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"Now, Daniel James might go in with us," said Mr. Bisket.

"Why would he?" said Mr. Jenkins.

No one could answer this, so they sat for a moment. Mr. Bisket and Mr. Jenkins pulled out their pipes, and Mr. Bush pulled out his chewing tobacco, then looked at me and put it away. The others lit up.

"Holmes. Lacey. The Smithsons. We don’t need more than that," said Thomas. "At least for now."

"One step at a time," said Mr. Jenkins, as if the property weren’t even his. "Maybe I’m better off in town, anyway."

"Well, I am not going to give away my piece," said Mr. Bush.

"And," declared Thomas, "if they are Missourians bringing slaves, then we don’t want them in our midst. I care about that more than the property."

"Then you and I make a good team"—Mr. Bush laughed —"because when it comes right down to it, I care about the property. If they are claiming three hundred twenty acres, well..." He shook his head in disgust, and everyone else smoked in silence. I served tea that Mrs. Jenkins had sent out to me the previous week, steeped in water from our well. I made it weak, so you could see all the way to the bottoms of the cups.

After everyone had had some tea, Thomas raised the question that interested me. He said, "How could someone start building on your land, Jenkins, and you don’t know it until the cabin’s mostly done?"

Mr. Jenkins shrugged. "I’ve been in town. Fact is, I lost that other claim and all those improvements, and it took the stuffing right out of me. I don’t have the fire right now to be a farmer. I thought I would plant a crop in the spring and see how it came up, then make up my mind."

"His land, our land, it doesn’t matter," said Mr. Bush. "Our party’s got all this land spoken for, and the fact is, these folks from Missouri could see that plain as day. The stakes are out there. Your cabin and the Jameses’ cabin are up, and Bisket’s, here, too, and the Holmeses have felled a lot of trees for theirs. This is just Missouri aggression, pure and simple. Pretty soon this’ll be a voting precinct, and it’ll turn out that all five thousand of us have voted for Stringfellow, you mark my words."

Everyone nodded, including me. This seemed like the truest thing said all evening.

The others soon left, to go about to the cabins of our other friends. None of the women had come out from Lawrence, and Mr. Bush and Mr. Jenkins were staying the night with Mr. Bisket, whose cabin was now entirely enclosed. At dawn, the plan was, the men would get up and gather at Mr. Bisket’s claim. When they judged that enough of a party had gathered, they would investigate the newcomers in a body.

I remember getting ready for bed and feeling some surprise that this had come up so suddenly. It didn’t speak well of Mr. Jenkins’s ability to look after his own interests that total strangers had seized his land and established themselves upon it, and he only noticing when everything was more or less complete. I thought of something brother Roland Brereton had sometimes said about why he wasn’t particularly neighborly: "Why should I look after those who can’t look after themselves? When the time comes, they’ll be too behindhand to look after me." But that was Illinois, and this was Kansas, where, as Thomas and I in our separate ways were both coming to know, you had to choose whom there was to choose. Even so, I went to bed in a stimulated but contented state of mind: we’d had company; something interesting was going on; things would work out well enough in the end. And here was Thomas, too. That made things seem fine enough to me.

Not long after dawn, Thomas rode away on Jeremiah. Not long after that, I got up and began idling about the cabin—smoothing the quilts, driving off the mice and other vermin, sweeping the floors, adding some sticks of wood to the fire we’d kept damped down in the stove all night long. We were well into October, and the nights were, it seemed then, pleasantly cool after the heat of September. The mornings were crisp. I put on an extra shawl and did some chinking of the joints between the logs with a paste