VIIIA BORDER INCIDENT
The public roads or thoroughfares through which the party floundered when crossing the sparsely settled counties of western Illinois, which had noticeably improved during the day or two of travel from the East toward Quincy, grew almost impassable on the Missouri side of the Mississippi River. Heavy freight-wagons, each bearing an immense load of merchandise, chiefly hides and furs from the Northwest Territory, had stirred the mud in the narrow lane to a seemingly inexhaustible depth; and the long spell of freezing by night, followed daily by the inevitable thaw, caused the many unbridged streams to overflow their banks and inundate the wide wastes of bottom land through which the ox teams were compelled to wander blindly, in continual danger of disaster. But the most disagreeable experiences resulted from the frequent snow-storms, which generally occurred at camping-time, accompanied by chilling winds and intermittent falls of rain or sleet, covering the earth with a glare of ice.
“When I get to heaven, I mean to ask Saint Peter to assign all cooks to high seats,” said Jean one evening, as, balancing a tray laden with tin cups and saucers, she paused above the heads of the men kneeling at the mess-boxes, and in apparent innocence upset a steaming cup upon the head of Yank.
“No harm done, I assure you, Miss Rangeah. Don’t mention it!” he said, affecting not to feel the burn at the back of his neck, whereat Jean grew repentant.
“Do you s’pose Saint Peter will pay any heed to the request of a slip of a girl like you?” asked Hal.
“I’ll not be a slip of a girl when I go through the gates o’ heaven, but a mature matron, famous and honored.”
“We are in a slave State now,” wrote Jean, under date of April 16; “and from my limited experience I am forced to conclude that slavery is more deteriorating in its effects upon the white people we meet than it is upon the blacks. The primitive cultivating of the soil we saw in central Illinois, where the white men do their own farming, was bad enough, God knows; but the shiftless, aimless, happy-go-lucky work of the Missouri ‘niggers,’ as they style themselves, is even worse. The white men we see at times are idle, pompous, and lazy. The white women are idle and apathetic; and the children are aimless and discouraged. Daddie says slavery is wrong, and no contingency can make it right; but I notice that he doesn’t propose any remedy.”
Prairie schooners were not known as “ships of the desert” then, for Joaquin Miller had not yet sought or acquired fame; and no Huntington or Holladay had made a transcontinental railway track, or tunnelled the sierras of the mighty West to open the way for the iron horse. Even the overland stage was an improvement as yet unknown; for Holladay had not yet established his relay stations, or sent his intrepid drivers out among the savages as heralds of approaching civilization.
“Daddy says humanity’s a hog,” was the leader in Jean’s next entry in her diary. “The weather continued so bad, mother was so wan and weak, and the stock were so nearly starved, that he decided to stop over for a day or two near a farmhouse and barnyard, where there seemed a chance to purchase food for man and beast. But we were glad to move on after a rather brief experience. The farmer doubled the price of his hay and grain every morning after ‘worship,’ reminding those of us who could not choose but hear his daily dole of adviceto God, of Grandpa Ranger’s story of a planter and merchant he knew in his youth, of whom it was said that he would call his slaves to their devotions in the morning with a preamble like this: ‘Have you wet the leather? Have you sanded the sugar? Have you put meal in the pepper and chicory in the coffee? Have you watered the whiskey? Then come in to prayers!’”
The necessities of these farmers were born of isolation; and the opportunities for barter and dicker with passing emigrants stirred the acquisitive spirit within them into vigorous action. The prices of their hitherto unsalable commodities went up to unheard-of figures, increasing in geometrical progression. But Captain Ranger, having created a market in the remote country places in Illinois for supplies of coffee, tea, calico, and unbleached cotton cloth, had prepared himself at Quincy with such commodities, and was able to adjust his trade somewhat to the law of supply and demand.
Oh, those teamsters of the plains! No jollier crowd of brave, enduring, accommodating men ever cracked cruel whips over the backs of long-enduring oxen, or plodded more patiently than they beside the slowly moving wagons, as, wading often over shoe-tops through the muck and mire of the Missouri roads of early springtime, they jollied one another and cracked their whips and sang. Each misfit nickname was accepted as a joke, and none of the men inquired as to the origin of his peculiar cognomen. But Hal, being more inquisitive than they, asked troublesome questions of his sisters, who were in the secret.
“Better tell him, girls,” said their mother. “He’ll be in honor bound to keep the secret then. Won’t you, dear?”
“Jean did it,” said Marjorie.
“Then suppose you confess,” said Hal.
“It was this way,” she explained after a pause ofmock seriousness. “The first night we were in camp, after we had washed the dishes, it occurred to me to write each teamster’s name and paste it to the bottom of his plate. I didn’t know the real name of one of ’em from Adam’s, so I wrote them down as Scotty, Limpy, Yank, Shorty, Sawed-off, and so on. We didn’t intend to perpetrate a misfit, but a joke, and we struck both. Scotty got the correct title, though it merely happened so. But you just watch ’em! Limpy’s as straight as an Indian; Sawed-off stands six feet two in his socks; Lengthy is no taller when he stands up than when he lies down; Yank is a characteristic slave-owner; and Sambo is an ingrained abolitionist!”
