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A few days later, with the weather calm but the party still fresh in our memories, Thomas and I took the mule and Jeremiah out to our claim to plan our return there, as we couldn’t live with Charles and Louisa forever. The weather had moderated but was still freezing—the ice on the river was solid, and the prairie was covered with snow. Even so, we rode hatless; Thomas had his coat thrown open, and I laid my shawl across the mule’s withers. We thought it must be in the twenties—a bona fide heat wave.

Perhaps because we remembered our contented moments of the fall, we were happy and eager on the way out there. Thomas grinned at every sign of the coming spring, and I did, too. Soon it would be my birthday. I would turn twenty-one in K.T., and it seemed like a fine thing, and who knew what my twenty-second year would bring? With luck, a child, the end of the war, and everything else that was good, as well. At any rate, all the signs looked hopeful to us—the black shapes of crows and hawks wheeling in the blue sky, the moisture on the dark branches of the trees along the river, the tracks of animals in the snow, revealing the lives that were starting up again all over the prairie. There were even hoofprints and the tracks of sleigh runners, suggesting the eagerness of settlers who refused to wait for the spring to make their entrance into K.T.

Thomas thought the war would end. "I’m telling you, Lidie," he said, "this winter goes to prove that slaves can’t live here, and that news will get back to South Carolina by the time the snow melts here. There’s a man they talk about, over to the west somewhere, who had his six slaves with him, and they were so cold they couldn’t work, so he had to take care of them all winter, and his wife had to cook for them! They’re leaving as soon as the thaw sets in."

We had a laugh over that.

"No," he said, "people eventually see the truth of their situation. Right now, the slave power is mad because they think someone is trying to tell them what to do. They hate that more than anything. But that’s the reaction of a hothead. I think cooler heads will learn from our experiences here. This was surely a winter for New Englanders!"

I didn’t disagree; I was ready to go him one better. "What about the Missourians? They’ve felt this winter, too, so they must see the writing on the wall. Once folks in K.T. show them what can be done in such a place, well, maybe they’ll stop and think."

Nor did we hesitate to speculate on more personal matters. We planned for them to go all our way, as well. For a girl, I had always liked the name Emma, and for a boy, Thomas favored the name of his father, Abel. Why not twins? I thought, though it seemed like tempting fate to say such a thing aloud. But I gave that mule a good kick, just for the joy of the thought, and we trotted out over the prairie snow, laughing and calling out to one another.

I should say that because Thomas was ten years older than I, I always assumed that he knew more than I did. His experience was wider, and he had seen parts of the world I could barely imagine, not least of these Boston itself. A wider experience, I have found, generally gives one a larger expectation of evil. No one can foresee the future, but those who have lived longer can foresee a little bit of it a little better than others. Nevertheless, when we came to our cabin and saw what had become of it in the winter weather, it seemed to me that Thomas was more surprised and more shaken than I was. For both of us, though, all giddiness evaporated. The place looked demolished, dreary, and desolate.

First of all, the fence was broken down almost completely, the fence posts knocked over and the rails scattered and broken. Animals had come along and gnawed at them, too, attesting to the scarcity of forage for the prairie beasts. All the outdoor arrangements we had made were scattered and destroyed—foxes, deer, wolves perhaps, raccoons, skunks, all had passed through and rooted among our things in their separate