Daughter of the Sword (6 page)

Father's big roll-top desk was in the print shop, but beneath one window stood a shelf of treasured books with his globe and atlas on top. Over by the fireplace, which was used for cooking, stood the rocker in which Mother had rocked the twins through teething, night frights, and colics, or while she sang or told stories.

A tall china cupboard held delicate porcelain that had been one of Great-Grandmother's wedding gifts, but the stoneware for everyday use sat on homemade shelves. The heirloom silver was used every day. Wear made it more beautiful, Leticia said, and it couldn't break.

There were napkins on the table, too, and tonight Deborah was glad of that, though she hated to iron and loathed wash day above all things. The crude plank table near the fireplace was used for preparing meals, but the dining table was from the east, polished cherrywood with four matching chairs.

In the cabin's other room was the feather-mattressed four-poster where the twins had been born, a bureau, the sewing machine, and a large chest that held bedding and out-of-season clothes. In a curtained-off corner, Deborah slept on a wooden frame criss-crossed with rawhide and covered with a corn-shuck mattress.

Thos had the same kind of bed in the lean-to attached to the south side of the house, though in summer he pitched his mattress in the open. Deborah would have liked to join him and drift off to sleep watching the stars, but her mother flatly refused. One more mark against the odious state of being a female!

Father said the blessing and then passed a platter of rabbit to Dane.

It's hot that I mind being a woman,
Deborah thought, taking a generous helping of the dandelion greens she had gathered and washed before going to Johnny's.
I just hate being told I can't do this or that and having to wear these cumbersome skirts!
Rolf gave her a side glance and she increased her grievances.

It's wretched, too, that some men are strong enough to treat you any way they please. And I think it's awful that the first man's kiss I ever had tasted of my own blood! I'm going to ask Johnny to let me carry my knife. He will if I tell him someone gave me a fright. And if I have my Bowie … well, then we'll see how enterprising Rolf Hunter is!

At this thought, she smiled so benignly at Rolf that he looked first amazed, then elated. She smiled with equal sweetness into Dane's disapproving eyes and added rabbit, gravy, and a slice of Sara's bread to her plate.

Josiah, bless him, was bragging about Lawrence and how there had been churches and schools almost from the start, in marked contrast to most frontier towns, where a saloon was considered the first necessity.

“The Congregationalists organized Plymouth Church in October of 1854,” he said. “We met in a hay tent till it burned down, and then any place we could find till we finally built our good stone church last year. It's a sweet sound on Sunday morning, the church bells in the valley.”

“Lawrence does seem a much more substantial and progressive town than most on the frontier,” Dane said.

“We have the best buildings in the Territory, the finest hotel, newspapers, and a literary society besides schools and churches.” Josiah's dark eyes twinkled and he closed his hand briefly but warmly over his wife's. “Mrs. Whitlaw thinks I'm wearying you. Of course, compared to England, Kansas is a raw, rough place. But we've cast our lot with it, sirs, come here with other like-minded folk to see that Kansas enters the Union as a free state. We hope for this prairie land and we love it.”

Rolf was looking bored, but Dane remarked that the people of Lawrence seemed a very different sort from those of Leavenworth.

Mother sniffed, Thos grinned, and Father took a long drink of water. “Leavenworth's full of land speculators, the hangers-on around a military post, and a good many Missourians who keep a foot on both sides of the border, though it's not as bad as it was.”

“When we said we were coming to Lawrence,” Rolf chuckled, “the mildest thing our landlord said was that it was a nest of doggoned, viperish, Free-State nigger-loving abolitionists.”

“Well, Lawrence
is
the Free-State citadel,” shrugged Josiah. “We've been under siege twice. In 1855 Sheriff Jones, who was actually a citizen of Missouri, arrested a number of Free-Staters and set fire to the Free-State Hotel after his cannon didn't demolish it. His men wrecked my press and scattered the type before doing the same thing to
The Herald of Freedom.
But the hotel's rebuilt—the brickyard made 168,000 bricks for it—the presses are running, and our little town prospers.”

Dane spoke thoughtfully. “As an editor, Mr. Whitlaw, you must be a special target for pro-slavers. Wouldn't you and your family be safer in town?”

“In New Hampshire the print shop made a comfortable living, but it's another tune here, sir! We must raise as much food as possible. I hope, in time, to have a dairy and devote myself to that and farming when the struggle for the Territory is over, spending only a few days a week at the shop.”

Deborah refilled cups with “coffee” made from parched wheat and molasses cooked together till they were almost burned, then cleared away the plates while Leticia took the lid off the cast-iron Dutch oven and cut slices of apple corncake, asking Deborah to bring in a pitcher of cream to pour over it.

When she returned from the well-house, Dane was saying, “I don't perfectly understand, sir, how western land's acquired by settlers. To travelers from a part of the, world where all the land's been claimed for centuries, your vast wilderness is mind-boggling!”

Josiah explained the Preemption Act of 1841. Any head of a family, single man over twenty-one, or widow could claim one hundred sixty acres of public land so long as they'd swear they weren't settling on the land in order to sell it, hadn't agreed to turn it over to someone else, didn't own three hundred twenty acres elsewhere, and had never preempted before. Having filed and sworn, the settler could buy the land at the appraised price, which was generally $1.25 an acre.

“Then the land's surveyed first and there are government offices to handle claims?”

