I was of a fair complexion, with blue eyes, and my upper lip and chin were covered with a reddish fuzz over a very ruddy skin—a little like David's of old, I guess. On the passenger boats I met a great many people, and was joked a good deal about the girls, some of whom seemed to take quite a shine to me, just as they do to any fair-haired, reasonably clean-looking boy; especially if he has a little reputation; but though I sometimes found myself looking at one of them with considerable interest there was not enough time for as slow a boy as I to begin, let alone to finish any courting operations on even as long a voyage as that from Albany to Buffalo. I was really afraid of them all, and they seemed to know it, and made a good deal of fun of me.

We did not carry our horses on this boat; but stopped at relay stations for fresh teams, and after we had pulled out from one of these stations, we went flying along at from six to eight miles an hour, with a cook getting up nine meals; and we often had a "sing" as we called it when in the evening the musical passengers got together and tuned up. Many of them carried dulcimers, accordions, fiddles, flutes and various kinds of brass horns, and in those days a great many people could sing the good old hymns in the Carmina Sacra, and the glees and part-songs in the old Jubilee, with the soprano, tenor, bass and alto, and the high tenor and counter which made better music than any gathering of people are likely to make nowadays. All they needed was a leader with a tuning-fork, and off they would start, making the great canal a pretty musical place on fine summer evenings. We traveled night and day, and at night the boat, lighted up as well as we could do it then, with lanterns and lamps burning whale-oil, and with candles in the cabin, looked like a traveling banquet-hall or opera-house or tavern.

We were always crowded with immigrants when we went west; and on our eastern voyages even, our passenger traffic was mostly related to the West, its trade, and its people. Many of the men had been out west "hunting country," and sat on the decks or in the cabins until late at night, telling their fellow-travelers what they had found, exchanging news, and sometimes altering their plans to take advantage of what somebody else had found. Some had been looking for places where they could establish stores or set up in some other business. Some had gone to sell goods. Some were travelers for the purpose of preying on others. I saw a good deal of the world, that summer, some of which I understood, but not much. I understand it far better now as I look back upon it.

I noticed for the first time now that class of men with whom we became so well acquainted later, the land speculators. These, and the bankers, many of whom seemed to have a good deal of business in the West, formed a class by themselves, and looked down from a far height on the working people, the farmers, and the masses generally, who voyaged on the same boats with them. They talked of development, and the growth of the country, and the establishments of boats and the building of railways; while the rest of us thought about homes and places to make our livings. The young doctors and lawyers, and some old ones, too, who were going out to try life on the frontiers, occupied places in between these exalted folk and the rest of us. There were preachers among our passengers, but most of them were going west. On almost every voyage there would be a minister or missionary who would ask to have the privilege of holding prayer on the boat; and Captain Sproule always permitted it. The ministers, too, were among those who hunted up the singers in the crowds and organized the song services from the Carmina Sacra.

4

I was getting used to the life and liked it, and gradually I found my resolve to go west getting less and less strong; when late in the summer of 1854 something happened which restored it to me with tenfold strength. We had reached Buffalo, had discharged our passengers and cargo, and were about starting on our eastward voyage when I met Bill, the sailor, as he was coming out of a water-front saloon. I ran to him and called him by name; but at first he did not know me.

"This ain't little Jake, is it?" he said. "By mighty, I b'lieve it is! W'y, you little runt, how you've growed. Come in an' have a drink with your ol' friend Bill as nussed you when you was a baby!"

I asked to be excused; for I hadn't learned to drink more than a thin glass of rum and water, and that only when I got chilled. I turned the subject by asking him what he was doing; and at that he slapped his thigh and said he had great news for me.

"I've found that hump-backed bloke," he said. "He came down on the boat with us from Milwaukee. I knowed him as soon as I seen him, but I couldn't think all the v'yage what in time I wanted to find him fer. You jest put it in my mind!"

"Where is he?" I shouted. "You hain't lost him, have you?"

Bill stood for quite a while chewing tobacco, and scratching his head.

"Where is he?" I yelled.

"Belay bellering," said Bill. "I'm jest tryin' to think whuther he went on a boat east, or a railroad car, or a stage-coach, or went to a tavern. He went to a tavern, that's what he done. A drayman I know took his dunnage!"

"Come on," I cried, "and help me find the drayman!"

"I'll have to study on this," said Bill. "My mind hain't as active as usual. I need somethin' to brighten me up!"

"What do you need?" I inquired. "Can't you think where he stays?"

"A little rum," he answered, "is great for the memory. I b'lieve most any doctor'd advise a jorum of rum for a man in my fix, to restore the intellects."

I took him back into the grog-shop and bought him rum, taking a very little myself, with a great deal of blackstrap and water. Bill's symptoms were such as to drive me to despair. He sat looking at me like an old owl, and finally took my glass and sipped a little from it.

"Hain't you never goin' to grow up?" he asked; and poured out a big glass of the pure quill for me, and fiercely ordered me to drink it. By this time I was desperate; so I smashed his glass and mine; and taking him by the throat I shook him and told him that if he did not take me to the hump-backed man or to the drayman, and that right off, I'd shut off his wind for good. When he clinched with me I lifted him from the floor, turned him upside down, and lowered him head-first into an empty barrel. By this time the saloon-keeper was on the spot making all sorts of threats about having us both arrested, and quite a crowd had gathered. I lifted Bill out of the barrel and seated him in a chair, and paid for the glasses; all the time watching Bill for fear he might renew the tussle, and take me in flank; but he sat as if dazed until I had quieted matters down, when he rose and addressed the crowd.

"My little son," said he, patting me on the shoulder. "Stoutest man of his inches in the world. We'll be round here's evenin'—give a show. C'mon, Jake!"

"Wot I said about growin' up," said he, as we went along the street, "is all took back, Jake!"

We had not gone more than a quarter of a mile when we came to a place where there was a stand for express wagons and drays; and Bill picked out from the crowd, with a good deal of difficulty, I thought, a hard-looking citizen to whom he introduced me as the stoutest man on the Erie Canal. The drayman seemed to know me. He said he had seen me wrestle. When I asked him about the hunchback he said he knew right where he was; but there was no hurry, and tried to get up a wrestling match between me and a man twice my size who made a specialty of hauling salt, and bragged that he could take a barrel of it by the chimes, and lift it into his dray. I told him that I was in a great hurry and begged to be let off; but while I was talking they had made up a purse of twenty-one shillings to be wrestled for by us two. I finally persuaded the drayman to show me the hunchback's tavern, and promised to come back and wrestle after I had found him; to which the stake-holder agreed, but all the rest refused to consent, and the money was given back to the subscribers. The drayman, Bill and I went off together to find the tavern—which we finally did.

It was a better tavern than we were used to, and I was a little bashful when I inquired if a man with a black beard was stopping there, and was told that there were several.

"What's his name?" asked the clerk.

"'E's a hunchback," said Bill—I had been too diffident to describe him so.

"Mr. Wisner, of Southport, Wisconsin," said the clerk, "has a back that ain't quite like the common run of backs. Want to see him?"

He was in a nice room, with a fire burning and was writing at a desk which opened and shut, and was carried with him when he traveled. He wore a broadcloth, swallow-tailed coat, a collar that came out at the sides of his neck and stood high under his ears; and his neck was covered with a black satin stock. On the bed was a tall, black beaver, stove-pipe hat. There were a great many papers on the table and the bed, and the room looked as if it had been used by crowds of people—the floor was muddy about the fireplace, and there were tracks from the door to the cheap wooden chairs which seemed to have been brought in to accommodate more visitors than could sit on the horsehair chairs and sofa that appeared to belong in the room. Mr. Wisner looked at us sharply as we came in, and shook hands first with Bill and then with me.

"Glad to see you again," said he heartily. "Glad to see you again! I want to tell you some more about Wisconsin. I haven't told you the half of its advantages."

