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"Well, it waren’t gone to be Missy Helen. Dat’s for sure. But you is all right now. You got you color back. I reckon it didn’t hurt you so much."

"I suppose I’ll know that later."

"Spose so." And she went out.

Some time after that, Helen ran in. She had an evening frock on, of pale-yellow silk, and her hair was elaborately done up in a braided weave. She was smiling but agitated. She exclaimed, "Oh, Louisa, Papa is terrifically eager to meet you, so he sent Ike off right away, and now Ike’s back, and Mr. LaFrance has promised to send Isabelle over in the wagon first thing! Isn’t that splendid? But the other news is so frightening, I hardly dare tell you about it, in your condition, but I am bursting! Papa says not to worry, they won’t get near us, he will hold them off, but—" She began gasping, then sat down on the bed, folded her hands in her lap, closed her eyes, and composed herself. "Papa says Lane’s army in Nebraska, the one he ran away from, was just a ruse, and now he has a whole other one, three or four hundred or more, and he’s been seen in Olathe! Mr. Perkins, who’s down below, knew a man whose cousin saw him himself! You can’t mistake Jim Lane—oh, he is a cruel-looking man, and they say his eyes are dead black until he decides to kill someone, and then they get a strange red light in them! And a man saw him and identified him positively and overheard him say that he was going to move on Missouri now! Oh, my!" She put her hands to her throat. "And Papa and Mr. Harris, he’s down below as well, both say that that’s been the plan all along, that the abolitionist criminals have all along meant to run us off our farms and steal our factories and bring in a lot of Irishmen to work in them for no wages at all, and you know, they never take care of their workers, but when they can’t work, no matter how old they are, they just throw them out on the street to fend for themselves, and Chicago is full of those people, and Saint Louis, too. Bella told me about it in a letter—such a tragedy! But at the same time, it’s so dangerous! And they’ll do anything to a woman, they have no respect for women, beatings and everything unspeakable, and their best men don’t care a pin for it but just step over the bodies in the street and walk right past crying children as if they weren’t Christians at all!"

I dared not laugh at this torrent. I said, "I haven’t heard such things myself. I—"

"But Papa says that we have him, and Ike and Jess and Malachi, and Mr. Harris has twenty or thirty, both at the factory and on the farm, and of course there’s Morgan at home, though he’s only sixteen, and Stephen up at the college, and he would certainly come home, if danger threatened. Mr. Harris’s brothers were in the Texas war and are very bold fellows—but oh, I don’t know how I shall go to sleep! Just imagine, you are sleeping ever so peacefully, and you suddenly awaken in the middle of the night, to find an abolitionist in your room, staring down at you, some Old John Brown sort of person, who isn’t even human, really, but a terrible demon—oh, and you know he’s going to hack you to pieces right there!"

’John Brown didn’t hack any women to death." But I said it sheepishly, the only way you would say something like that.

"And you know, they round up your people, and they make them go off, whether they want to or no, even the mammies and little ones, and they drive them north like cattle or sheep or something, and then, when they’ve got them so far from home that they can’t ever return, no matter how much they want to, why, then they just let them go on their own. The skilled ones, like Mr. LaFrance’s Isabelle, they might be all right, you know, but not everyone is skilled like that. Papa says it’s even odds who takes care of whom. When the cholera came through here, my mama was out in the cabins washing and feeding and setting fires, and she wore herself out, so that Delia said to her that she wouldn’t have been surprised if Mama’d ended up laying down her own life for her people, and that was why Delia would