at that moment. Killing you might just be boasting by other means."

The night air was undeniably soft and fragrant with some exotic but comforting scent. I said, "My sisters would have it that my father was a handsome gentleman, and he certainly turned himself out that way, to the very last. But he had a great affinity for rough river characters who had something to sell or could be made to buy. Once, when my mother told him how much they frightened her, coming to the house, I heard him say, 'Any man who says he's killed somebody, or claims he's going to on the smallest provocation, certainly has not and absolutely will not. I'm safer with a boaster than I am with a silent man who doesn't drain off his resentment a few words at a time.' "

"I've been thinking of that. But Kansas, here, seems like a new place entirely. We can't tell if anything we already know is true."

I said, as if my first day in Kansas Territory hadn't been the strangest of my life, "How bad could it be?"

Now we pulled our blankets to us and spread them as best we could on the long gra.s.s and made what seemed to be a comfortable bed, but when we lay down in them, it turned out that our heads were below our feet, a most uncomfortable position. And simply turning in the other direction somehow transformed gra.s.s that had been soft and welcoming into tufty b.u.mps. We shifted again, this way and that. I was sleepy, now, and sure Mr. Graves would be up and discoursing at the first light or before. I drifted off, felt a hump under my hip, turned, moved an inch or two, eased onto my back. Suddenly, the prairie made me a perfect bed, formed just for my shape and ease. I opened my eyes to better appreciate the miracle. There was the moon, rising late, and there, against it, was the box of "harness." I turned back to Thomas, intending to solicit a promise that he would dispose of it tomorrow in Lawrence, or the next day at the latest, but he was peacefully asleep.

The embers of our fire faded and died, the moon rose higher and diminished to the size of a small coin. Mr. Graves and Thomas slept on, Mr. Graves, it appeared, in perfect comfort, as his loud, moist snores were uninterrupted and nearly mechanical in their regularity. My husband had a worse time, often turning and jerking against the hard ground, or sighing, or groaning. But I thought he was sleeping, at least lightly, while I seemed to myself wide awake, though in retrospect, I would say, my anxious resolve to keep my eye on that box indicated that I, too, was partly dreaming. Nevertheless, I did hear the very first approach of men on horses, the only ones since early in the evening. After some minutes of only the clopping sound of shod hooves, one of them said in a low voice, "Now what do we have here?" The tones were distinctly Tennessee, and I, who had always expected to be bold and enterprising, closed my eyes at once and played possum. The men were not drunk, or if they were, they were very quietly drunk, because another man answered as softly, "Found us some Yankees, huh?"

"Could be."

Then a third horse came up, and this man was drunk, because he started shouting, "Git up, you G- d- Yankees! Sun's up early this morning! Git up! Haw haw haw! Time to greet the G- d- day!"

Thomas was on his feet in half a second, no playing possum for him, but Mr. Graves took a moment, and then only sat up in his blankets. I opened my eyes. It was nowhere near dawn. Even though I hadn't been asleep, I felt shocked and groggy-my flesh seemed to be ringing with the suddenness of the intrusion. Then I felt a hard edge like the end of a pole poking into my side. It was the barrel of a long rifle. One of the men had dismounted. He said, "You, too. You git up, too." I stood, and my hair fell down my back to my waist.

"G- d- if it an't a woman. A big, ugly one, but-"

"d.i.c.k, shut up! You're drunk and I'm tired of you and I might have to shoot you one of these days if you don't quit spouting off your mouth."

Mr. Graves, still sitting in his blanket, said, "How are you boys tonight? Is there something we can do for you?"

"Where ya headed?"

"California road," a.s.serted Mr. Graves.

"You an't taking this wagon to any California, haw!"

"Well, sir," said Mr. Graves, "I can fully comprehend your skepticism, though folks have made it all the way to Utah Territory on foot and with handcarts, but no, this vehicle don't look like a California-bound vessel- no covering, for one thing, and the sun gets high and hot out there-but I myself am not going to California, nosirree. I myself am going back to Missoura as soon as I join these folks with their party out past Lecompton. They got their mas and pas waiting, and nearly a regiment of sisters and brothers and all. We've been hurrying to meet up with them." I noticed that Mr. Graves's mode of speech had shaded perceptibly toward "Tennessee."

"Late in the year to be going to California."

