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"Remember the Misses Tonkin? They said never to restrict you or tell you what to do."

"I think they were talking about finances, not violence."

"I don’t know that I’m talking about violence."

But I knew that he was. Having lived all his life among New Englanders, he thought that the talking could go on forever and arrive finally at reason. Having lived all my life along the river, I knew the more likely outcome. It scared me, and I shook my head. A bit later, he got up, took his hat and jacket and gun, and went out the door. Shortly after that, I heard Jeremiah trot away.

Now, of course, there was no sleeping. I didn’t bother to change into my nightdress but merely rolled up in my favorite quilt and lay down on the bed. Over the weeks, I had chinked the cabin, not well, but well enough. The chill air crept in, rattling the newspapers pasted to the logs, but the pale light of the moon and stars was excluded; the inside of the cabin was as dark as a cistern. Already our peace of a few weeks before, when the weather was warm and the moon shone upon us through our sail, seemed long past and much to be yearned for. I feared for my husband. His quiet resolve could easily, I thought, press him toward a fight. On this slavery question, he didn’t know or understand how to take a realistic position. Southerners were well known to argue and bluster about slavery, but they would fight to the death about one thing only, and that was what they called honor and what my sister Miriam had called prickly pride. They didn’t like to be injured, but they hated to be insulted. And you couldn’t always guess in advance which was which—partly that depended on the level of whiskey intake that had been achieved. I remembered an incident from long before, sometime when I was a child. I was at Horace’s store with my mother. It was deep winter, and Horace was putting on his boots to go out into the snow, when a man pushed through the door, his pistols drawn, shouting, "Horace Silk, you will cheat me no more! Those mules I sold you for a hundred dollars you turned around and sold to Jed Bindle for two fifty, and you an’t given me none of the profits!"

Horace took a moment to stamp his feet into his boots and then shouted, "Kite, you are lying to blacken my reputation in front of my family!" And then Kite leveled the pistols at him and said, "I wasn’t going to shoot you before, Horace, I just wanted my share of the profits, but now you have insulted my honor, and if I don’t shoot you, then I will never speak to you again!" He was serious, too, but then Horace’s father, Jonas, interposed and explained to the man Kite the role of the middleman in every mercantile transaction, and my mother stepped forward and persuaded him to come farther into the store and get warm, knowing that he was less likely to shoot Horace right in front of her. We had always told this as a funny story, but now it seemed only frightening.

A northerner, insensitive in some ways and full of self-righteousness, could gravely offend a southerner in a second. The northerner would be giving his general opinion, more than likely unasked for, and all unknowingly challenging the southerner’s every deeply held belief, not to mention, with sundry looks and expressions, suggesting that the southerner was possessed of numerous flaws of character and person. The southerner was bound to see offense in every suggestion, insult in every difference of opinion, and to act upon his stung pride. Better a man were dead than that he thought ill of you. The northerner, the Yankee, didn’t seem to care about differences of opinion. He had the blithe and unsociable conviction, which poured out with every utterance, that he was so completely in the right that what other men thought didn’t bother him. I thought these Missourians, or Louisianans, whatever they were, would get fed up at last and shoot everyone of our party, and then—

And then they would come over to this cabin, and they would see what we had plastered on our walls, and they would burn it to the ground. And if my husband