Vandemark's Folly Part 10

I couldn't think what he meant by a station; but it was about time to make camp anyhow, and so I took him into the wagon with me, and we drove across country by a plain trail, through a beautiful piece of oak openings, to a big log house in a fine grove of burr oaks, with a log barn back of it--as nice a farmstead as I had seen. There were fifteen or twenty cattle in the yards, and some sheep and hogs, and many fat hens. If this was a station, I thought, I envied the man who owned it.

As we drove up I saw a little negro boy peeping at us from the back of the house, and as we halted a black woman ran out and seized the pickaninny by the ear, and dragged him back out of sight. I heard a whimper from the little boy, which seemed suddenly smothered by something like a hand clapped over his mouth. Mr. Dunlap's wagon was not in sight, but its owner came out at the front door and greeted me in a very friendly way.

"What makes you call this a station?" I asked of Thatcher.

Dunlap looked at him sternly.

"I forgot myself," said Thatcher, more to Dunlap than to me.

"Never mind," replied Dunlap. "If I can tell B from a bull's foot, it's all right."

Then turning to me he said, "The old lady inside has a meal of victuals ready for us. Come in and we'll let into it."

There was nothing said at the meal which explained the things that were so blind to me; but there was a good deal of talk about rifles. The farmer was named Preston, a middle-aged man who shaved all his beard except what grew under his chin, which hung down in a long black fringe over his breast like a window-lambrequin. His wife's father, who was an old Welshman named Evans, had worked in the lead mines over toward Dubuque, until Preston had married his daughter and taken up his farm in the oak openings. They had been shooting at a mark that afternoon, with Sharp's rifles carried by Dunlap and Thatcher, and the old-fas.h.i.+oned squirrel rifles owned on the farm. After supper they brought out these rifles and compared them. Preston insisted that the squirrel rifles were better.

"Not for real service," said Dunlap, throwing a cartridge into the breech of the Sharp, and ejecting it to show how fast it could be done.

"But I can roll a squirrel's eye right out of his head most every time with the old-style gun," said Preston. "This is the gun that won the Battle of New Orleans."

"It wouldn't have won against the Sharp," said Thatcher; "and you know we expect to have a larger mark than a squirrel's head, when we get to Kansas."

This was the first breech-loader I had ever seen, and I looked it over with a buying eye. It didn't seem to me that it would be much better for hunting than the old-fas.h.i.+oned rifle, loaded with powder and a molded bullet rammed down with a patch of oiled cloth around it; for after you have shot at your game once, you either have hit it, or it runs or flies away. If you have hit it, you can generally get it, and if it goes away, you have time to reload. Besides those big cartridges must be costly, I thought, and said so to Mr. Dunlap.

"When you're hunting Border Ruffians," said he, "a little expense don't count one way or the other; and you may be willing to pay dear for a chance to reload three or four times while the other man is ramming home a new charge. Give me the new guns, the new ideas, and the old doctrine of freedom to fight for. Don't you see?"

"Why, of course," said I, "I'm for freedom. That's why I'm going out on the prairies."

"Prairies!" said old Evans. "Prairies! What do you expect to do on the prairies?"

"Farm," I answered.

"All these folks that are rus.h.i.+ng to the prairies," said the old man, "will starve out and come back. G.o.d makes trees grow to show men where the good land is. I read history, and there's no country that's good for anything, except where men have cut the trees, n.i.g.g.e.red off the logs, grubbed out the stumps, and made fields of it--and if there are stones, it's all the better. 'In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,'

said G.o.d to Adam, and when you go to the prairies where it's all ready for the plow, you are trying to dodge G.o.d's curse on our first parents.

You won't prosper. It stands to reason that any land that is good will grow trees."

"Some of this farm was prairie," put in Preston, "and I don't see but it's just as good as the rest."

"It was all openings," replied Evans. "The trees was here once, and got killed by the fires, or somehow. It was all woods once."

"You cut down trees to make land grow gra.s.s," said Thatcher. "I should think that G.o.d must have meant gra.s.s to be the sign of good ground."

"Isn't the sweat of your face just as plenty when you delve in the prairies?" asked Dunlap.

"You fly in the face of G.o.d's decree, and run against His manifest warning when you try to make a prairie into a farm," said Evans.

"You'll see!"

"Sold again, and got the tin, and sucked another Dutchman in!" was the ditty that ran through my head as I heard this. Old man Evans' way of looking at the matter seemed reasonable to my cautious mind; and, anyhow, when a man has grown old he knows many things that he can give no good reason for. I have always found that the well-educated fellow with a deep-sounding and plausible philosophy that runs against the teachings of experience, is likely, especially in farming, to make a failure when he might have saved himself by doing as the old settlers do, who won't answer his arguments but make a good living just the same, while the new-fangled practises send their followers to the poor-house.