"That's what I said," declared Mr. Graves. "That's exactly what I myself told them."

I could still feel the mark where the rifle barrel had touched me, and even in the dark I could see that one of the men was looking through the wagon, pushing boxes around and lifting up lids. Thomas saw it, too. Though he kept his eyes on the two men talking to us, he kept his arm tightly round my waist, and every time I stared in the direction of the wagon, he pinched me gently.

"They said, 'All the better opportunity to trust in the Lord.' Can you believe that? These folks are from a sect out Indiana way. They don't believe in marriage nor having children, nor anything like that. Go ahead and talk to them, but all you'll get out of 'em is the children of Israel and the blood of Isaiah and suchlike. This trip an't been nothing for me in the conversation line."

"Shut up," said the leader of the three men.

Thomas cleared his throat. I felt mine close up. He said, "That's not quite right. We do believe in marriage, but we remain celibate even inside marriage as a discipline and a form of reverence."

"G- d-!" exclaimed the drunk man. "Henry, you oughtta hear this!"

"What?" said the man at the wagon.

"My bet is you're headed for Lawrence," said the leader.

"Haw!" shouted the man at the wagon, triumphantly. I watched him lift out the terrible box, not without difficulty, though obviously he was a strong man. Thomas pinched me, and I turned to look at our interlocutors.

"You got Free State written all over you," said the leader.

"Look et this!" said the man at the wagon. "Some luck!" I closed my eyes.

"What?" said the drunk man.

"Highly rectified whiskey! Half a barrel! Full to the top!"

The drunk man ran to the wagon to see the miracle. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the harness box sitting on the ground, untouched and disregarded.

"Folks in sects don't carry whiskey," said the leader.

"Well, that's my whiskey," said Mr. Graves, his voice hollow with regret. "I do a bit in the trading line, you see," he offered. "Sometimes a little milk or vegetables or flour. I had a stove once. Bought her for five dollars and carried her out to Big Spring and sold her for twenty. That was a good-"

"Shut up. You think we're thieves?"

Mr. Graves coughed, not quite knowing how to answer this question.

d.i.c.k said, "Haw! We're just citizens looking for some of them Free State traitors they bring in to vote for them black abolitionist laws and steal our n.i.g.g.e.rs! We got farms! Just out patrolling the countryside, makin' sure of the peace!"

"Put the whiskey back, Henry!" said the leader, whom no one had named.

"Would you boys like to tap that barrel and have a taste?" suggested Mr. Graves. "To kind of break your fast?"

"Haw!" said Henry, still standing by the wagon, his foot nearly on the harness box. "d.i.c.k, here, an't fasted from whiskey in ten year! Not for a day, not for a hour!" Now he began to laugh, and d.i.c.k joined him, as if drunkenness were the funniest thing in the world. d.i.c.k pointed his rifle toward the sky and must have pulled the trigger. The sudden report was so startling and frightening that a red fog or veil seemed to jump up in front of my eyes. I only distantly heard the leader say, "d.i.c.k, you're a stupid man. If you weren't married to my sister, I'd shoot you right now."

"She don't like him, anyway," said Henry.

Out on the prairie, a surge of yipping and howling. Coyotes, no doubt. And I saw that the mules, though hobbled, had disappeared.

Thomas stood up straight and quiet, unarmed but gazing calmly at the man still sitting on his horse. Somehow, the clownishness of d.i.c.k and Henry had shifted the tone of the situation, and the man on the horse soon dropped his gaze, as if embarra.s.sed. But he said, "I know what you look like, Free Stater, and I hope not to have to see you in these parts again." He turned his horse and galloped away, leaving the other two, but they mounted not long after that, as if they could do nothing without him. d.i.c.k did shout, as he was galloping off, "You are ugly, ma'am! I know you can't help it, but you are!"

The first gray strip of dawn paled our faces as we sat down again in our blankets. We all looked at one another for a moment, but to be honest, there didn't seem to be much to say except, as Roland Brereton's mother had said so many years ago, "Praise the Lord!"

