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By Root 1651 0

no further discussion, we gathered up what we could carry, including the plates, which were nicer than anything I had, though too small to be really useful, and we took it home. The next day, we went back and made a travois by lashing together some of the rails from the fence, and we dragged home as many of those as we could. The day after that, Thomas brought home the door and the window. I was so happy to have that window! I stuffed the bullet hole with a piece of cloth. That was one chink the wind would not get through. At first, of course, we pondered the ironies of the situation: Were we prospering from someone else’s loss, either the Jenkinses’ or those Missourians’? But shortly we stopped cutting it so fine, and not only did we make good use of what there was; we half hoped to come upon another such cache. I thought of Susannah Jenkins’s own observation that K.T. had coarsened her. But that made it seem as though how K.T. changed you was all bad. In my opinion, K.T. made you see the world as it was. Your actions followed that.

We lived quietly until mid-June. The rains tapered off, and our crop seemed to be doing well enough. The hunting was good, though not so good as the autumn before, and we ate well. I got used to the loneliness, even started to like it. Sometimes Thomas and I went a whole day without saying much and then didn’t read in the evening, either, but sat on our step and stared out over the prairie at the lengthening shadows and the golden sunshine and the wide, busy sky. We didn’t share what we were fancying, but I wondered about Louisa’s condition, and how it would be if I should find myself in the same condition, and what our claim would be like a year thence if there was a child upon it. I made up rules—I would go into town for the winter again, so as to avoid Mrs. James’s fate; I would keep hunting all summer and fall, to have good meat every day; I would forage for some plants I knew were good in such times; I would go into Lawrence and stay for a few days, so that Louisa could teach me to knit; I would get Charles to build me a real cradle, a rocking one, so that I wouldn’t have to run the danger of having the child in the bed with us. I knew all about how I would do it, down to the last detail. But I didn’t tell Thomas a word.

Now the eighteenth of June rolled around, exactly four weeks after the sacking of Lawrence. We had borrowed a little wagon from Mr. James— four wheels and a platform was what it was, really, a handmade, K.T.-type wagon, and our plan was to go into Lawrence. We had some business, I forget what it was, but really, I think, we felt that we both desired and deserved to go into town, see our friends, and find out the news. I also had conceived a terrible apprehension about Frank, who had been out to see us but twice since our departure from Lawrence. When I’d left him in Louisa’s charge, it seemed a good solution to his reluctance to go out to the claim (a reluctance I sympathized with), and I hadn’t thought about it much for the first week or two. But then I’d awakened one night with the certain knowledge that Louisa was simply letting the boy run wild and Charles, his nominal employer, would have better intentions but fewer opportunities for overseeing him, as he was still traveling to Leavenworth, now twice a week, to carry the mail. And so we hitched up the little wagon and left the claim without a backward glance. It was already a heavy, windy day, even early in the morning, and there wasn’t much freshness anywhere.

When we got to Lawrence, there was talk of Old Brown, indeed, but not of "those killings"; rather of a battle that had taken place ten days after them in the Black Jack ravine, down south and east somewhere. It appeared that a few southerners had set out from Lecompton to look for Old Brown, "thinking," said Mrs. Bush, "that those events down near Pottawatomie might be traceable to him or his sons. And they captured two of his sons, and burned the one boy’s house down, and made him and his brother march in chains under the hot sun back to Lecompton, and he