I saw that he thought we had been there before, and was about to correct his mistake, when Bill told him that that's what we had come for.

"What you said about Wisconsin," said Bill, winking at me, "has sort of got us all worked up."

"Is it a good country for a boy to locate in?" I asked.

"A paradise for a boy!" he said, in a kind of bubbly way. "And for a poor man, it's heaven! Plenty of work. Good wages. If you want a home, it's the only God's country. What kind of land have you been farming in the past?"

Bill said that he had spent his life plowing the seas, but that all the fault I had was being a landsman. I admitted that I had farmed some near Herkimer.

"And," sneered Mr. Wisner crushingly, "how long does it take a man to clear and grub out and subdue enough land in Herkimer County to make a living on? Ten years! Twenty years! Thirty years! Why, in Herkimer County a young man doesn't buy anything when he takes up land: he sells something! He sells himself to slavery for life to the stumps and sprouts and stones! But in Wisconsin you can locate on prairie land ready for the plow; or you can have timber land, or both kinds, or opening's that are not quite woods nor quite prairie—there's every kind of land there except poor land! It's a paradise, and land's cheap. I can sell you land right back of Southport, with fine market for whatever you raise, on terms that will pay themselves—pay themselves. Just go aboard the first boat, and I'll give you a letter to my partner in Southport—and your fortunes will be made in ten years!"

"The trouble is," said Bill, "that we'll be so damned lonesome out where we don't know any one. If we could locate along o' some of our ol' mates, somebody like old John Tucker,—it would be a—a paradise, eh, Jake?"

"The freest-hearted people in the world," said Mr. Wisner. "They'll travel ten miles to take a spare-rib or a piece of fresh beef to a new neighbor. Invite the stranger in to stay all night as he drives along the road. You'll never miss your old friends; and probably you'll find old neighbors most anywhere. Why, this country has moved out to Wisconsin. It won't be long till you'll have to go there to find 'em—ha, ha, ha!"

"If we could find a man out there named Tucker—"

"An old—sort of—of relative of mine," I put in, seeing that Bill was spoiling it all, "John Rucker."

"I know him!" cried Wisner. "Kind of a tall man with a sandy beard? Good talker? Kind of plausible talker? Used to live down east of Syracuse? Pretty well fixed? Went out west three years ago? Calls himself Doctor Rucker?"

"I guess that's the man," said I; "do you know where he is now?"

"Had a wife and no children?" asked Wisner. "And was his wife a quiet, kind of sad-looking woman that never said much?"

"Yes! Yes!" said I. "If you know where they are, I'll go there by the next boat."

"Hum," said Wisner. "Whether I can tell you the exact township and section is one thing; but I can say that they went to Southport on the same boat with me, and at last accounts were there or thereabouts—there or thereabouts."

"Come on, Bill," said I, "I want to take passage on the next boat!"

Mr. Wisner kept us a long time, giving me letters to his partner; trying to find out how much money I would have when I got to Southport; warning me not to leave that neighborhood even if I found it hard to find the Rucker family; and assuring me that if it weren't for the fact that he had several families along the canal ready to move in a week or two, he would go back with me and place himself at my service.

"And it won't be long," said he, "until I can be with you. My boy, I feel like a father to the young men locating among us, and I beg of you don't make any permanent arrangements until I get back. I can save you money, and start you on the way to a life of wealth and happiness. God bless you, and give you a safe voyage!"

"Bill," said I, as we went down the stairs, "this is the best news I ever had. I'm going to find my mother! I had given up ever finding her, Bill; and I've been so lonesome—you don't know how lonesome I've been!"

"I used to have a mother," said Bill, "in London. Next time I'm there I'll stay sober for a day and have a look about for her. You never have but about one mother, do you, Jake? A mother is a great thing—when she ain't in drink."

"I wish I could have Mr. Wisner with me when I get to Southport," I said. "He'd help me. He is such a Christian man!"

"Wal," said Bill, "I ain't as sure about him as I am about mothers. He minds me of a skipper I served under once; and he starved us, and let the second officer haze us till we deserted and lost our wages. He's about twice too slick. I'd give him the go-by, Jake."

"And now for a boat," I said.

"Wal," said Bill, "I'm sailin' to-morrow mornin' on the schooner Mahala Peters, an' we're short-handed. Go aboard an' ship as an A. B."

I protested that I wasn't a sailor; but Bill insisted that beyond being hazed by the mate there was no reason why I shouldn't work my passage.

"If there's a crime," said he, "it's a feller like you payin' his passage. Let's get a drink or two an' go aboard."

I explained to the captain, in order that I might be honest with him, that I was no sailor, but had worked on canal boats for years, and would do my best. He swore at his luck in having to ship land-lubbers, but took me on; and before we reached Southport—now Kenosha—I was good enough so that he wanted me to ship back with him. It was on this trip that I let the cook tattoo this anchor on my forearm, and thus got the reputation among the people of the prairies of having been a sailor, and therefore a pretty rough character. As a matter of fact the sailors on the Lakes were no rougher than the canallers—and I guess not so rough.

I was sorry, many a time, on the voyage, that I had not taken passage on a steamer, as I saw boats going by us in clouds of smoke that left Buffalo after we did; but we had a good voyage, and after seeing Detroit, Mackinaw and Milwaukee, we anchored in Southport harbor so late that the captain hurried on to Chicago to tie up for the winter. I had nearly three hundred dollars in a belt strapped around my waist, and some in my pocket; and went ashore after bidding Bill good-by—I never saw the good fellow again—and began my search for John Rucker. I did not need to inquire at Mr. Wisner's office, and I now think I probably saved money by not going there; for I found out from the proprietor of the hotel that Rucker, whom he called Doc Rucker, had moved to Milwaukee early in the summer.

"Friend of yours?" he asked.

"No," I said with a good deal of emphasis; "but I want to find him—bad!"

"If you find him," said he, "and can git anything out of him, let me know and I'll make it an object to you. An' if you have any dealings with him, watch him. Nice man, and all that, and a good talker, but watch him."

"Did you ever see his wife?" I inquired.

"They stopped here a day or two before they left," said the hotel-keeper. "She looked bad. Needed a doctor, I guess—a different doctor!"

There was a cold northeaster blowing, and it was spitting snow as I went back to the docks to see if I could get a boat for Milwaukee. A steamer in the offing was getting ready to go, and I hired a man with a skiff to put me and my carpet-bag aboard. We went into Milwaukee in a howling blizzard, and I was glad to find a warm bar in the tavern nearest the dock; and a room in which to house up while I carried on my search. I now had found out that the stage lines and real-estate offices were the best places to go for traces of immigrants; and I haunted these places for a month before I got a single clue to Rucker's movements. It almost seemed that he had been hiding in Milwaukee, or had slipped through so quickly as not to have made himself remembered—which was rather odd, for there was something about his tall stooped figure, his sandy beard, his rather whining and fluent talk, and his effort everywhere to get himself into the good graces of every one he met that made it easy to identify him. His name, too, was one that seemed to stick in people's minds.



5

At last I found a man who freighted and drove stage between Milwaukee and Madison, who remembered Rucker; and had given him passage to Madison sometime, as he remembered it, in May or June—or it might have been July, but it was certainly before the Fourth oL July.

"You hauled him—and his wife?" I asked.

"Him and his wife," said the man, "and a daughter."

"A daughter!" I said in astonishment. "They have no daughter."

"Might have been his daughter, and not her'n," said the stage-driver. "Wife was a good deal younger than him, an' the girl was pretty old to be her'n. Prob'ly his. Anyhow, he said she was his daughter."

"It wasn't his daughter," I cried.

"Well, you needn't get het up about it," said he; "I hain't to blame no matter whose daughter she wasn't. She can travel with me any time she wants to. Kind of a toppy, fast-goin', tricky little rip, with a sorrel mane."