By the time the men had caught the mules and I had found some biscuits and other comestibles in Mr. Graves's traveling kit, it was full day and promising to be a hot one. I had put my hair up, but I could feel perspiration trickling down my back, so that I had to roll up my sleeves and unb.u.t.ton the collar of my bodice. Thomas gave me a quizzical look-he didn't seem, and hadn't yet seemed, to even feel the warmth. I put on a white poke bonnet that I had purchased in Kansas City. No one had ever seen the like of it in Quincy, but it worked wonders. When we set out, I walked alongside the wagon. Lawrence, Mr. Graves said, was but ten miles or so from where we were standing.

It took about five of those miles for Mr. Graves to resume his former volubility, and another mile after that for him to put the three intruders in their place. "I was never impressed by those three," he said. "They was just talkin' through their hats. I seen the one, the quiet-spoken one, though I an't ever heard his name. Now, the point of these encounters is just to put a little fear into those who an't quite sound on the goose question. It's harmless, really, just a little fun. I'll admit we're a rough sort of folk out here in K.T., but we an't badly disposed, taken all in all. You just got to know how to take us."

He rattled on, but Thomas, who had at least held up his end of the conversation the day before, remained silent. I kept walking, a few feet from the wagon, happy to be on my own. I knew perfectly well how to take Henry and d.i.c.k and their leader, whoever he was. I hated them.

CHAPTER 7.

I Am Taken in by Some Citizens of Lawrence [image]There is no point of domestic economy, which more seriously involves the health and daily comfort of American women, than the proper construction of houses. There are five particulars, to which attention should be given, in building a house; namely, economy of labor, economy of money, economy of health, economy of comfort, and good taste. - p. 258 I'L ADMIT THAT after our night in Kansas City, I had lost a portion of my faith in the bills I'd seen back in Quincy advertising lovely towns with their wide streets and gracious buildings. Lawrence was, even then, a famous town, though it has become so famous since that I can hardly remember how famous it was before I saw it. I do know that as I was walking along, I imagined our destination as a pleasant, neat, whitewashed New England village, replete with steeples and mercantile establishments, a library and a school, set neatly in the midst of a smiling, tablelike prairie. I foresaw that when I got there, a gla.s.s of clean drinking water, a clean, private bed, and perhaps even a bath might be waiting for me. I was eager to see Lawrence.

But first we came to Franklin. The road had taken us through a stream called the Wakarusa-a trickle of water at the bottom of a steep hill was what it seemed to me-and then, a bit after that, some cabins, sunbedazzled and humble. It did not look as if anyone had made an effort to build anything here that wasn't absolutely essential to survival, nor, in fact, did it look as if there was a reason for this town to be here at all-the river was thin and forbidding of access, and there was no other advantage to the spot. We pa.s.sed Franklin.

It was clear long before we got there that Lawrence was a town where a great deal of business was conducted. We met up with wagons of all descriptions-open like ours, or covered with white canopies; pulled by mules, horses, or oxen; full of goods and full of men, women, and children. Once, we got in among a group of four wagons from Ohio carrying seven families heading for the town of Manhattan, K.T.-some thirty people in all, including (and I looked closely at these two) a woman who had given birth to her baby two days before and was now sitting up on the seat of the wagon, laughing and talking as easy as you please. She had the baby in her arms, but she was shading its little head from the sun with her shawl, so I couldn't see it. Her six-year-old walked along beside the wagon, and two others peeped out from inside, their faces round and cheerful. The lady herself was a rebuke to Miss Beecher-she looked blooming and none the worse for her confinement. I thought about her all the way along the river road that runs into Lawrence.

Franklin was a good preparation for Lawrence, in that after Franklin, no town could disappoint. And as soon as you got into Lawrence, you saw that whatever the town might then lack, such things would not be lacking for long, because everyone in Lawrence was as eager as could be. I have to say that my sisters and their husbands were used to laughing a bit at New Englanders. Harriet said that you could keep a neat house without puffing yourself up so much about it as New Engenders did, and Roland Brereton d-d all New Englanders as interfering and sanctimonious dogooder abolitionists that needed to be shot (though he was abashed enough around Thomas, possibly the first New Englander he'd ever been related to, and anyway, the satisfaction of marrying me off overwhelmed all other considerations), but it was wonderful to see, in Lawrence, what a set of New Englanders could do in the way of setting up a town in new country and making it run.

