The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [68]
But I’m getting ahead of my story. On the very next day after the Sunday Frank got there, affairs with the Missourians got a little hot.
About midmorning, Thomas looked up, to see all our friends coming to get him, and when he left, he took his gun as well as his hat. He did not take Jeremiah but got up behind the Smithson boy, who had a big, raw-boned mule. That Jeremiah was still grazing peacefully in his pen must have been what set off Frank, because he would not let me be until I agreed that we would follow and see what might happen. I didn’t need much persuading, I must say, but it was Frank who suggested that I put on some of Thomas’s clothes and pin my hair up under a hat.
We got on bareback, me in front and Frank behind. Jeremiah, who was working every day, now accepted almost anything, since over the weeks he had been hitched to a wagon single and double, had been ridden with saddle and without, single and double, and had had all sorts of things, from newly slaughtered turkeys and strings of prairie chickens to bundles of wood, thrown over his back. He still looked elegant and interested, and I had found out that a more realistic price for a horse of his quality was a hundred dollars or more. Frank had a knife in his boot and was carrying one of our Sharps carbines, which he had seen first thing in the morning and appropriated at once.
We circled around and approached the cabin through the woods, trying to keep as quiet as we could and to reconnoiter before revealing our presence.
The Missourians had been busy in the five days since I’d walked past. The walls were well chinked, and the window was still in place, one pane shattered and blocked off with sheets of oiled paper but the other panes glinting in the sunshine. A door was hung, a real door, too, with a hole where the latch would be installed and where a loop of string now hung. There was a stoop, too, with two steps going up to it. The builders had brought more than the usual knowledge to their building. It was a desirable dwelling, in K.T. terms. They had also split quite a few rails for fence, and these lay in a stack. The men of the place—I counted five, with the boy— stood behind the stack, and each of them held a long rifle of the Missouri or Kentucky sort. All of our men, numbering eight (Mr. Bush and Mr. Jenkins, my husband, Mr. Smithson and the Smithson boy, Mr. Holmes, Mr. James, and Mr. Bisket), faced them, five mounted and three dismounted.
The man who seemed to be the owner of the cabin was short and red-faced, with long dark hair that hung below his shoulders, a full beard going gray, and bushy, almost white eyebrows. He was glaring at our men, who had their backs to Frank and me. I halted Jeremiah and held him quiet, and Frank, eager for a better look, slipped down and edged forward before I could stop him. I didn’t dare call out to him—I was even less anxious to attract my husband’s attention than that of the strangers. Frank knelt down behind the crotch of a tree. His rifle was well within his reach. As far as I knew, Frank’s expertise in shooting was the same as mine—jars and squashes, squirrels, and a variety of feathered quarry—but he cozied up to that tree with his rifle nearby as if he’d been in a lifetime of armed confrontations. The angry man—my enemy, I knew without reflection—was saying, "Well, I an’t gonna move. The legalities are on my side. I got a cabin built, I staked my claim. And I an’t gonna be bought out, either."
"You’ve got a slave woman," said Mr. Holmes.
"I do, and I got more comin’, so you better git used to it. This is gonna be a slave state, or it an’t gonna be a state a-tall. You Yankees are goin’ against the law and tryin’ to tell us out here what to do with our own belongings, and we an’t gonna stand for it. I maybe only have two slaves, but if you tell me I can’t have none, then I’ll git me two more. You try to tell me what to do and I’ll do the opposite