"I don't understand it," said I. "Did you notice his wife—whether she seemed to be feeling well?"

"Looked bad," said he. "Never said nothing to nobody, and especially not to the daughter. Used to go off to bed while the old man and the girl held spiritualist doin's wherever we laid over. Went into trances, the girl did, and the old man give lectures about the car of progress that always rolls on and on and on, pervided you consult the spirits. Picked up quite a little money 's we went along, too."

I sat in the barroom and thought about this for a long time. There was something wrong about it. My mother's health was failing, that was plain from what I had heard in Southport; but it did not seem to me, no matter how weak and broken she might be, that she would have allowed Rucker to pass off any stray trollop like the one described by the stage-driver as his daughter, or would have traveled with them for a minute. But, I thought, what could she do? And maybe she was trying to keep the affair within bounds as far as possible. A good woman is easily deceived, too. Perhaps she knew best, after all; and maybe she was going on and on with Rucker from one misery to another in the hope that I, her only son, and the only relative she had on earth, might follow and overtake her, and help her out of the terrible situation in which, even I, as young and immature as I was, could see that she must find herself. I had seen too much of the under side of life not to understand the probable meaning of this new and horrible thing. I remembered how insulted my mother was that time so long ago when Rucker proposed that they join the Free-Lovers at Oneida; and how she had refused to ride home with him, at first, and had walked back on that trail through the woods, leading me by the hand, until she was exhausted, and how Rucker had tantalized her by driving by us, and sneering at us when mother and I finally climbed into the democrat wagon, and rode on with him toward Tempe. I could partly see, after I had thought over it for a day or so, just what this new torture might mean to her.

I was about to start on foot for Madison, and looked up my stage-driver acquaintance to ask him about the road.

"Why don't you go on the railroad?" he asked. "The damned thing has put me out of business, and I'm no friend of it; but if you're in a hurry it's quicker'n walkin'."

I had seen the railway station in Milwaukee, and looked at the train; but it had never occurred to me that I might ride on it to Madison. Now we always expect a railway to run wherever we want to go; but then it was the exception—and the only railroad running out of Milwaukee was from there to Madison. On this I took that day my first ride in a railway car, reaching Madison some time after three. This seemed like flying to me. I had seen plenty of railway tracks and trains in New York; but I had to come to Wisconsin to patronize one.

I rode on, thinking little of this new experience, as I remember, so filled was I with the hate of John Rucker which almost made me forget my love for my mother. Perhaps the one was only the reverse side of the other. I had made up my mind what to do. I would try hard not to kill Rucker, though I tried him and condemned him to death in my own mind several times for every one of the eighty miles I rode; but I knew that this vengeance was not for me.

I would take my mother away from him, though, in spite of everything; and she and I would move on to a new home, somewhere, living happily together for the rest of our lives.

I was happy when I thought of this home, in which, with my new-found, fresh strength, my confidence in myself, my knack of turning my hand to any sort of common work, my ability to defend her against everything and everybody—against all the Ruckers in the world—my skill in so many things that would make her old age easy and happy, I would repay her for all this long miserable time,—the cruelty of Rucker when she took me out of the factory while he was absent, the whippings she had seen him give me, the sacrifices she had made to give me the little schooling I had had, the nights she had sewed to make my life a little easier, the tears she dropped on my bed when she came and tucked me in when I was asleep, the pangs of motherhood, and the pains worse than those of motherhood which she had endured because she was poor, and married to a beast.

I would make all this up to her if I could. I went into Madison, much as a man goes to his wedding; only the woman of my dreams was my mother. But I felt as I did that night when I returned to Tempe after my first summer on the canal—full of hope and anticipation, and yet with a feeling in my heart that again something would stand in my way.



CHAPTER V

THE END OF A LONG QUEST

I went to seek my mother in my best clothes. I had bought some new things in Milwaukee, and was sure that my appearance would comfort her greatly. Instead of being ragged, poverty-stricken, and neglected-looking, I was a picture of a clean, well-clothed working boy. I had on a good corduroy suit, and because the weather was cold, I wore a new Cardigan jacket. My shirt was of red flannel, very warm and thick; and about my neck I tied a flowered silk handkerchief which had been given me by a lady who was very kind to me once during a voyage by canal, and was called "my girl" by the men on the boat. I wore good kip boots with high tops, with shields of red leather at the knees, each ornamented with a gilt moon and star—the nicest boots I ever had; and I wore my pants tucked into my boot-tops so as to keep them out of the snow and also to show these glories in leather. With clouded woolen mittens on my hands, given me as a Christmas present by Mrs. Fogg, Captain Sproule's sister, that winter I worked for her near Herkimer, and a wool cap, trimmed about with a broad band of mink fur, and a long crocheted woolen comforter about my neck, I was as well-dressed a boy for a winter's day as a body need look for. I took a look at myself in the glass, and felt that even at the first glance, my mother would feel that in casting her lot with me she would be choosing not only the comfort of living with her only son but the protection of one who had proved himself a man.

I glowed with pride as I thought of our future together, and of all I would do to make her life happy and easy. I never was a better boy in my life than on that winter evening when I went up the hilly street from the tavern in Madison to the place on a high bluff overlooking a sheet of ice, stretching away almost as far as I could see, which they told me was Fourth Lake, to the house in which I was informed Doctor Rucker lived—a small frame house among stocky, low burr oak trees, on which the dead leaves still hung, giving forth a dreary hiss as the bitter north wind blew through them.

I knocked at the door, and was answered by a red-haired young woman, with a silly grin on her face, the smirk flanked on each side with cork-screw curls which hung down over her bright blue dress; which, as I could see, was pulled out at the seams under her round and shapely arms. She put out a soft and plump hand to me, but I did not take it. She looked in my face, and shrank back as if frightened.

"Where's Rucker?" I asked; but before I had finished the question he came forward from the other room, clothed in dirty black broadcloth, his patent-medicine-pedler's smile all over his face, with a soiled frilled shirt showing back of his flowered vest, which was unbuttoned except at the bottom, to show the nasty finery beneath. He had on a broad black scarf filling the space between the points of his wide-open standing collar, and sticking out on each side. I afterward recalled the impression of a gold watch-chain, and a broad ring on his finger. He was quite changed in outward appearance from the poverty-stricken skunk I had once known; but was if anything more skunk-like than ever: yet I had to look twice to be sure of him.

"I am exceedingly glad to see you in the flesh," said he, coming forward with his hand stuck out—a hand which I stared at but never touched—"exceedingly glad to see you, my young brother. I have had a spiritual vision of you. Honor us by coming in by the fire!"

"Where's my mother?" I asked, still standing in the open door.

Rucker started at the sound of my voice, which had changed from the boy's soprano into a deep bass—much deeper than it is now. It was the hoarse croak of the hobbledehoy.

The young woman had shrunk back behind him now.

"Your mother?" said he, in a sort of panther-like purr. "A spirit has been for three days seeking to speak to a lost child through my daughter. Come in, and let us see. Let us see if my daughter can not pierce the mysteries of the unseen in your case. Come in!"

The cold was blowing in at the open door, and his tone was a little like that of a man who wants to say, but does not feel it wise to do so, "Come in and shut the door after you!"

"Your daughter!" I said, trying to think of something to say that would show what I thought of him, her, and their dirty pretense; "your daughter! Hell!"

"Young man," said he, drawing himself up stiffly, "what do you mean—?"

"I mean to find my mother!" I cried. "Where is she?"

Suddenly the thought of being halted thus longer, and the fear that my mother was not there, drove me crazy. I lunged at Rucker, and with a sweep of my arms, threw him staggering across the room. The girl screamed, and ran to, and behind him. I stormed through to the kitchen, expecting to find my mother back there, working for this smooth, sly, scroundrelly pair; but the place was deserted. There were dirty pots and pans about; and a pile of unwashed dishes stacked high in the sink—and this struck me with despair. If my mother had been about, and able to work, such a thing would have been impossible. So she either was not there or was not able to work—my instinct told me that; and I ran to the foot of the stairs, and calling as I had so often done when a child, "Ma, Ma! Where are you, ma!" I waited to hear her answer.