All the streets were named for states, and the best street was Ma.s.sachusetts Street. There were buildings of all kinds and in all states of construction-stone walls rose beside frame buildings, which sat next to lean-tos built of hay. Some residences were dug right into the ground, and their owners were busy building over them. Other houses had come in pieces, or so we were told, from the States; one hotel, where we wanted to stay but decided not to, because of contagion, was called the Cincinnati House, because it had been floated somehow from Cincinnati and put back together in Lawrence. The streets were dusty paths, but they looked very much as if they wanted to be streets and soon would fulfill their ambitions. Almost as soon as we got to Lawrence, Mr. Graves took us into a new store, run by a man named Stearns, that was well stocked with not only local produce, like b.u.t.ter, eggs, apples, and melons, but also stoves and chairs and tools and buckets and plates and cups and yard goods and even books. Mr. Graves swelled its stock of highly rectified whiskey and seemed pleased with the price he got. He also sold the man some spoons, a black coat, three boots, a wooden leg with the fourth boot glued onto it, a bushel of unripe pears from Missouri, and a saddle. Then Mr. Graves was happy and carried us, as a favor, to the top of Mount Oread, the great Lawrence landmark, which looked out of town toward the prairies to the south. By this time, it was nearly dusk, and Mr. Graves invited us to gaze upon and enjoy the prairie sunset as if he himself had arranged it for our benefit.

Thomas had asked at the Cincinnati House after his friends from Ma.s.sachusetts, but no one there knew any of them, or rather, everyone at the Cincinnati House who had been in Lawrence for any time at all was ill, and everyone still on his or, mostly, her feet was almost as new to the country as we were. Mr. Graves himself, afraid of infection, only called in at the window-he wouldn't by any means enter the door. At the Stearns establishment, we were told that almost everyone was at Big Spring for the day, making up a government for the Free Staters to war against the illegitimate government that the Missourians had forced upon the State. I have to say that I heard all this, sometimes sitting in Mr. Graves's wagon and sometimes leaning against it, but I didn't pay much attention. I was too busy staring at the building here, the business there, the animals and people walking to and fro from here to there. There was a kind of New England righteousness about it, about the way that the town looked and the way that the people carried themselves. Thomas, who had been a bit of an odd but intriguing duck in Quincy, looked right at home here.

Thomas did not let either the undesirability of the Cincinnati House or the absence of his friends perturb him now that he was in Kansas, and I found myself taking on some of his equanimity. As we rode down from the top of Mount Oread with Mr. Graves, a man pa.s.sed us on horseback, and Thomas said, in a voice entirely unsurprised, "There's Bisket now. h.e.l.lo, Bisket!"

Mr. Bisket was an exceedingly tall and thin young man, certainly no older than I. His long arms and legs seemed to gangle around the compact dimensions of his pony. He drew to a halt. "Newton! We stopped looking for you and thought sure you were dead! But you an't! Halleluia!"

Mr. Bisket turned his horse and walked alongside our wagon in the deepening evening gloom. Thomas turned to me. "Well, Bisket," he said, "I was delayed in Quincy with Howell, and so I found myself getting married! Lydia, my dear, this is Bisket, Charles Bisket! He's a member of our company! Bisket, my wife, Lydia Newton!"

Mr. Bisket leaned over and extended one of his wandlike hands in my direction. I could see that Mr. Graves was waiting to be introduced, as well, just as if he were one of the family. I said, "We've been taken under the wing of Mr. David Graves, here."

"David B. Graves, David B. Graves." Mr. Graves grinned and took the wand into his own paw. Even though Mr. Bisket had generally adopted the garb of the west-blue jean trousers, a blue shirt, a red neckerchief, and a hat with a large brim, the two men looked as if they belonged to different kingdoms-one animal and one plant, perhaps. Mr. Bisket declared that we had missed it this time.

"What's that?" said my husband.

"Well, now. The new governor's come in the last few days, and they love him up in Westport, and he loves them, too. He's all for the bogus legislature, and he told those fellows up there that it would be well for Kansas and Missouri inst.i.tutions to harmonize! He's proslave all the way!" Mr. Bisket glanced suddenly at David B. Graves, who adopted a look of bland impenetrability.

Thomas said, "What about our claims?"

"Aw, that'll be okay. That'll work out fine in the end. But I wish I would have gone up to Big Spring for the convention. I bet that was something!" I rather thought that the presence of Mr. Graves, though, modified his enthusiasm.