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By Root 1793 0

and locked the door, then I helped her draw some heavy boxes in front of it. The shop had two small windows, and in front of these we tacked up blankets. Then we dragged all of the goods that might have any value to a back room and locked that door. After that, we ran up the stairs and closed that door behind us, and pushed the bedstead Thomas and I had been using in front of it, then we retreated to Louisa’s room and climbed into her giant rosewood bedstead together and hid down under the quilts. Louisa couldn’t shoot, but I had the two carbines near at hand.

We took somewhat different positions on the shooting of Jones. We both agreed that it had to be done, on the analogy of removing a burr under a saddle or easing an unbearable goad. "Now he’s gone," I said, "things will actually calm down, because he’s been the moving force behind Shannon and the rest of them, even President Pierce, I’ll bet. None of them cares about Lawrence as much as Jones did."

"But now they will," said Louisa. "Now, by killing him, we’ve proved our very lawlessness. They’ll view him as a martyr, if you ask me. This will galvanize them!"

"But everyone, everyone in his right mind, knew what Jones really was!"

"Who is in their right mind? When the K.T. question comes up in certain quarters, it drives people right out of their right mind."

I must say that though we were worried about our husbands and Frank, at the same time our own coziness gave us a deep-down faith in their safety. Louisa, who had followed some of the more advanced thinkers in Boston and the east, even said that should something happen to any of them, we would feel it, a sort of unearthly vibration, communicated to us from the spiritual realm. That sounded reassuring to me.

Mostly what we thought about the killing of Jones was that now things would go one way or the other, that our uncertain spring, all fraught with speculation, would turn into a summer where at least all the parties knew where they stood. We blew out the candle, and then we drifted off, or I did. The next thing I knew, Louisa had let Thomas in, and he had Frank and Roger Lacey with him. Two candles were lit. I sat up in bed. I said, "Is there a war?"

"Everything is quiet," said Thomas. "And I know where Charles is." Louisa nodded. Across the room, the two boys were silent. I thought they were tired. I said, "My goodness, Frank! What do you mean by getting Thomas out at all hours to be looking for you? I am going to have to send you back to your mother if I can’t handle you! You are as wild as an Indian and twice as self-sufficient!"

Thomas said, "Frank was out by the Missourians’ camp."

"What in the world were you doing out there, boy? I thought you were getting some supper."

"We went out there," said Frank.

"Well, we know that."

"Everybody was out there. Governor Robinson was, and Senator Lane. The whole town was out there."

I looked at Thomas. He cocked his eyebrow and shrugged, as if to say he didn’t think so, and then said, "They had their guns with them."

I was shocked. "Whatever for! You are boys! You do not need to go armed about your business!"

The boys didn’t say anything.

I said, "Frank, I’m going to take your gun away from you before it gets you in trouble, I swear! Or I’m going to send you back to Illinois, because another night like this, well... "

But the fact was, Frank was already out of hand, had been out of hand even back in Quincy. As a last insult, I said, "I don’t know what is going to become of you, Frank. You have no schooling to speak of, you run around on your own all the time, I don’t know what you eat or when you sleep. You do not live a well-regulated life!" But whose fault was that?

"I got a hundred dollars, though," he offered.

"Oh, my goodness! Go to bed!"

It was three a.m. We bedded the boys down on some quilts in the shop and forbade them to leave before morning. Later, when Thomas and I went to bed, he said to me in a low voice, "He knows who shot Jones."

"How does he know?"

"He knows. I heard him and Roger whispering about it when I was bringing them home,