• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1629 0

before was utterly gone now, in the teeth of the wind and the flat gray sky and the white frost over everything, inside the cabin and out. The stove was barely warm and would gulp down much of our wood just to get hot enough to cook breakfast. My pitcher of water had a thick film of ice. Nothing, it seemed, could be touched without pain. We lay in bed, disconsolate. I asked Frank if he regretted his journey to Kansas now.

"Nah," he said. "Something might happen. Nothing’s gonna happen at home. Everything’s fixed there. Here everything’s loose."

"Loose and sliding downhill," I said.

"I’ll tell you one thing, though. Thomas an’t no farmer."

"Isn’t."

"He’s got schoolteacher or something written all over him. My pa says that’s how you tell an abolitionist. They’re all goldurned schoolteachers, and I have to say that I gave that aspect of things plenty of thought before I come here."

"Came here."

"But he’s left me alone about it and hasn’t made me write anything. He’s about as handy as a brick. It makes me nervous when he gets out there with that ax."

"He goes slow. He’s not practiced."

"It’s like he wasn’t ever a boy."

"Well," I said defensively, "he wasn’t a western boy, a rude boy who gets to do everything he wants to all the time."

Frank shrugged. To myself, I acknowledged this was true. It was very much as if Thomas had never been a boy but had always been a man. This was what set him apart from the other men I knew.

We lay in bed chatting all morning, as though we hadn’t a thing to do in the world, and then, toward midday, Mr. Bisket arrived with his wagon, hitched up to his little horse and Jeremiah, and we ran out of the cabin to greet him. In no time at all, we had all our things packed that we would need for a prolonged stay in Lawrence—clothing, bedclothes, weapons and ammunition, books, candles, a skillet, all of our provisions. There was no question, no remonstration. The very wagon and horses carried about them the air of bustle and great events that were not to be missed. We rolled away from the claim, over the crispy hard and frozen prairie, without a backward glance.

There was plenty of news. Sheriff Jones was hot to invade Lawrence and kept sending for Branson, the fugitive. No one was saying where he was, but Bisket speculated that he was well on his way to Iowa by now. Jones planned to use the search for Branson as a pretext to roust out folks he particularly hated, and most people in Lawrence expected at least a few of their homes to be burned down, in retaliation for the burning of the Missourians’ homes.

Mr. Bisket had been drilling all day the day before. He said, "They’re afraid of our rifles, deathly afraid. And you know why? They know you an’t got to be much of a shot to hit something; you just got to have plenty of firing caps and balls and black powder. They all pride themselves on being able to pick the eyeball out of a squirrel at a hundred yards, but they know we an’t got to do that. We got these rifles; all we got to do is keep loading and firing. An’t got to load anything down the muzzle one time. I wish we had us some artillery. Robinson’s been talking about it. He wrote off to Thayer, they say, asking for some fieldpieces. I’d like to see that!" He laughed.

I asked if Thomas was drilling.

"Nah. They got him digging at the fortifications. Anybody who an’t exhausted has to do that. That’s hard work. Tomorrow’s the attack."

"Why tomorrow?"

"I don’t know. That’s what everyone says. Depends on when they run out of whiskey. When they run out of whiskey, first they get mad, then they sober up and get smart. They got to attack while they’re mad but before they sober up. Jones has the whiskey coming in to them by the barrel. Some folks are all for us attacking them, since we could take ’em easy, but Robinson says we got to sit tight and let them make the first move, or the U.S. Army’ll be down on us like a blanket."

"I thought there were thousands of them."

Mr. Bisket shrugged.

A bit later, he handed me the reins and slipped down off the wagon seat. He motioned to Frank to join