• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

"If you and Frank leave here and take Jeremiah, anything could happen. We’re cold here, but all in all, we’re better off staying out of it, I think."

But after I’d surveyed our stores again, I said, "Whatever happens, Thayer will make sure that Lawrence is provisioned. There’s safety in numbers. And we need to show what side we’re on...."

"There’s so much work to do around here. If we leave now, no matter what we find, we might not be able to come back during the winter. If we let everything go, there’s no telling whether ..."

I dreaded any step we made out of the cabin and away from our claim. I felt we’d hardly begun to live our life. And yet it was windy cold and discouraging.

It was said that meanwhile the Border Ruffians were massing for a fight at Franklin. The carbines were needed in town, and Thomas was, too. All the men in Lawrence were busy drilling and building earthworks and talking of strategies for defense, but Lawrence was all too vulnerable— approachable from almost any direction, and especially open from the bluff. Against a real attack, with artillery and cavalry charges, the people of Lawrence could not defend themselves. All they had were their Sharps rifles and the moral high ground.

There were thousands of Missourians massed to attack Lawrence, and the first thing they did was sit and wait, allowing their numbers to swell and the people of Lawrence to ponder their fate. Nevertheless, we both sensed that even with many of our friends around, the pondering we did out on our claim was lonelier and more fearful than what they were doing in town. What if Lawrence was sacked, burned to the ground, cleared out, our friends hanged, shot, tarred and feathered? It was not a prospect to contemplate by yourself. Had we been in Lawrence, I thought, we’d be drilling and building, digging and talking, making preparations for our own defense. It would at least be lively and invigorating. Late in the afternoon—that would have been Friday—we did what people with dilemmas always do—we tried to have it both ways. Thomas got on Jeremiah and rode into town, leaving Frank, over loud protests, with me, and carrying the last of the Sharps rifles, except for my own, in saddlebags over Jeremiah’s rump. He intended to reconnoiter the "war" and return in the morning. If he didn’t return (but of course, he would), he would send someone else, either to get me or to stay with me.

The transparency of this plan didn’t escape any of the three of us, but it allowed us to act. After he left, Frank and I busied ourselves for our evening and night as if it were the last—a project that we wouldn’t have to repeat. We allowed ourselves a good supper—corncakes and dried apples and some honey and a stew of prairie chicken and wild onions. We built a good fire in the stove—not eking out our wood supply but pouring it on. Every time we thought of what might be happening in Lawrence, we put on another piece of wood. Without mentioning it, we both sneaked glances around to the southeast, toward Lawrence, to see if the sky was alight. But the night stayed dark and crisply chill; no fires on the horizon. I lit a candle and brought down "The Song of Hiawatha" from Thomas’s shelf of books and tried to read it aloud to Frank as Thomas would have, slowly, savoring the words, letting their rhythms form a little music in the cold air. I let myself think about him already being dead, as a way of preparing for that. All over Kansas, no doubt, women were praying, and men, too. That was the way with most folks in K.T., and in the States, but Frank and I didn’t pray. It didn’t occur to us. We had swum in the ocean of religion all our lives and not gotten wet. After our reading, we went to bed, again as if for the last time, bundling into the quilts and blankets and embracing sleep as if we’d never sleep again.

In the morning, I woke up early, just after dawn, and already knew that Thomas had not returned. Whatever elevation of spirits we’d achieved the night