At that moment, I would have traded my Iowa farm for any good piece of land covered with trees. But Dunlap and Thatcher had something else to talk to me about. They were for the prairies, especially the prairies of Kansas.

"Kansas," said Dunlap, "will be one of the great states of the Union, one of these days. Come with us, and help make it a free state. We need a hundred thousand young farmers, who believe in liberty, and will fight for it. Come with us, take up a farm, and carry a Sharp's rifle against the Border Ruffians!"

This sounded convincing to me, but of course I couldn't make up my mind to anything of this sort without days and days of consideration; but I listened to what they said. They told me of an army of free-state emigrants that was gathering along the border to win Kansas for freedom.

They, Dunlap and Thatcher, were going to Marion, Iowa, and from there by the Mormon Trail across to a place called Tabor, and from there to Lawrence, Kansas. They were New England Yankees. Thatcher had been to college, and was studying law. Dunlap had been a business man in Connecticut, and was a friend of John Brown, who was then on his way to Kansas.

"The Missouri Compromise has been repealed," said Thatcher, his eyes s.h.i.+ning, "and the Kansas-Nebraska Bill has thrown the fertile state of Kansas into the ring to be fought for by free-state men and pro-slavery men. The Border Ruffians of Missouri are breaking the law every day by going over into Kansas, never meaning to live there only long enough to vote, and are corrupting the state government. They are corrupting it by violence and illegal voting. If slavery wins in Kansas and Nebraska, it will control the Union forever. The greatest battle in our history is about to be fought out in Kansas, a battle to see whether this nation shall be a slave nation, in every state and every town, or free. Dunlap and I and thousands of others are going down there to take the state of Kansas into our own hands, peacefully if we can, by violence if we must.

We are willing to die to make the United States a free nation. Come with us!"

"But we don't expect to die," urged Dunlap, seeing that this looked pretty serious to me. "We expect to live, and get farms, and make homes, and prosper, after we have shown the Border Ruffians the muzzles of those rifles. Thatcher, bring the pa.s.sengers in!"

3

Thatcher went out of the room the back way.

"We call this a station," went on Dunlap, "because it's a stopping-place on the U. G. Railway."

"What's the U. G. Railway?" I asked.

"Don't you know that?" he queried.

"I'm only a ca.n.a.l hand," I answered, "going to a farm out on the prairie, that I was euchred into taking in settling with a scoundrel for my share of my father's property; and I'm pretty green."

Thatcher came in then, leading the little black boy by the hand, and following him was the negro woman carrying a baby at her breast, and holding by the hand a little woolly-headed pickaninny about three years old. They were ragged and poverty-stricken, and seemed scared at everything. The woman came in bowing and sc.r.a.ping to me, and the two little boys hid behind her skirts and peeked around at me with big white eyes.

"Tell the gentleman," said Thatcher, "where you're going."

"We're gwine to Canayda," said she, "'scusin' your presence."

"How are you going to get to Canada?" asked Thatcher.

"The good white folks," said she, "will keep us hid out nights till we gits thar."

"What will happen," said Thatcher, "if this young man tells any one that he's seen you?"

"The old ma.s.sa," said she, "will find out, an' he'll hunt us wif houn's, an' fotch us back', and then he'll sell us down the ribber to the cotton-fiel's."

I never heard anything quite so pitiful as this speech. I had never known before what it must mean to be really hunted. The woman shrank back toward the door through which she had come, her face grew a sort of grayish color; and then ran to me and throwing herself on her knees, she took hold of my hands, and begged me for G.o.d's sake not to tell on her, not to have her carried back, not to fix it so she'd be sold down the river to work in the cotton-fields.

"I won't," I said, "I tell you I won't. I want you to get to Canada!"

"G.o.d bress yeh," she said. "I know'd yeh was a good young gemman as soon as I set eyes on yeh! I know'd yeh was quality!"

"Who do you expect to meet in Canada?" asked Thatcher.

"G.o.d willin'," said she, "I'm gwine to find Abe Felton, the pa of dese yere chillun."

"The Underground Railway," said Dunlap, "knows where Abe is, and will send Sarah along with change of cars. You may go, Sarah. Now," he went on, as the negroes disappeared, "you have it in your power to exercise the right of an American citizen and perform the G.o.d-accursed legal duty to report these fugitives at the next town, join a posse to hunt them down under a law of the United States, get a reward for doing it, and know that you have vindicated the law--or you can stand with G.o.d and tell the law to go to h.e.l.l--where it came from--and help the Underground Railway to carry these people to heaven. Which will you do?"

"I'll tell the law to go to h.e.l.l," said I.