Rucker, pale as a sheet, came up to me, his quivering mouth trying to work itself into a sneaking sort of smile.

"Why, Jacob, Jakey," he drooled, "is this you? I didn't know you. Sit down, my son, and I'll tell you the sad, sad news!"

I heard him, but I did not trust nor understand him, and I went through that house from cellar to garret, looking for her; my heart freezing within me as I saw how impossible it would be for her to live so. There were two bedrooms, both beds lying just as they had been left in the morning—and my mother always opened her beds up for an airing when she rose, and made them up right after breakfast.

The room occupied by the young woman was the room of a slut; the clothes she had taken off the night before, or even before that, lay in a ring about the place where her feet had been when she dropped them in the dust and lint which rolled about in the corners like feathers. Her corset was thrown down in a corner; shoes and stockings littered the floor; her comb was clogged with red hair like a wire fence with dead grass after a freshet; dingy, grimy underclothing lay about. I peered into a closet, in which there were more garments on the floor than on the nails. The other bedroom was quite as unkempt; looking as if the occupant must always do his chamber work at the last moment before going to bed. They were as unclean outwardly as inwardly.

After ransacking the house up-chamber, I ran down-stairs and went into the room from which Rucker had come, where I found the girl hiding behind a sofa, peeking over the back of it at me, and screaming "Go away!" All the walls in this room were hung with some thin black cloth, and it looked like the inside of a hearse. There was a stand in one corner, and a large extension table in the middle of the room, with chairs placed about it. In the corner across from the stand was a spiritualist medium's cabinet; and hanging on the walls were a guitar, a banjo and a fiddle. A bell stood in the middle of the table, and there were writing materials, slates, and other things scattered about, which theatrical people call "properties," I am told. I tore the black draperies down, and searched for a place where my mother might be—in bed I expected to find her, if at all; but she was not there. I tried the cellar, but it was nothing but a vegetable cave, dug in the earth, with no walls, and dark as a dungeon when the girl shut down the trap-door and stood on it: from which I threw her by putting my back under it and giving a surge. When I came up she was staggering to her feet, and groaning as she felt of her head for the results of some suspected cut or bump from her fall. Rucker was following me about calling me Jacob and Jakey, a good deal as a man will try to smooth down or pacify a vicious horse or mule; and after I had looked everywhere, I faced him, took him by the throat, and choked him until his tongue stuck out, and his face was purple.

"My God," said the girl, who had grown suddenly quiet, "you're killing him!"

I looked at his empurpled face, and my madness came back on me like a rush of fire through my veins—and I shut down on his throat again until I could feel the cords draw under my fingers like taut ropes.

She laid her hand rather gently on my breast, and looked me steadily in the eye.

"Fool!" she almost whispered. "Your mother's dead! Will it bring her back to life for you to stretch hemp?"

I guess that by that action she saved my life; but it has been only of late years that I have ceased to be sorry that I did not kill him. I looked back into her eyes for a moment—I remember yet that they were bright blue, with a lighter band about the edge of the sight, instead of the dark edging that most of us have; and as I understood her meaning I took my hands from Rucker's throat, and threw him from me. He lay on the floor for a minute, and as he scrambled to his feet I sank down on the nearest chair and buried my face in my hands.

It was all over, then; my long lone quest for my mother—a quest I had carried on since I was a little, scared, downtrodden child. I should never have the chance to serve her in my way as she had served me in hers—my way that would never have been anything but a very small and easy one at the most; while hers had been a way full of torment and servitude. All my strength was gone; and the girl seemed to know it; for she came over to me and patted me on the shoulder in a motherly sort of way.

"Poor boy!" she said. "Poor boy! To-morrow, come to me and I'll show you your mother's grave. I'll take you to the doctor that attended her. I know how you feel."

I had passed a sleepless night before I remembered to feel revolted at the sympathy of this hussy who had helped to bring my mother to her death—and I did not go near her. But I inquired my way from one doctor to another—there were not many in Madison then—until I found one, named Mix, who had treated my mother in her last illness. She was weak and run down, he said, and couldn't stand a run of lung fever, which had carried her off.

"Did she mention me?" I asked.

"At the very last," said Doctor Mix, "she said once or twice, 'He had to work too hard!' I don't know who she meant. Not Rucker, eh?"

I shook my head—I knew what she meant.

"And," said he, "if you can see your way clear to arrange with old Rucker to pay my bill—winter is on now, and I could use the money."

I pulled out my pocketbook and paid the bill.

"Thank you, my boy," said he, "thank you!"

"I'm glad to do it," I answered—and turned away my head.

"Anything more I can do for you?" asked Doctor Mix, much kinder than before.

"I'd be much obliged," I replied, "if you could tell me where I can find some one that'll be able to show me my mother's grave."

"I'll take you there," he said quickly.

We rode to the graveyard in his sleigh, the bells jingling too merrily by far, I thought; and then to a marble-cutter from whom I bought a headstone to be put up in the spring. I worked out an epitaph which Doctor Mix, who seemed to see through the case pretty well, put into good language, reading as follows: "Here lies the body of Mary Brouwer Vandemark, born in Ulster County, New York, in 1815; died Madison, Wisconsin, October 19, 1854. Erected to her memory by her son, Jacob T. Vandemark." So I cut the name of Rucker from our family record; but, of course, he never knew.

Then the doctor took me back to the tavern, trying to persuade me on the way to locate in Madison. He had some vacant lots he wanted to show me; and said that he and a company of friends had laid out new towns at half a dozen different places in Wisconsin, and even in Minnesota and Iowa. Before we got back he saw, though I tried to be civil, that I was not thinking about what he was saying, and so he let me think in peace; but he shook hands with me kindly at parting, and wished I could have got there in September.

"Things might have been different," said he. "You're a darned good boy; and if you'll stay here till spring I'll get you a job."

2

There was no fire in my room, and it was cold; so there was no place to sit except in the barroom, which I found deserted but for one man, when I went back and sat down to think over my future. Should I go back to the canal? I hated to do this, though all my acquaintances were there, and the work was of the sort I had learned to do best; besides, here I was in the West, and all the opportunities of the West were before me, though it looked cold and dreary just now, and no great chances seemed lying about for a boy like me. I was perplexed. I had lost my desire for revenge on Rucker; and just then I felt no ambition, and saw no light. I was ready, I suppose, to begin a life of drifting; this time with no aim, not even a remote one—for my one object in life had vanished. But something in the way of guidance always has come to me at such times; and it came now. The one man who was in the bar when I came in got up, and moving over by me, sat down in a chair by my side.

"Cold day," said he.

I agreed, and looked him over carefully. He was a tall man who wore a long black Prince Albert coat which came down below his knees, a broad felt hat, and no overcoat. He looked cold, and rather shabby; but he talked with a good deal of style, and used many big words.

"Stranger here?" he asked.

I admitted that I was.

"May I offer," said he, "the hospitalities of the city in the form of a hot whisky toddy?"

I thanked him and asked to be excused.

"Your name," he ventured, after clearing his throat, "is Vandemark."

Then I looked at him still more sharply. How did he know my name?

"I have been looking for you," said he, "for some months—some months; and I was so fortunate as to observe the fact when you made a call last evening on our fellow-citizen, Doctor Rucker. I was—ahem—consulted professionally by the late lamented Mrs. Rucker—I am a lawyer, sir—before her death, for the purpose of securing my services in looking after the interests of her son, Mr. Jacob H. Vandemark."

"Jacob T. Vandemark," said I.