“We couldn’t have made such a lot o’ misfits if we had tried a week,” said Mary. “But the men all think Hal did it; so the suspicion doesn’t fall on us; and you get the credit for being somewhat of a wag, Mr. Hal.”
“It’s nothing new for men or boys to take the credit for what their sisters do,” said Jean, as Hal strode away, satisfied that in protecting his sisters from a piece of folly, by accepting it as his own, he was acting the part of a man. “Adam set the example; and where would Herschel have been if he hadn’t had a sister?”
“Adam might have been in a box if he couldn’t have had Eve,” laughed Marjorie; “for there would then have been nobody to raise Cain.”
“Or the Ranger family,” added Jean.
Several days of tedious, laborious travel brought the wanderers into an open, sparsely timbered, almost unsettled part of the State of Missouri. The snow and sleet gave way to brighter skies, the roads and sloughs were drying up, and the higher grounds were gradually arraying themselves in robes of green and gold.
“Here is vacant land, and lots of it,” said Mary, as she viewed the virgin prospect of a mighty settlement inundisguised admiration. “This is a beautiful world!” and she sighed deeply, her face toward the rising sun.
“Don’t look backward,” cried Jean. “Remember Lot’s wife.”
“There’s no use in trying to look backward,” urged Hal. “Dad will never halt till he lands us on the western shore of the continent, on the eastern hem of the Pacific Ocean. He says this country’s too old for him. The wild turkeys are all killed off, or scared out o’ sight; the deer and elk are gone for good; and the country’s played out.”
“Wait a few years, and there’ll be railroads gridironing this whole great valley of the Mississippi,” said Jean. “There’ll be towns and cities springing up in a hundred places. Farms and orchards and handsome country homes will cover these rolling prairies. The native groves will be more than quadrupled by cultivation, and schoolhouses and churches will spring into existence everywhere.”
“I wish you’d talk like this to your father! Won’t you, Jean?” asked Mrs. Ranger.
“You couldn’t hire him to live in a slave State!” cried Jean.
“The Reverend Thomas Rogers might manage to get this far on the way toward the setting sun without much money,” smiled Mrs. Ranger, meaningly. “The children favor our stopping here, on Missouri soil,” she added, as her husband joined the group. “Don’t you think the idea a good one, John?”
“What! And let the word go back among our people at home that we’d flunked? No! I’d die first, and then I wouldn’t do it,” exclaimed her husband, petulantly.
Mrs. Ranger burst into tears.
“There, there, Annie! Don’t worry. But don’t ask me to settle, with my children, in a slave State. Father left Kentucky when I was a boy to get away from slavery and its inevitable accompaniment of poor white trash.There is an irrepressible conflict between freedom and every form of involuntary servitude that exists under the sun. This nigger business will lead to a bloody war long before Uncle Sam is done with it, and I doubt if even war will settle it.”
“But Oregon may come into the Union as a slave State, John. You know that the extension of slavery is the chief theme that is agitating Congress now.”
“I’ll have a chance to fight the curse in Oregon, Annie. But it is a settled condition here. I’ll fight it to the bitter end, if I get a chance!” He strode away to look after the cattle and men.
“Dear, patient mother!” cried Jean, stroking her mother’s cheek tenderly. “Your head is as clear as a bell. But there’s a whole lot o’ common-sense in what daddie says, too. We’ll soon have settled weather; then you won’t mind travelling. We all think you’ll be well and strong as soon as we get settled in Oregon.”
“Maybe so, if I could only live to get there,” faltered the feeble woman. “But—”
“But what, mother?”
“Nothing. I was only thinking.”
Jean’s heart sank. “You must get to bed, mother dear,” she said lovingly.
The Ranger children, tired out with the fatigue and excitement of the day, were soon locked in the deep sleep of healthy youth and vigor. Not so Mrs. Ranger. The regular breathing of her sleeping loved ones soothed her nerves, but she seemed preternaturally awake.
A gentle breeze stirred the white wagon-hood overhead. Sukie, who was tethered near, neighed gently as Mrs. Ranger spoke her name, and came closer to be stroked.
“Is de Cap’n heah?” asked a dusky figure with a child on its hip, as it edged its way between the mare and the wagon-wheel.
“He’s out with the cattle at present. Is there anything I can do for you?”
“Hide me, quick! De houn’s is aftah me, honey. I’ve jes’ waded de crick, and dey’ve lost de trail. Quick, missus; an’ I’ll sarve ye forever!”
The low baying of the bloodhounds proclaimed that they were again on the trail.
“Climb in here! Be quick!” exclaimed Mrs. Ranger, making room for the quaking fugitive. “I’ve never tried to sleep with a nigger and her baby, but I can stand it if I have to,” she said to herself, as the refugee took the place assigned to her.
“What in thunder are you up to now?” asked her husband when he looked in upon his wife and children in the morning and discovered the dusky intruder.
“Trying to help you to circumvent the institution you are so ready to fight, which, as you say, is wrong, and no contingency can make right,” replied his wife, her cheeks and eyes aglow with mingled satisfaction and excitement.