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"Why is that?" said Thomas.

"Well, they got doings up there in a day or two. Now, I may be one hundred percent sound on the goose question, but I been around, and I know that not everyone can be like me. You know, there’s two types of folks around here. One wants to have things go their way, and the other just wants to see what happens. My guess is that you are a man of the first type, while I am a man of the second type. I can get along with you." Mr. Graves gave a huge laugh, a huge expectoration, and a huge belch, then he walked off to find his mules and his wagon.

Thomas took my arm as we walked a little ways down the "street."

"In Lawrence, we’ll find where my friends have gone and what sort of claim they’ve got for me."

"What are the doings in Big Spring? Where’s that?"

"I suppose it’s farther up the territory. I heard a lot of talk last night."

"I did, too, about lashing some abolitionist to a log and—"

"Tarring and feathering, too. And killings."

We thought simultaneously of the "harness."

He said, "I’ve checked our boxes at the steamboat landing. Untouched."

"The harness stays in Lawrence, then?"

I could have sworn that Thomas nodded frankly in answer to this question, because it was my fixed impression that soon, very soon, we would be relieved of its burden and confirmed in our simple identity as a newly married couple intending to settle in Kansas, drawn by the salubrious climate and the numerous improvements to towns and homesteads already achieved by the hard work and enterprise of settlers whose only goal in life was to welcome the rest of us and smooth our paths. But perhaps my impression was wrong, because as we turned back to the Humphry House to find our breakfast, I was shocked by the sight of some men coming out of the door carrying a long plank covered with a blanket, under which I could easily make out the form of a man, and whatever feelings of mystery I felt were at once dispelled by the sight of the dark-haired woman I had seen the day before, picking her way down the ramp behind the bearers. She looked as pale and exhausted as she had at her nursing, but more resolute and less confused. We stepped aside, and they passed us. I heard her say to the bearer nearest her, "I heard that the Independence goes downriver tomorrow, and I mean to be on her. In a week I mean to be in New York State, and a few days after that in Connecticut, where we started out when we got married five years ago and more. I’ve been in five states and I’ve buried one of my babies in every one of them, and after I bury him over in Kansas, that will be six, and I can be done with it."

"You can find a husband around here, no trouble."

"Any husband around here is already looking west, no matter what he says. One husband looking west is enough for a lifetime."

"Well, you’re right," said her interlocutor.

I put my hand through Thomas’s arm a little more firmly, and we made our way up the ramp. I had been hungry, as we’d had nothing to eat since before disembarking from the Independence the day before, but as we sat down, I found that my appetite had vanished, or, perhaps, had been displaced by the starkest terror. I looked at the food before me—a dish of pork, a dish of corn bread, a dish of pickles, and other dishes, too—and I looked at the strange faces around me, Thomas’s being not the least strange, but perhaps the most. I looked at the flimsy walls of the Humphry House and the soft floor filmed with cottony grit. I looked at the Negro boy who was bringing in more dishes and listened to the sound of the proprietor’s wife yelling at him to get back there, into the kitchen. The very brightness of the sunlight streaming in the door and the warmth of the breezes eddying about the room and the casual indifference of the men spitting and yelling and gobbling their food caused a wave of dread to run down me like a swell in the current of the river, and then another and another. These sensations seemed to fix me in my seat, to fix my stare upon the table and my hands in my lap. It was