The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [26]
"I have."
"Does anyone know about them?"
"My friends in Kansas have been waiting for them these four weeks."
"How many are there?"
"Twelve."
I looked at them again. They of course didn’t move, but they seemed alive. He said, "Sharps rifles. Twelve Sharps rifles."
I said, "Their barrels are very short."
"They’re carbines." Then: "Can you really shoot? Frank said you can."
"Will I be required to?"
He didn’t answer that. "I haven’t heard from my friends, but the newspapers I’ve seen around here today run pretty hot. Of course, you never know what they’re putting in just to work people up."
"I can shoot a bottle or a pumpkin. Frank and I did that."
We were silent for a moment, looking at the short black barrels of the weapons, then he slipped his arm about my waist. He said, "When I set out from Massachusetts, I knew these might put me in danger once I got near Kansas. The danger isn’t going to be any less just because I found a wife on the way."
"Oh, it might be," I said, "if I look sufficiently girlish and you seem sufficiently callow. My goodness me, just what are those ugly things? How did they get mixed up with my quilts and feather beds? I thought we’d ordered a stove!"
"I calculated in the night that we can still go back up the river and cross through Iowa and Nebraska and then turn south."
"I thought we were in a tremendous hurry. September first is in three days."
"It’s a dilemma. In Quincy, I estimated the danger as rather small, but here in slave country, with what the Missouri papers are saying—"
"You’re too used to looking and acting like an abolitionist. Do what Roland Brereton does: smile at the Negro children and frown severely at the men and women, as if you are ruminating over some soon-to-be-deserved punishment, and you’ll fit in perfectly. You mustn’t be eager to befriend the porters and the draymen and the serving maids, or to make it up to them that they live in bondage. It’s one thing to be an abolitionist passing through Missouri, and it’s quite another to be an abolitionist passing through Missouri with twelve Sharps rifles."
He nodded, then pulled me more tightly against him. My tone of course was light, but I wasn’t happy by any means about our baggage.
He nailed the lid back on the box. An hour later, I watched it being carried aboard the Independence with as much apparent indifference as if it contained the "harness" that was written on the side.
Travel up the Missouri was slower and more distressing than travel down the Mississippi. I had plenty of time to ponder the rifles Thomas was transporting to his friends in Kansas, people I had not met but whom I’d imagined as a small group of aspiring farmers whose ambitions ran to a few head of cattle and horses, a few acres of corn and flax. That they shared his abolitionist feelings I’d taken as evidence of benignity and charitableness—my sister Miriam, after all, though peppery and uncommonly plainspoken, was the kindest person I’d ever met, the only truly kind person in our family, if kindness could be defined as eagerness to do good in things large and small whether that goodness accrued to one’s own benefit or not. When Roland Brereton made of abolitionists great demons of aggression whose first delights were stealing Negroes and killing their owners, and, if that wasn’t possible, forcing the Congress and the states to pass laws that would do the same thing with less fun about it, I thought of Miriam and of Roger Howell or of "poor Dr. Eels," who suffered so for his beliefs. I’d thought Roland saw the dark shadow of his own self in those supposed abolitionists. It was Roland, after all, who said from time to time that folks were going to bring slavery back to Illinois, mark his