his men took over the prisoners and held them until a runner could get to Lawrence and summon the six-pound cannon they had there. Fifty horsemen then gathered near Titus’s place (which Papa insisted upon calling "Fort Titus") and attacked at dawn on the morning of August 16. A Free-Soiler was killed, then the cannon leveled a wall of one of the buildings, and then Titus surrendered. When Walker went in, he saw a printed handbill hanging on the wall, advertising a five-hundred-dollar reward for his own head, to be paid by Titus! Then, according to Papa’s reports, there was a great deal of fighting among the Free-Soilers about whether to kill the gallant Titus, but they hadn’t the manhood to do it, and so he and some of his cronies ("gallant allies," said Papa) were carted off to Lawrence and imprisoned. A mob of Lawrenceites tried to get to him and hang him, but Walker or someone managed to preserve him, saying that war must be carried out by rule, and what we had here was a war. Papa agreed. All of Papa’s friends agreed. What had been, on the one hand, a problem of governing and, on the other, a fight was now clearly rising up the scale and would soon be, if it wasn’t already, an actual war. The hardest piece of all this intelligence, for me, was when Papa declared that the prisoners in Lecompton—that is, Governor Robinson and his associates—were to be summarily hung in retaliation for all of this. I will say that I felt my face go white and my body go cold when he said it, but I was so used to dissembling by now that I only smiled and said, "Surely that couldn’t be according to the law," and then Papa said, "What law is there in Kansas?" and then it turned out not to be true. Those prisoners remained where they were, and other prisoners, taken in all of these skirmishes, were exchanged, and so hostilities, at least around Lawrence, ceased for the time being. Soon there were other rumors: Proslave households around Tecumseh were attacked and all their goods stolen and taken to Topeka, where the Free Staters divided them up and took them home. (Papa believed this one, but I didn’t.) A man in Leavenworth made a bet that he could scalp an abolitionist before sundown, and won it. (I believed this, but Papa said he didn’t think any southerner could do such a thing. I kept my beliefs to myself; Papa did not. Helen believed every bad thing she heard.) Many names came up, but Frank’s wasn’t among them, nor Charles’s nor any other that I knew. That was my only comfort.
I summarize these events because at the time they were extraordinarily hard to understand, what with the comings and goings of Papa and his friends, the dislocations of the housekeeping and farming at Day’s End Plantation, and my own confusions and frights, not to mention Helen’s. I could not help worrying about Louisa and Charles and the Bushes and my other friends in Lawrence, especially as Louisa was approaching her time, and there was no telling what the Missourians were planning to do to Lawrence should Lane be unable to defend the town (and he was surely unable to defend the town). In Papa’s normally neat and orderly house, the unfinished canvas lay on the hall floor for three days before Lorna and I rolled it up and set it off to the side. The pots of paint and brushes somehow got out onto the porch railing, where they were still sitting, untouched, when I left Day’s End Plantation for good, some time later. For me, these things were the emblem of all the order that ended then and all the disorder that began.
One of these days, toward supper, Helen and I were up in her room, sorting through her gowns, as she had decided that she would make do with what she had for the winter and not ask Papa for anything luxurious until, should it happen, she was ready to put together her wedding clothes. Minna’s wedding, to take place in October, had come in for much discussion, also, and Helen was trying to be sweet and judicious at the same time. "I don’t think," she said, "that Minna really understands what we are having to put up with."
"Have you written to her?"
"Not