"Why, damn me," said he, looking again at his book, "it is a 'T.' Lawyer's writing, Jacob, lawyer's writing—notoriously bad, you know."

I sat thinking about the expression, "the interests of Jacob T. Vandemark," for a long time; but the truth did not dawn an me, my mind working slowly as usual.

"What interests?" I asked finally.

"The interest," said he, "of her only child in the estate of Mrs. Rucker."

Then there recurred to my mind the words in my mother's last letter; that the money had been paid on the settlement of my father's estate, and that she and Rucker were coming out West to make a new start in life. I had never given it a moment's thought before, and should have gone away without asking anybody a single question about it, if this scaly pettifogger, as I now know him to have been, had not sidled up to me.

"The estate," said my new friend, "is small, Jacob; but right is right, and there is no reason why this man Rucker should not be made to disgorge every cent that's coming to you—every cent! I know Doctor Rucker slightly, and I hope I shall not shock you if I say that in my opinion he would steal the Lord's Supper, and wipe his condemned lousy red whiskers and his freckled claws with the table-cloth! That's the kind of pilgrim and stranger Rucker is. He will cheat you out of your eye teeth, sir, unless you are protected by the best legal talent to be had—the best to be had—the talent and the advice of the man to whom your late lamented mother went for counsel."

"Yes," said I after a while, "I think he will."

"That is why your mother," he went on, "advised with me; for even if I have to say it, I'm a living whirlwind in court. Suppose we have a drink!"

I sat with my drink before me, slowly sipping it, and trying to see through this man and the new question he had brought up. Certainly, I was entitled to my mother's property—all of it by rights, whatever the law might be—for it came through my father. Surely this lawyer must be a good man, or my mother wouldn't have consulted him. But when I mentioned to my new friend, whose name was Jackway, my claim to the whole estate he assured me that Rucker was the legal owner of his share in it—I forget how much.

"And," said he, "I make no doubt the old scoundrel has reduced the whole estate to possession, and is this moment," lowering his voice secretively, "acting as executor de son tort—executor de son tort, sir! I wouldn't put it past him!"

I wrote this, with some other legal expressions in my note-book.

"How can I get this money away from him?" said I, coming to the point.

"Money!" said he. "How do we know it is money? It may be chattels, goods, wares or merchandise. It may be realty. It may be choses in action. We must require of him a complete discovery. We may have to go back to the original probate proceedings through which your mother became seized of this property to obtain the necessary information. How old are you?"

I told him that I was sixteen the twenty-seventh of the last July.

"A minor," said he; "in law an infant. A guardian ad litem will have to be appointed to protect your interests, and to bring suit for you. I shall be glad to serve you, sir, in the name of justice; and to confound those with whom robbery of the orphan is an occupation, sir, a daily occupation. Come up to my office with me, and we will begin proceedings to make Rucker sweat!"

3

But this was too swift for a Vandemark. In spite of his urging, I insisted that I should have to think it over. He grew almost angry at me at last, I thought; but he went away finally, after I had taken the hint he gave and bought him another drink. The next morning he was back again, urging me to proceed immediately, "so that the property might not be further sequestrated and wasted." He did not know how slow I was to think and act; and suspected that I was going to some other lawyer, I now believe; for I noticed him shadowing me, as the detectives say, every time I walked out. On the third day, while I was still studying the matter, and making no progress, Rucker himself came into the tavern, with his neck bandaged and his head on one side, and in his best clothes; and sitting on the edge of his chair between me and the door, as if ready to take wing at any hostile movement on my part, he broached the subject of my share in my mother's estate.

"I want to deal with you," said he in that dangerous whine of his, "as with my own son, Jacob, my own son."

There was nothing to say to this, and I said nothing. I only looked at him. He was studying me closely, but had never taken pains to learn my peculiarities when I lived with him, and had to study a total stranger, and a person who was too old to be treated as a child, but who at the same time must be very green in money matters. I was a puzzle to him, and my lack of words made me still more of a problem.

"You know, of course," he finally volunteered, "that the estate when it was finally wound up had mostly been eaten up by court expenses and lawyers' fees—the robbers!"

I could see he was in earnest in this last remark: but of course lawyers' fees and court expenses were all a mystery to me. I did not even know that lawyers and courts had anything to do with estates. I did not know what an estate was—so I continued to keep still.

"There was hardly anything left," said he.

I was astonished at this; and I did not believe it. After thinking it over for a few minutes, earnestly, and without any thought of saying anything to catch him up, I said: "You traveled in good style coming west on the canal. You took a steamer up the Lakes. You have been dressing fine ever since the money came in; and you're keeping a woman."

He made no reply, except to say that I did not understand, but would when he showed me where every cent of the estate money had gone which he had spent, and just how much was left. As for his daughter—he supposed I knew—but he never finished this speech. I rose to my feet; and he left hurriedly, saying that he would show me a statement in the morning. "I expect to pay your board here," said he, "for a few days, you know—until you decide to move on—or move back."

For a week or so I refused to talk with Rucker or Jackway; but sat around and tried to make up my mind what to do. To hire Jackway would take all my savings; and the schedules which Rucker brought me on legal-cap paper I refused even to touch with my hands. I am sure, now, that Rucker had sent Jackway to me in the first place, never suspecting that the matter of the estate had been so far from my mind; and thereby, by too much craft, he lost the opportunity of stealing it all. Jackway kept telling me of Rucker's rascalities, so as to get into my good graces and confidence, in which he succeeded better than he knew; and urging me to pay him a few dollars—just a few dollars—"to begin proceedings to stay waste and sequestration"; but I did not give him anything because it seemed a first step into something I had not understood.

4

I began calling on land agents, thinking I might use what little money I had left to make a first payment on a farm; but the land around Madison was too high in price for me. Two or three of these real estate agents were also lawyers; and I caught Rucker and Jackway together, looking worried and anxious, when I came from the office of one of them who very kindly informed me that, if he were in my place, he would go across the Mississippi and settle in Iowa. He had been as far west as Fort Dodge, and described to me the great prairies, unbroken by the plow, the railroads which were just ready to cross the Mississippi, the rich soil, the chance there was to get a home, and to become my own master. I began to feel an interest in Iowa.

I think these days must have been anxious ones for Rucker, greedy as he was for my little fortune, ignorant as he was of the depth of the ignorance of the silent stupid boy with whom he was dealing—and a boy, too, who had made that one remark about his way of living and traveling that seemed to show a knowledge of just what he was doing, and had done. I could see after that, that he thought me much sharper than I was. Lawyer Jackway haunted the hotel, and was spending more money—Rucker's money, I know. He had bought a new overcoat, and was drinking a good deal more than was good for him; but he wormed out of me something about my desire for a farm, and after having had a chance to see Rucker he began talking of a compromise.

"The old swindler," said he, "has all the evidence in his own hands; and he and that red-headed spiritual partner of his will swear to anything. As your legal adviser," said he, "and the legal adviser of your sainted mother, I'd advise you to take anything he is willing to give—within bounds, of course, within bounds."

So the next time Rucker sidled into the tavern, and began beslavering me about the way the money left by my mother was being eaten up by expenses and debts, I blurted out: "Well, what will you give me to clear out and let you and your red-headed woodpecker alone?"

"Now," said he, "you are talking sensibly—sensibly. There is a little farm-out near Blue Mounds that I could, by a hard struggle, let you have; but it would be more than your share—more than your share."

This was forty acres, and would have a mortgage on it. I waited a day or so, and told him I wouldn't take it. What I was afraid of was the mortgage; but I didn't give my reasons. Then he came back with a vacant lot in Madison, and then three vacant lots, which I went and looked at, and found in a swamp. Then I told him I wanted money or farm land; and he offered me a lead mine near Mineral Point. All the time he was getting more and more worried and excited; he used to tremble when he talked to me; and as the winter wore away, and the season drew nearer when he wanted to go on his travels, or deal with the properties in which I had found out by this time he was speculating with my mother's money, just as everybody was speculating then, in mines, town sites, farm lands, railway stocks and such things, he was on tenter-hooks, I could see that, to get rid of me, whom he thought he had given the slip forever. Finally he came to me one morning, just as a warm February wind had begun to thaw the snow, and said, beaming as if he had found a gold mine for me: "Jacob, I've got just what you want—a splendid farm in Iowa."

