“Well, there’s only one way. We must strike pure terror into their hearts, Owen. Pure terror. Pure! We must become terrible!” he growled. We had to make the Border Ruffians understand that they had to be ready to die miserably for this. If we showed them that their bits of Kansas Territory would not come to them otherwise, they’d go galloping straight back to Alabama and Georgia, where they could lie and boast in the taverns and bawdyhouses all they wanted. All we cared was that Kansas be left a free state, so that we could go back to Father’s old plan of breaking the rich slaveholder’s back by drawing off the Negro labor force with the Subterranean Passway, his plan to turn the Underground Railroad into a north-flowing river of fugitives. Then, to get their sugar and cotton and corn and tobacco grown, the planters would be forced to turn to their fellow whites and would start enslaving them. And when they did that, poor white men would know their true enemies at last. They’d see that their true allies all along had been us abolitionists and the freed blacks living up North and the Southern Negroes who still remained in bondage. With its main supports gone, Satan’s temple of slavery would come tumbling down, and then the Negro would no longer be despised in the land. The poor, landless black man and the poor white would fall into one another’s arms.
“Sounds good, Father,” I said. “Sounds real good.” I cracked the reins and moved the wagon a little more smartly along, as it looked like rain in the west. The huge, milky-white Kansas sky had gone all yellow near the horizon and then had suddenly darkened overhead. Long grasses riffled and swirled in the wind like the soft surface of the sea, changing from pale blue to green to steel gray in the broody, late afternoon light. Our trail was an ancient buffalo road, a grass-covered depression through the high, flat, endless field, which we followed as if in the wake of a westering ship, and I half-expected to see eddies of foam and bubbles out there before us. Ragged sheets of lightning shook down from the southern sky, and a few seconds later, the rumble of thunder rolled across the plain like distant cannonfire.
“What say you to that, son?” Father shouted over the wind. He was holding on to the seat with both hands, as the wagon bucked and dipped across the rough, grassy plain towards the long, purple line of cottonwoods in the river-bottom ahead, where our camp was located.
“To what?”
“To my thoughts!”
“Oh, I like it!” I shouted back.
“Like what?”
“Becoming terrible! I like becoming terrible!”
He loosened one hand from the box and flung his sinewy arm around my shoulders. “Oh, thou hast lately become a true soldier of the Lord, Owen!” He pulled me to him and laughed. Then suddenly the sky opened up, and a cold rain poured down, silencing us for the rest of the way into camp.
Once there, when we had climbed down from the wagon and come into the flapping tent, Salmon, Fred, Oliver, and Henry greeted us with great excitement and gave us news that set us immediately to loading the wagon with our weapons, and with Oliver up on the box driving the team and Father and the rest of us on horseback, we six headed on through the downpour straight on to Lawrence.
In our absence, the boys had learned that the Missourian Colonel Butord and his four hundred Southerners and hundreds more in smaller gangs of Southerners were headed for Lawrence from several directions, and this time they were coming in determined to burn the town to the ground. To justify their attack, the pro-slavers now had a legal pretext, in that, a few days earlier, a grand jury in Atchison had indicted all the Free-State leaders for high treason and the editors of the Herald Freedom, the Free-State newspaper, for sedition. This time, the Border Ruffians meant to stamp out the abolitionists once and for all. They meant to take our citadel and burn it and sow salt where it had stood and wipe all memory of Free-State resistance from Kansas forever.
The possibility of this occurring brought Father to a fever-pitch of excitement. As usual, it was the idea of battle more than the reality that made the Old Maris blood boil and his tongue wag. In some surprising ways and more than he thought, Father resembled the very Southerners he claimed to be at war with. Up to a point, it made him an effective leader of more conventional men than he, which was most men, of course, but that point was where the battle itself actually began.
He was not afraid exactly; Father was a courageous man. Simply, it was as if he could not cease controlling a situation, and whenever he reached that moment when he no longer was able to shape and determine things, he backed off. Which was why, I suppose, he needed me. I made no show of this and do not think that I tricked him into depending on me or moved him in any way contrary to his essential desires, even though he never quite said outright that, once he had properly positioned himself at the edge of battle, he needed me to bring him over it. Rather, it was our unstated agreement, our tacit understanding, that he was the one to lead us to the precipice, and I was the one to carry us across.
Out on the California Road, where it joined the Osawatomie Road down to our old, abandoned camp at Browns Station, we met up with two companies of volunteers, about thirty men, parts of John’s Osawatomie Rifles, as it turned out, who were milling about and apparently going nowhere. The rain had let up, and the men were shaking off their clothes, drying their weapons, and scraping mud from their horses’ shoes. They had built a huge fire, as if they meant to stay awhile or even overnight, for it was nearly dark by then.
They were more concerned, it seemed, with organizing themselves into a regular troop of soldiers than with riding straight on to defend Lawrence from the invaders. John explained to Father that they had lately received contradictory reports from Lawrence and wished to wait for further orders before leaving this part of the territory undefended against the numerous bands of Buford’s Ruffians who had been roaming the region for weeks, threatening to shoot, hang, and burn Free-Staters. Their first responsibility, he said, was to protect the Osawatomie section of the territory, not Lawrence.
This infuriated Father. He had moved to the wagon, where, to address the group, he stood up on the seat, with Oliver at the reins beside him and the rest of us on horseback. Earlier, back at the camp, we had loaded the wagon with the usual sheaf of pikes and sharpened broadswords, and we were armed in addition with our Sharps rifles and our revolvers. Though we were but six men, or five men and a boy, we had the weaponry of a dozen. “The Missourians are all at Lawrence, burning it down!” the Old Man shouted at John and the others. “It’s only you boys and your women and children who are left here!”
“We don’t know that,” John coolly answered.
“Well, then, you’re welcome to stay put until you do!” the Old Man snapped, and he leapt to the ground and took the bridle of Reliance from me and signaled for us to depart. At once, Oliver drew the wagon back onto the muddy road, and we headed at a gallop northward across the darkening plain towards Lawrence.
I remember two more meetings out on the road that night, before we went to Pottawatomie and did the terrible things there. The first was a rider who had been sent down to Osawatomie from Lawrence by the Free-State authorities, Colonel Lane and Mr. Robinson. He was a screw-faced boy of sixteen or seventeen, his horse all lathered from the long ride, and he at first mistook us for the advance contingent of the Osawatomie Rifles and thought that Father was John himself, Lieutenant Brown.