Here the Old Man for the first time took charge completely. He banged on the door, and before anyone inside had a chance to answer, he demanded to know the way to Dutch Henry’s cabin, which was widely known as a meeting place for pro-slavery settlers. Someone, presumably Mr. Wilkinson, began to answer, but Father interrupted and told him to come out and show us the way.
When there was no reply, Father waited a moment and then said, “Are you of the Law and Order Party?” meaning, was he pro-slavery.
Wilkinson answered forthrightly, “I am, sir!”
“Then you are our prisoner! I order you to open your door to us at once, or we shall burn the house down around you!”
“Wait! Wait a minute. Let me get a light,” Wilkinson said.
Father replied that he would give him thirty seconds and commenced counting, but before he had reached twenty, the door was opened, and we all marched inside the cabin. Here, again, there was a terrified wife and four children, all of the children small, however, little more than babies. Wilkinson was in his mid-thirties, a tall, gaunt Southerner with a great jaw, standing in his underwear and stockinged feet. His wife, also tall and thin, in a flannel nightgown and cap, stood by the fireplace, with the children huddled close around her.
“Who are you!” the woman screamed at Father. “Are you the devil? You look like the devil!”
“My wife is sick” Mr. Wilkinson said. “Let me stay here with her till morning. Post a man here, and you can come for me then, when we’ll have someone to tend the babies for her. We got us a woman coming then.”
Father ignored his drawling pleas. He set Oliver and Fred to search the house for weapons, and they quickly turned up a rabbit gun and a powder flask. “Bring them with us,” the Old Man said. Salmon and Henry he told to pick up the pair of saddles that were lying on the floor next to the door and carry them up to the road. We were short two saddles, and I had spotted them myself when we entered the cabin. To Mr. Wilkinson, Father simply said, “Come along now” and he pointed the tip of his sword at the man, whose face went rigid at the sight of it. He made no answer and walked stiff-legged from the cabin, and Father followed.
The wife called after him, “Dad, you’ll want your boots!”
“He won’t be needing them,” I said.
“What are you going to do to my husband?” Her deep-set eyes, her small, round mouth, her nose, her whole face, were all circles inside circles, a great, concentric, plaintive whorl that threatened to draw me out of myself and towards her, and I stepped backwards as if afraid of her.
“Nothing,” I said. “We ain’t gonna do nothing to him. Just make him our prisoner.”
“Why? What’s he done?”
“For exchange. We’ll exchange him with the Missourians for one of ours,” I said, and stumbled backwards from the cabin and turned and ran to catch up with the others, who had disappeared into the darkness ahead.
By the time I reached the place where the path joined the main trail, they had already killed Mr. Wilkinson, and he lay on the rough ground in a splash of moonlight with his throat slashed, a huge, toothless yawn from one side of his massive jaw to the other, and he had a great, raw wound on his skull, as if he had been scalped by Indians, and one arm had been nearly severed from the trunk.
“All right, now,” Father said. “Let’s get on to the Sherman cabin.” He told us to hide the saddles and the rabbit gun in the brush so we could pick them up later.
But then Oliver began to cry. “I don’t want to do any more of this!” he wailed. “I can’t!.”
As if reminding the Old Man of something he had forgotten, Fred leaned in close to Father and said, “He’s not a grown man yet, you know.”
I said, “Maybe Oliver should go back for the wagon and come down along the trail, pick up these here saddles and so on, and meet up later with us below.”
“Yes, fine. Do that, Oliver. The rest of you follow me,” Father said, and we went from there down to our final stop, the cabin owned by Dutch Sherman, the Missourian who, of all the pro-slavers settled along the Pottawatomie, was the most outspoken and threatening. It was he whom we had most particularly gone looking for that night, and as it turned out, he was the easiest to kill. Not because we hated him more than the others, but because he physically opposed us, fought us furiously until he was finally dead.
Evidently, he had heard the gunshot from up above, where Father had fired his revolver into Mr. Doyle’s head, and had come out to investigate, for we met him up on the road a short ways from his cabin. Father, Fred, and I were in front, with Henry and Salmon trailing behind, and we came upon him suddenly before he knew we were there. He was standing by the side of the road, urinating, and had not heard us approach. He was a muscular keg of a man, red-faced, with a bull neck and thick arms, a mustachioed Dutchman of about forty, famous for his temper. We threw down on him with our swords and Father’s revolver, and Father said that we were capturing him for the Northern Army. “You are our prisoner, sir.”
He buttoned himself up slowly, methodically, and glared at us, all the while muttering in his hard accent, “So it’s you damned Bible-thumping Browns, is it? You are worse than the niggers. You are a bunch of god-damn Yankee trash come down here for stealing our niggers and our horses and then to go off feeling all good for it. You are a pack of god-damn hypocrites, coming around here in the dead of night like this for robbing a man and to terrorize him. Tell me what in the hell do you think you are doing!”
When Father answered, “The only thing we’re robbing you of tonight is your life,” Mr. Sherman understood the dire situation he was in, and he went wild. He exploded in fury, grabbing the barrel of Father’s revolver with one hand and punching him repeatedly in the face with the other. He was very strong, and when Father could not get the weapon loose of his grip or protect himself from his pummeling fist, I was obliged to bring my sword into play and, with a single stroke, severed the man’s hand at the wrist. Both hand and revolver fell to the ground. He howled in pain and rage and charged at me with his head lowered and butted me in the face, bloodying my nose and knocking me backwards onto the ground. With his remaining hand, he grabbed my dropped sword and swung it like a scimitar in a wide circle, clearing a space to stand in and hold us at bay. His severed hand lay on the ground, and his chopped wrist sprayed blood, draining him white, yet still he staggered in a circle, flailing the sword at us, causing us to leap back from him and look for an opening to take him down without being injured by him. I had scrambled back to my feet, my face covered with blood, and when I saw Father’s revolver lying on the ground next to Mr. Sherman’s hand, I darted over to it, grabbed the weapon, and, from a crouching position, looked up into the maddened face of Dutch Sherman looming over me. His sword, my dropped sword, was about to come down on my head. At the same instant as I shot the man in the chest, Henry caught him from behind across the mid-section with his sword, and Fred sank his sword into the man’s shoulder. He was dead before he hit the ground.
No one said a word for a long time after that. Void of feeling and thought, we stumbled down to the creek and washed our swords and our hands and faces in the cold water and waited there, seated on the rocks, for Oliver to arrive with the wagon. Each of us had withdrawn to a chamber deep inside his head and had locked himself in there alone. When, after about an hour, Oliver still had not come, Father abruptly got up and walked back along the road a ways to Dutch Sherman’s cabin and soon returned, leading a pair of Mr. Sherman’s horses, bridled and saddled. So we would be called horse-thieves, as well as murderers, assassins, cold-blooded executioners. He gave the reins to Salmon and Henry and in a somber, low voice instructed them to ride back along the ridge and see if anything had befallen Oliver.