And he laid on the table the deed to my farm in Vandemark Township, a section of land in one solid block a mile square. "Of course," said he, "I can't let you have all of it—'but let us say eighty acres, or even I might clean up a quarter-section, here along the east side,"—and he pointed to a plat of it pinned fast to the deed.

"The whole piece," said I, "is worth eight hundred dollars, and not a cent more—if it's all good land. That ain't enough."

"All good land!" said he—and I could see he was surprised at the fact that I knew Iowa land was selling at a dollar and a quarter an acre. "Why, there ain't anything but good land there. You can put a plow in one corner of that section, and plow every foot of it without taking the share out of the ground."

"All or nothing," said I, "and more."

Next day he came back and said he would let me have the whole section; but that it would break him. He wanted to be fair with me—more than fair. People had set me against him, he said, looking at Jackway who was-drinking at the bar; but nobody could say that he was a man who would not deal fairly with an ignorant boy.

"I've got to have a team, a wagon, a cover for the wagon, and provisions for the trip," I said, "and a few hundred dollars to live on for a while after I get to Iowa."

At this he threw his hands up, and left me, saying that if I wanted to ruin him I would have to do it through the courts. He had gone as far as he would go, and I would never have another offer as generous as he had made me. The next day I met on the street the red-headed girl, who went by the name of Alice Rucker, and was notorious as a medium. She stopped me, and asked why I hadn't been to see her—carrying the conversation off casually, as if we had been ordinary acquaintances. All I could say—for I was a little embarrassed, was "I do' know"—which was what I had told Rucker and Jackway, in answer to a thousand questions, until they were crazy to know how to come at me.

"Let me tell you something," said she. "If you want that Iowa farm, pa—"

"Who?" said I.

"Rucker," said she, brazening it out with me. "He'll give you the land, and your outfit. Don't let them fool you out of the team and wagon."

"Thank you for telling me," said I; "but I guess I'll have to have more."

"If you go into court he'll beat you," said she, "and I'm telling you that as a friend, even if you don't believe me."

"I'm much obliged," I said; and I believed then, and believe now, that she was sincere.

"And when you start," said she, "if you want some one to cook and take care of you, let me know. I like traveling."

I turned red at this; and halted and mumbled, until she tripped away, laughing, but looking back at me; but I remembered what she had said, and within a week I had consented that Jackway be appointed guardian ad litem for me in the court proceedings; and in a short time I received a good team of mares, a bay named Fanny and a sorrel named Flora, good, twelve hundred pound chunks, but thin in flesh—I would not take geldings—a wagon, nearly new, a set of wagon bows, enough heavy drilling to make a cover, some bedding, a stove, an old double-barreled shotgun, two pounds of powder and a lot of shot, harness for the team, horse-feed, and as complete an outfit as I could think of, even to the box of axle-grease swinging under the wagon-box. Rucker groaned at every addition; and finally balked when I asked him for a hundred dollars in cash. The court entered up the proper decree, I put my deeds in my pocket, and after making a feed-box for the horses to hang on the back of the wagon-box, I pulled out for Iowa three weeks too soon—for the roads were not yet settled.



5

The night before I started, I sat in the warm barroom, half pleased and half frightened at the new world into which I was about to enter, thinking of my new wagon and the complete equipage of emigration now shown to be mine by the bills of sale and deeds in my pocket, and occasionally putting my fingers to my nose to catch the good smell of the horse which soap and water had not quite removed. This scent I had acquired by currying and combing my mares for hours, clipping their manes and fetlocks, and handling them all over to see if they were free from blemishes. The lawyer, Jackway, my guardian ad litem, came into the tavern in a high and mighty and popular way, saying "How de do, ward?" in a way I didn't like, went to the bar and throwing down a big piece of money began drinking one glass after another.

As he drank he grew boastful. He bragged to the men about him of his ability. Nobody ever hired Jackway to care for his interests, said he, without having his interests taken care of.

"You can go out," said he to a peaceful-looking man who stood watching him, "into the street there, and stab the first man you meet, and Jackway'll get you clear. I'm a living whirlwind! And," looking at me as I sat in the chair by the wall, "you can steal a woman's estate and I'll get it away from her heirs for you."

I wondered if he meant me. I hardly believed that he could; for all the while he had made a great to-do about protecting my interests; and I now remembered that he had taken an oath to do so. But he kept sneering at me all the evening, and just as I was leaving to go to bed, he called the crowd up to drink with him.

"This is on the estate," he hiccoughed—for he was very drunk by this time—"and I'll give you a toast."

They all lined up, slapping him on the back; and as I stood in the door, they all lifted their glasses, and Jackway gave them what he called his "toast," which ran as follows:

"Sold again And got the tin, And sucked another Dutchman in!"

He paid out of a fat pocketbook, staggering, and pointing at me and looking like a tipsy imp of some sort; and finally he started over toward me, saying, "Hey, Dutchman! Wait a minute an' I'll tell you how you got sucked in!"

I grew suddenly very angry; and slammed the door in his face to prevent myself from doing him harm. I had not yet seen why I ought to do him harm; and along the road to Iowa, I was all the time wondering why I got madder and madder at Jackway; and that rhyme kept running through my mind, oftener and oftener, as I drew nearer and nearer my journey's end:

"Sold again And got the tin, And sucked another Dutchman in!"

It was in the latter part of March. There were snowdrifts in places along the road, and when I reached a place about where Mt. Horeb now is, I had to stop and lie up for three days for a snow-storm. I was ahead of the stream of immigrants that poured over that road in the spring of 1855 in a steady tide.

As I made my start from Madison I saw Rucker and Alice standing at the door of the tavern seemingly making sure that I was really getting out of town. He dodged back into the house when I glanced at them; but she walked out into the street and stopped me, as bold as brass.

"I'm waiting," said she. "Where shall I ride?" And she put one foot on the hub and stepped up with the other into the wagon box.

"I'm just pulling out for Iowa," I said, my face as red as her hair, I suppose.

"We're just pulling out," said she.

"I've got to move on," said I; "be careful or you'll get your dress muddy on the wheel."

She couldn't have expected me to take her, of course; but I thought she looked kind of hurt. There seemed to be something like tears in her eyes as she put her arms around my neck.

"Kiss your little step-sister good-by," she said. "She's been a better friend of yours than you'll ever know—you big, nice, blundering greenhorn!"

She laid her lips on mine. It was the first kiss I had ever had from any one since I was a little boy; and as I half struggled against but finally returned it, it thrilled me powerfully. Afterward I was disgusted with myself for kissing this castaway; but as I drove on, leaving her standing in the middle of the road looking after me, it almost seemed as if I were leaving a friend. Perhaps she was, in her way, the nearest thing to a friend I had then in the world—strange as it seems. As for Rucker, he was rejoicing, of course, at having trimmed neatly a dumb-head of a Dutch boy—a wrong to my poor mother, the very thought of which even after all these years, makes my blood boil.



CHAPTER VI

I BECOME COW VANDEMARK

I was off with the spring rush of 1855 for the new lands of the West! I kept thinking as I drove along of Lawyer Jackway's sarcastic toast, "Sold again, and got the tin, and sucked another Dutchman in!" But after all I couldn't keep myself from feeling pretty proud, as I watched the play of my horses' ears as they seemed to take in each new westward view as we went over the tops of the low hills, and as I listened to the "chuck, chuck" of the wagon wheels on their well-greased skeins. Rucker and Jackway might have given me a check on the tow-path; but yet I felt hopeful that I was to make a real success of my voyage of life to a home and a place where I could be somebody. There was pleasure in looking back at my riches in the clean, hard-stuffed straw-tick, the stove, the traveling home which belonged to me.

