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In fact, when I paid attention, which I hadn’t been doing heretofore, I could make out what the two men were saying quite well, even over the humming of the girl. I set myself to listen, full of conviction that the information I needed would be forthcoming if I just listened long enough.

"It’s a whole load," said the new Mr. Graves.

"Men’s or women’s?"

"Both. Mostly men’s, I think. But they an’t gonna cost you nothing. Their owners is all dead!"

"But I got to go all the way to Saint Louis to get ’em."

"Bailey might bring ’em up as far as Lexington."

"And I an’t heard anyone talk about shoes. I an’t sure there’s much of a market for old shoes in K.T."

"Lots of ’em are boots. Anyways, you got to make your own market sometimes."

"In my opinion, David B., dead men’s shoes are a risky venture."

"In my opinion, cousin, nothing ventured, nothing gained."

"I’ll ponder over it."

We went along for a ways. Other horsemen and people in wagons were about, and sometimes the two men hailed them.

I dozed off.

A loud and merry laugh woke me up. "They did?" exclaimed the new Mr. Graves. "Sent ’em back down the river without their rifles? Haw haw! I like that one!"

’Jim Lane was in a state, let me tell you," said the old Mr. Graves. "When he recruited those boys in Chicago, he had to sober them up one by one, then teach the difference between east and west, so they’d know how to get to K.T!"

"Paddy don’t know the way, haw haw!" exclaimed the new Mr. Graves.

"And our boys, they said, ’Now, we’ll give you two bucks apiece for your rifles, boys, but only if you don’t fuss. If you fuss, we’ll give you a kick apiece in the hind end!’ "

"That’s what they got, haw haw!"

By this time I was wide awake, perceiving that their conversation had turned to the political situation. I tried to be quiet, but I must have let on somehow, because they moved closer together and lowered their voices, so that I could catch only a word here and there. Two of the words I caught were "Lane’s army" and another word was "Nebraska." I had heard about this before—Jim Lane had recruited another army in Iowa, in addition to the Chicago group the men had just been discussing, and was bringing it to Lawrence through Nebraska. It was supposed to be a well-equipped northern fighting band, plenty of guns and ammunition and officers trained in military colleges in Indiana and Ohio who were disaffected by the fact that the regular U.S. Army, like every other branch of the government, was in the power of the slavocrats. Louisa and Charles had talked about the plan a few days before. It was mixed up somehow with the idea of Kansas becoming an independent republic, as Texas had been for a while. An independent Free-Soil republic with its own army and the capital at Topeka. Well, people would talk about anything.

And suddenly Thomas was with me. Rolling over that stretch of prairie that we had rolled over in such a state of innocence only a few months before brought him to me. I remembered how I used to feel his presence as a kind of largeness pressing against me, and then I would look over, and he would just be sitting there, mild and alert, taking everything in and thinking about it. That was the distinctive thing about Thomas: he was always thinking about it. You didn’t have that feeling with most people; rather, you had a feeling that nothing was going on with them at all. Even Louisa, who was certainly an intelligent woman: if she wasn’t talking about something you didn’t have the feeling that she was thinking about it. I remembered something I hadn’t thought of since it happened — the time we’d camped on the prairie, our first night on the prairie ever, and Thomas had taken my hand between his and rubbed my thumb and asked me if I was afraid. Hadn’t I said no? Hadn’t the very grasp of his hand driven out the fear that I had felt earlier in the day? How strange that was, all things considered. And shouldn’t I learn a lesson from that, to be afraid right now? And yet I wasn’t afraid at all, even of the