John said, “I’ve got family.”
“Yes;” the man said, “so you do,” and he turned his horse and rode out from the camp, onto the crossing.
Mr. Williams said, “Listen, Browns, if I was one of you, Id find me a hole and stay in it till winter. Then maybe I’d light on out of Kansas and go back to the states. All across the territory now there’s going to be hell to pay. You damned Browns,” he declared, “you’re plain crazy. Even you, John. Jason, too. I like you and him well enough, but your name is Brown, and we can’t be under you no more. Not now,” he said, and clicked to his horse and went out from the camp to the crossing. There he took his place at the head of the gathering column of men, and when they were arranged in a military line, he led the troop down the road towards Osawatomie.
Soon they were gone from sight, and we could no longer hear their hoofbeats. A crow circled overhead and cawed. Seconds later, another crow appeared beside it, and the two carved wide loops against the cloudless sky. Shortly, Jason returned from the river-bottom, looking aghast and pale, as if he had been gazing at the corpses of the five men we had slain barely three hours and five miles away from here. Fred moved back towards the wagon. John had not spoken once yet to Father or stepped from his spot by the dying fire.
Father put a hand on my arm and said, “What d’ you thinks best now, son?”
“Attack.”
“You think so, eh?”
“Worst thing we could do is what Mister Williams said, hide in a hole. We’re instruments of the Lord, are we not? So let the Lord lead us. To teach when it is unclean and when it is clean: this is the law,’“ I quoted to him.
He made a small smile. “And if the plague be in the walls of the house!” he came back, “‘then the priest shall command that they take away the stones in which the plague is, and they shall cast them into an unclean place without the city.’“
“Should we be stones cast out? When we can be the priest’s men, instead?”
Father nodded, and then he called to Salmon, Oliver, Fred, and Henry, who leaned by the wagon. “Mount up, boys. We’re riding on over by Middle Creek a ways.”
“What for?” Salmon asked.
“To find us a camp where we can rest in peace a day.”
“What then?” Henry wanted to know.
“Then we’ll see some action. From here on out, we’re going to be on the attack, boys.”
Jason sat down heavily on a nearby log and, placing his forehead against his knees, wrapped his head with his arms, as if hiding his father and brothers from his sight and hearing. John remained standing by the dwindled fire, all disconsolate and downcast.
I said to him, “You coming?”
He shook his head no.
“Suit yourself,” I said. “Jason?”
He didn’t answer.
“You boys maybe ought to think about moving your wives and Tonny permanently into town or down to Uncle’s place!’ I told them. “It’s going to start getting plenty hot around here now,” I said, and climbed up on the wagon seat next to Oliver. Father had mounted Reliance and was out in front of the wagon. “Okay, Father,”I said to him. “Let’s move.”
He nodded, and we rode off across a broad, high meadow north— west of the crossroad, away from our old settlement at Browns Station, away from the town of Osawatomie, away from poor John and Jason. I remember I turned in the wagon and peered back at them, and my elder brothers were standing with their arms around each other, as if both men were weeping and trying to console one another.
I did not think then that what later happened to John and Jason would occur, but when it did, I was not surprised. By then, Father, Old Brown, had become the feared and admired Captain John Brown of Kansas, had become Osawatomie Brown, the victor of the Battle of Black Jack, the one nationally known hero of the Kansas War, and he was back in Boston, working his way across the entire Northeast, raising funds and making speeches to thunderous applause. And through it all, from that May day forward, the cold, silent man at his side, the large, red-bearded fellow with the gray eyes who spoke to no one but to Captain Brown himself, was me. My two elder brothers had been all but removed from Father’s life, and I had replaced them there.
Chapter 20
I’m trying to recall it: how I came to be knocking at the rough plank door of Uncle Sam Adair’s cabin in the nighttime; and when exactly it occurred, that same night or the next. Things happened so quickly back then that, although I can with ease summon them to my mind in sharp, vivid detail, sometimes their sequence blurs. But I do know that it was right after we had made our first secret campsite over on Middle Creek in amongst a clutch of black oak trees, and had slept awhile and rested our animals and prepared our weapons for battle, that I went to my uncle’s cabin. I have no diary at hand, for none of us kept one, and of course I have no calendar from those days. But I do remember that, towards the end of our first night in camp, while the others were sleeping, on Father’s orders I rode one of Dutch Sherman’s liberated horses out to the Osawatomie Road, intending to slip into town under cover of darkness to be sure that Jason’s wife, Ellen, and John’s Wealthy and little Tonny were safely ensconced with friends there.
Yes, it was not until the second night that I made it over to the Adair cabin. For, when we had first got to Middle Creek, the boys, Oliver, Salmon, Fred, and Henry Thompson, were exhausted — oddly so, it seemed to me, despite the fact that we had all been awake for nearly forty hours straight, for Father and I were not in the slightest fatigued. Quite the opposite: he and I were exhilarated and filled with new and growing plans and stratagems for raiding and terrorizing the Border Ruffians and pro-slave settlers. The boys, though, were all but useless, at least for a while, until they could begin to put the killings behind them. Fred wept, and he declared again and again that he could not stand to do any more work such as that, and Oliver wrapped himself in his blanket on the ground and would not speak to any one of us, while Salmon and Henry huddled together and read in their Bibles.
Father sat on the ground beside Fred and said to him, “God will forgive thee, son. I have prayed and listened with all my mind and heart to the Lord, and I know that we have done His will in this business. You can let your conscience rest, son” he said, and stroked poor Fred and comforted him tenderly, while I went to the other boys and made my rough attempt to do the same, although they were not inclined to be comforted by me or Father and in a listless way said for us to just leave them be, they were tired and wished only to sleep.
So while the others slept or sulked or read, Father and I busied ourselves throughout the afternoon into the evening, constructing a crude lean-to of brush and a corral for the horses; and after dark, when we dared finally to set a small fire, we made a little wicker weir and caught and cooked us some small fish from the creek and ate and talked in low voices until late. Father was worried, I remember, about the women and Tonny, his only grandson, and when I volunteered to go into town to be sure they were safe, he at first said no, it was too dangerous, but I persisted, and finally he relented and gave the order. He said he would write some letters and send them with me and that I should try to get them to Uncle Sam Adair, his brother-in-law, for posting. “I want to have my own say-so on this business,” he said. “To get the truth out, before folks hear erroneous reports of it first. I don’t want the family at home fearing for our lives. Or for our souls, either;’ he added.
I agreed and said that I would also try to speak with John and Jason, to see if they would now change their minds and come in with us, for we would be much stronger with them than we were without. “True. True enough,” Father said. “But remember, son, it’s we who have made the blood sacrifice. They haven’t. This war’s no longer the same for us as it is for them.”