It seems a little queer to me now to think of it as I look out of my bay-window at my great fields of corn, my pastures dotted with stock, my feedyard full of fat steers; or as I sit in the directors' room of the bank and take my part as a member of the board. But I am really not as rich now as I was then.

I was going to a country which seemed to be drawing everybody else, and must therefore be a good country—and I had a farm. I had a great farm. It was a mile square. It was almost like the estate that General Cantine had near the canal at Ithaca I thought. To my boy's mind it looked too big for me; and sometimes I wondered if I should not be able to rent it out to tenants and grow rich on my income, like the Van Rensselaers of the Manor before the Anti-Rent difficulties.

All the while I was passing outfits which were waiting by the roadside, or making bad weather of it for some reason or other; or I was passed by those who had less regard for their horse-flesh than I, or did not realize that the horses had to go afoot; or those that drew lighter loads. There were some carriages which went flourishing along with shining covers; these were the aristocrats; there were other slow-going rigs drawn by oxen. Usually there would be two or more vehicles in a train. They camped by the roadside cooking their meals; they stopped at wayside taverns. They gave me all sorts of how-d'ye-does as I passed. Girls waved their hands at me from the hind-ends of rigs and said bold things—to a boy they would not see again; but which left him blushing and thinking up retorts for the next occasion—retorts that never seemed to fit when the time came; and talkative women threw remarks at me about the roads and the weather.

Men tried half a dozen times a day to trade me out of my bay mare Fanny, or my sorrel mare Flora—they said I ought to match up with two of a color; and the crow-baits offered me would have stocked a horse-ranch. People with oxen offered me what looked like good swaps, because they were impatient to make better time; and as I went along so stylishly I began turning over in my mind the question as to whether it might not be better to get to Iowa a little later in the year with cattle for a start than to rush the season with my fine mares and pull up standing like a gentleman at my own imaginary door.

2

As I went on to the westward, I began to see Blue Mound rising like a low mountain off my starboard bow, and I stopped at a farm in the foot-hills of the Mound where, because it was rainy, I paid four shillings for putting my horses in the stable. There were two other movers stopping at the same place. They had a light wagon and a yoke of good young steers, and had been out of Madison two days longer than I had been. I noticed that they left their wagon in a clump of bushes, and that while one of them—a man of fifty or more, slept in the house, the other, a young fellow of twenty or twenty-two, lay in the wagon, and that one or the other seemed always to be on guard near the vehicle. The older man had a long beard and a hooked nose, and seemed to be a still sort of person, until some one spoke of slavery; then he broke out in a fierce speech denouncing slaveholders, and the slavocracy that had the nation in its grip.

"You talk," said the farmer, "like a black Abolitionist."

"I'm so black an Abolitionist," said he, "that I'd be willing to shoulder a gun any minute if I thought I could wipe out the curse of slavery."

The farmer was terribly scandalized at this, and when the old man walked away to his wagon, he said to the young man and me that that sort of talk would make trouble and ruin the nation; and that he didn't want any more of it around his place.

"Well," said the traveler, "you won't have any more of it from us. We're just pulling out." After the farmer went away, he spoke to me about it.

"What do you think of that kind of talk?" he asked.

"I don't own any niggers," said I. "I don't ever expect to own any. I don't see how slavery can do me any good; and I think the slaves are human."

I had no very clear ideas on the subject, and had done little thinking about it; but what I said seemed to be satisfactory to the young man. He told his friend about it, and after a while the old man, whose name was Dunlap, came to me and shook my hand, saying that he was glad to meet a young fellow of my age who was of the right stripe.

"Can you shoot?" he asked.

I told him I never had had much chance to learn, but I had a good gun, and had got some game with it almost every day so far.

"What kind of a gun?" he asked.

I told him it was a double-barreled shotgun, and he looked rather disappointed. Then he asked me if I had ever thought of going to Kansas. No, I told him, I thought I should rather locate in Iowa.

"We are going to Kansas," he said. "There's work for real men in Kansas—men who believe in freedom. You had better go along with Amos Thatcher and me."

I said I didn't believe I could—I had planned to locate in Iowa. He dropped the subject by saying that I would overtake him and Thatcher on the road, and we could talk it over again. When did I think of getting under way? I answered that I thought I should stay hauled up to rest my horses for a half-day anyhow, so perhaps we might camp that night together.

"A good idea," said Thatcher, smilingly, as they drove off. "Join us; we get lonesome."

I laid by that forenoon because one of my mares had limped a little the day before, and I was worrying for fear she might not be perfectly sound. I hitched up after noon and drove on, anxiously watching her to see whether I had not been sucked in on horse-flesh, as well as in the general settlement of my mother's estate. She seemed to be all right, however, and we were making good headway as night drew on, and I was halted by Amos Thatcher who said he was on the lookout for me.

"We have a station off the road a mile or so," said he, "and you'll have a hearty welcome if you come with me—stable for your horses, and a bed to sleep in, and good victuals."

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-fashioned 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-fashioned 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 rushing to the prairies," said the old man, "will starve out and come back. God 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, niggered 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 God to Adam, and when you go to the prairies where it's all ready for the plow, you are trying to dodge God'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 grass," said Thatcher. "I should think that God must have meant grass 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 God'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 shining, "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 passengers 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 canal 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 scraping 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 massa," 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 God'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!"

"God 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.

"God 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 God-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 God and tell the law to go to hell—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 hell," said I.

Dunlap and Thatcher looked at each other as if relieved. I have always suspected that I was taken into their secret without their ordinary precautions; and that for a while they were a little dubious for fear that they had spilt the milk of secrecy. But all my life people have told me their secrets.

They urged me hard to go with them; and talked so favorably about the soil of the prairies that I began to think well again of my Iowa farm. When I had made it plain that I had to have a longer time to think it over, they began urging me to let them have my horses on some sort of a trade; and I began to see that a part of what they had wanted all the time was a faster team as well as a free-state recruit. They urged on me the desirability of having cattle instead of horses when I reached my farm.

"Cows, yes," said I, "but not steers."

So I slept over It until morning. Then I made them the proposition that if they would arrange with Preston to trade me four cows, which I would select from his herd, and would provide for my board with Preston until I could break them to drive, and would furnish yokes and chains in place of my harness, I would let them have the team for a hundred dollars boot-money. Preston said he'd like to have me make my selection first, and when I picked out three-year-old heifers, two of which were giving milk, he said it was a whack, if it didn't take me more than a week to break them. Dunlap and Thatcher hitched up, and started off the next morning. I had become Cow Vandemark overnight, and am still Cow Vandemark in the minds of the old settlers of Vandemark Township and some who have just picked the name up.

But I did not take on my new name without a struggle, for Flora and Fanny had become dear to me since leaving Madison—my first horses. How I got my second team of horses is connected with one of the most important incidents in my life; it was a long time before I got them and it will be some time before I can tell about it. In the meantime, there were Flora and Fanny, hitched to Dunlap and Thatcher's light wagon, disappearing among the burr oaks toward the Dubuque highway. I thought of my pride as I drove away from Madison with these two steeds, and of the pretty figure I cut the morning when red-haired Alice climbed up, offered to go with me, and kissed me before she climbed down. Would she have done this if I had been driving oxen, or still worse, those animals which few thought worth anything as draught animals—cows? And then I thought of Flora's lameness the day before yesterday. Was it honest to let Dunlap and Thatcher drive off to liberate the nation with a horse that might go lame?

"Let me have a horse," said I to Preston. "I want to catch them and tell them something."

I rode up behind the Abolitionists' wagon, waving my hat and shouting. They pulled up and waited.

