The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [81]
"How’s that?" said Thomas.
"All of ’em up and left. We got our Sharps rifles, you know. Every time they turn tail and run, they say, ’Them d— abolitionists got their d— Sharps rifles, so we better get outta here!’ " We laughed, but then, of course, it turned out that three of the Missourians’ cabins were burned down. This, the Bushes and the Jenkinses felt, they had done themselves, to cast blame on the Free Staters, who would never have done such a thing. The Holmeses felt the burning was so appropriately Satanic that forces not of our world could well be at work. The story was that some men, two Free Staters, had wanted to set the cabins afire, but the others had stopped them. Maybe they’d gone back later, but if they had, they were keeping mum.
The tyrant Jones didn’t want his people threatened, so after the murderer Coleman took refuge with the governor, Shannon, he took Coleman and went to arrest Dow’s friend, Branson, because Coleman said Branson had threatened him—the sheriff went with the murderer to arrest a friend of the victim! As Mrs. Bush would say, and did say, that was K.T. for you all over—everything was turned upside down. I said, "Well, you know, to a southern man, his honor is always worth another man’s death."
"They don’t think like we do, that’s the certain truth," said Mr. Jenkins, and everyone nodded. If there was any sentiment truer than that, I don’t know what it could have been. So Jones turned up with Coleman at Branson’s cabin and arrested him. They put Branson bareback on an old mule and rode him off, but they didn’t get far before a group of Free Staters intercepted them, freed Branson, and drove Jones and his ilk off, with, of course, plenty of blustering threats from Jones. Mr. Bisket knew all about it, but by the time we heard, of course, no one who’d been in on the freeing of Branson was talking about it. Even the names of the members of the party got to be a secret. Dr. Robinson called a meeting and said that the time had come to keep to ourselves and wait. There was no talk that he had been involved in the raid, but you got the feeling that plenty more about every little thing was known than was acknowledged.
Now the Free Staters were in trouble, and we shivered with it all the way up to our place. To hear the southerners tell it, we were a band of illegitimate rebels in open defiance of the authorities—their fraudulently elected government was legal, their pernicious laws were valid, their method of using the system of laws to press forward personal feuds was the order of the day and the shape of days to come. We had laughed at them all fall, but suddenly it was much more frightening.
Jones, like all Missourians and southerners, immediately began to shout that he was going to arrest and jail every abolitionist — and treasonous son of a — up in Lawrence. He had the guns and the men, and as with all their threats, it was hard to distinguish the bluster from the intent, and a wise precaution to act as if he did mean it and would do it.
In our little cabin, Thomas and I felt each of these bits of news as a blow. We knew right off how to think of them but not precisely how to feel about them. A danger, yes, that galvanized us, yes, but also an intrusion, it seemed to me, like an unwelcome trickle of water that looked, at first, as though it might be stanched easily enough. Mr. Bisket and others came and went. We gave them tea and corncakes or whatever we had. We listened, exclaimed, deplored. They left, and we exclaimed and deplored some more. Thomas got restless. He had taken no part in the rescue, had been to no meetings, got the news rather than made it. He repeated, "I didn’t much like driving off those Missourians."
I said, "But it’s better for everyone that they went. You yourself told me that they couldn’t live with us."
"I know."
Then, a bit later: "Driving off those Missourians wasn