"What's up?" asked Dunlap. "Going with us after all? I hope so, my boy."

"No," said I, "I just wanted to say that that nigh mare was lame day before yesterday, and I—I—I didn't want you to start off with her without knowing it."

Dunlap asked about her lameness, and got out to look her over. He felt of her muscles, and carefully scrutinized her for swelling or swinney or splint or spavin or thoroughpin. Then he lifted one foot after another, and cleaned out about the frog, tapping the hoof all over for soreness. Down deep beside the frog of the foot which she had favored he found a little pebble.

"That's what it was," said he, holding the pebble up. "She'll be all right now. Thank you for telling me. It was the square thing to do."

"If you don't feel safe to go on with the team," said I, "I'll trade back."

"No," said he, "we're needed in Kansas; and," turning up an oil-cloth and showing me a dozen or so of the Sharp's rifles, "so are these. And let me tell you, boy, if I'm any judge of men, the time will come when you won't feel so bad to lose half a dozen horses, as you feel now to be traded out of Flora and Fanny, and make a hundred dollars by the trade. Get up, Flora; go long, Fanny; good-by, Jake!" And they drove off to the Border Wars. I had made my first sacrifice to the cause of the productiveness of the Vandemark Farm.

That night a wagon went away from the Preston farm with the passengers going to Canada by the U.G. Railway The next morning I began the task of fitting yokes to my two span of heifers, and that afternoon, I gave Lily and Cherry their first lesson. I had had some experience in driving cattle on Mrs. Fogg's farm in Herkimer County, but I should have made a botch job of it if it had not been for Mr. Preston, who knew all there was to know about cattle, and while protesting that cows could not be driven, helped me drive them. In less than a week my cows were driving as prettily as any oxen. They were light and active, and overtook team after team of laboring steers every day I drove them. Furthermore, they gave me milk. I fed them well, worked them rather lightly, and by putting the new milk in a churn I bought at Mineral Point, I found that the motion of the wagon would bring the butter as well as any churning. I had cream for my coffee, butter for my bread, milk for my mush, and lived high. A good deal of fun was poked at me about my team of cows; but people were always glad to camp with me and share my fare.

Economically, our cows ought to be made to do a good deal of the work of the farms. I have always believed this; but now a German expert has proved it. I read about it the other day in a bulletin put out by the Agricultural Department; but I proved it in Vandemark Township before the man was born that wrote the bulletin. If not pushed too hard, cows will work and give almost as much milk as if not worked at all. This statement of course won't apply to the fancy cows which are high-power milk machines, and need to be packed in cotton, and kept in satin-lined stalls; but to such cows as farmers have, and always will have, it does apply.

I was sorry to leave the Prestons, they were such whole-souled, earnest people; and before I did leave them I was a full-fledged Abolitionist so far as belief was concerned. I never did become active, however, in spiriting slaves from one station to another of the U.G. Railway.

I drove out to the highway, and turning my prow to the west, I joined again in the stream of people swarming westward. The tide had swollen in the week during which I had laid by at the Prestons'. The road was rutted, poached deep where wet and beaten hard where dry, or pulverized into dust by the stream of emigration. Here we went, oxen, cows, mules, horses; coaches, carriages, blue jeans, corduroys, rags, tatters, silks, satins, caps, tall hats, poverty, riches; speculators, missionaries, land-hunters, merchants; criminals escaping from justice; couples fleeing from the law; families seeking homes; the wrecks of homes seeking secrecy; gold-seekers bearing southwest to the Overland Trail; politicians looking for places in which to win fame and fortune; editors hunting opportunities for founding newspapers; adventurers on their way to everywhere; lawyers with a few books; Abolitionists going to the Border War; innocent-looking outfits carrying fugitive slaves; officers hunting escaped negroes; and most numerous of all, homeseekers "hunting country"—a nation on wheels, an empire in the commotion and pangs of birth. Down I went with the rest, across ferries, through Dodgeville, Mineral Point and Platteville, past a thousand vacant sites for farms toward my own farm so far from civilization, shot out of civilization by the forces of civilization itself.

I saw the old mining country from Mineral Point to Dubuque, where lead had been dug for many years, and where the men lived who dug the holes and were called Badgers, thus giving the people of Wisconsin their nickname as distinguished from the Illinois people who came up the rivers to work in the spring, and went back in the fall, and were therefore named after a migratory fish and called Suckers; and at last, I saw from its eastern bank far off to the west, the bluffy shores of Iowa, and down by the river the keen spires and brick and wood buildings of the biggest town I had seen since leaving Milwaukee the town of Dubuque.

I camped that night in the northwestern corner of Illinois, in a regular city of movers, all waiting their turns at the ferry which crossed the Mississippi to the Land of Promise.



4

Iowa did not look much like a prairie country from where I stood. The Iowa shore towered above the town of Dubuque, clothed with woods to the top, and looking more like York State than anything I had seen since I had taken the schooner at Buffalo to come up the Lakes. I lay that night, unable to sleep. For one thing, I needed to be wakeful, lest some of the motley crowd of movers might take a fancy to my cattle. I was learning by experience how to take care of myself and mine; besides, I wanted to be awake early so as to take passage by ferry-boat "before soon" as the Hoosiers say, in the morning.

That April morning was still only a gray dawn when I drove down to the ferry, without stopping for my breakfast. A few others of those who looked forward to a rush for the boat had got there ahead of me, and we waited in line. I saw that I should have to go on the second trip rather than the first, but movers can not be impatient, and the driving of cattle cures a person of being in a hurry; so I was in no great taking because of this little delay. As I sat there in my wagon, a black-bearded, scholarly-looking man stepped up and spoke to me.

"Going across?" he asked.

"As soon as the boat will take me," I said.

"Heavy loaded?" he asked. "Have you room for a passenger?"

"I guess I can accommodate you," I answered. "Climb in."

"It isn't for myself I'm asking," he said. "There's a lady here that wants to ride in a covered wagon, and sit back where she can't see the water. It makes her dizzy—and scares her awfully; can you take her?"

"If she can ride back there on the bed," said I.

He peeped in, and said that this was the very place for her. She could lie down and cover up her head and never know she was crossing the river at all. In a minute, and while it was still twilight, just as the ferry-boat came to the landing, he returned with the lady. She was dressed in some brown fabric, and wore a thick veil over her face; but as she climbed in I saw that she had yellow hair and bright eyes and lips; and that she was trembling so that her hands shook as she took hold of the wagon-bow, and her voice quivered as she thanked me, in low tones. The man with the black beard pressed her hand as he left her. He offered me a dollar for her passage; but I called his attention to the fact that it would cost only two shillings more for me to cross with her than if I went alone, and refused to take more.

"There are a good many rough fellows," said he, "at these ferries, that make it unpleasant for a lady, sometimes—"

"Not when she's with me," I said.

He looked at me sharply, as if surprised that I was not so green as I looked—though I was pretty verdant. Anyhow, he said, if I should be asked if any one was with me, it would save her from being scared if I would say that I was alone—she was the most timid woman in the world.

"I'll have to tell the ferryman," I said.

"Will you?" he asked. "Why?"

"I'd be cheating him if I didn't," I answered.

"All right," he said, as if provoked at me, "but don't tell any one else."

"I ain't very good at lying," I replied.

He said for me to do the best I could for the lady, and hurried off. In the meantime, the lady had crept back on my straw-bed, and pulled the quilts completely over her. She piled pillows on one side of her, and stirred the straw up on the other, so that when she lay down the bed was as smooth as if nobody was in it. It looked as it might if a heedless boy had crawled out of it after a night's sleep, and carelessly thrown the coverlet back over it. I could hardly believe I had a passenger. When I was asked for the ferriage, I paid for two, and the ferryman asked where the other was.

"Back in the bed," I said.

He looked back, and said, "Well, I owe you something for your honesty. I never'd have seen him. Sick?"