“Very often not.” Josiah shrugged. “As soon as land's opened, settlers pour in and claim parcels. Land offices don't open till a territory's surveyed. I filed my claim with the office of the United States Surveyor General a year and a half before the Lecompton land office opened two years ago. Then the early claims were put in the regular books.”

“The Indians must not look on settlers with much favor,” Dane commented dryly. “Don't they consider this prairie theirs?”

Leticia cast her husband a significant glance. Settling on former Indian land had been her sole objection to coming west, and the issue had been fervently debated at the Whitlaw table.

“The Territory's going to be settled,” Josiah had argued, “And it won't help Indians or anybody to let pro-slavers have it!”

It was Leticia, deep blue eyes troubled, who answered Dane. “Indians' rights are very muddled in Kansas, Mr. Hunter. To start with, there were the Kansas and Wichita, Pawnee, Osage, and those who came through to hunt, like the Kiowa, Comanche, Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Jicarilla Apache.”

“Didn't they fight?” asked Rolf, sitting up eagerly at the name of Comanche.

“They had their raids and battles, because especially to Cheyenne, Comanche, Kiowa, and Pawnee, being a great warrior was the aim of every man, and stealing the horses of another tribe was almost as prestigious as killing its braves.”

Rolf laughed and his eyes glowed like foxfire. “They have the Viking spirit. I look forward to meeting them!”

“Most westward travelers pray not to,” said Josiah. “What's made a real mess in Kansas has been settling eastern Indians here from as far away as New York to Missouri, at least eighteen different peoples who gave up claims to their eastern lands in return for grants in Kansas.”

“Which were to be theirs as long as grass grew,” Leticia added.

“You met Sara, who's Shawnee,” Deborah put in. “They started moving here from Ohio and Missouri in 1834, built log houses, and began farming very successfully on their reservation, which was over a million and a half acres. They had the first gristmill in the region.”

“And back in the Twenties, Daniel Morgan Boone, the old frontiersman's son, was hired by the government to teach the Indians better ways to farm,” Thos said. Old Boone was one of his heroes.

“Quaker, Baptist, and Methodist missionaries set up schools and missions,” Leticia added, as if taking consolation in that. “One, Reverend Jotham Meeker, published the first Indian-language newspaper,
The Shawnee Sun
.”

“That was in 1835.” Josiah cast such a longing look at his empty cup that Deborah jumped up to fill it. “Meeker later published the first book done in Kansas, a collection of Ottawa laws.”

Dane was frowning, clearly puzzled. “If these tribes have legal claim to much of the land in this Territory, how can it be settled by whites?”

“The government made treaties with the tribes.”

“Who had no choice!” interposed Leticia.

Father made a weary gesture. “I know, Letty! Still, legal forms
were
observed. The Indians
were
compensated, given some voice in deciding what was best for their people. The Wyandot, for instance, mostly chose to become U.S. citizens and took individual grants of what had been reservation land. The Shawnee kept two hundred thousand acres bordering Missouri, some taking separate farms of two hundred acres apiece, or holding land in common. They'll get tribal annuities for the rest of their land, paid out over a number of years. And the Osage still have their land.”

“They won't as soon as enough settlers want it,” persisted Leticia. “They'll be shoved off to some other place that whites don't see a use for, probably to Indian Territory, where Andrew Jackson sent the Cherokee and other Civilized Tribes!”

“Dear lady, you astonish me!” Rolf's lips tucked down in a cynical smile. “What can happen, after all, when superior numbers want something from people not mighty enough to withstand them? Besides, as I understand it, nomadic Indians drift over vast expanses of hunting grounds, though they don't grow crops or have permanent settlements. As a practical matter, can a few thousand savages monopolize land that would provide rich farms for people from your overcrowded sections and the emigration from Europe that is certain to increase? You've already got Swedes, Irish, and Frenchmen. Given a chance for almost free land and a chance of doing well for themselves, you're going to get thousands of settlers from the British Isles alone.”

“I know what will happen.” Leticia Whitlaw's firmly delicate chin came up. She gazed at Rolf till he colored. “That doesn't mean I think it's right.”

“Yet, madam, here you are,” he scored.

“Yes.”

Dane gave his brother a stern look. “It's clear, Rolf, that Mr. and Mrs. Whitlaw weighed and pondered before deciding to come here, and also clear that the West will be settled.”

“Have you changed your oft-voiced opinion, brother, that the Indians are greatly wronged?”

“No. But one might as well defy the ocean as a swelling tide of land-hungry people who see immense tracts going to what they can only consider waste.” He smiled at Leticia, and Deborah marveled at the change it made in his lean, scarred face, till now aloof or mocking. “Do you play the pianoforte, Mrs. Whitlaw?”

“It's my great pleasure,” she admitted shyly, “though there's seldom time for it.”

Deborah glanced at her mother incredulously, at the soft color in her cheeks and unusual glow. A few tendrils had escaped the French knot securing her wavy, light brown hair. Deborah had always taken for granted Mother's gently curved slim figure, but now, watching her as a stranger might, as Dane was, Deborah thought:
Why, she's pretty! Mother's pretty!

Along with pride came a stab of—was it jealousy? Deborah pushed that horrid thought away. It was only that Dane had rescued Mother, obviously admired her, while he was so bitingly cold and censorious to Deborah.

“It would be my great pleasure to hear you play,” he importuned.

“Do, Letty,” urged Father. “You haven't played in a coon's age. In fact, I've been wondering if you wished you'd brought the cookstove instead of your pianoforte.”

That had been the choice, one she'd never murmured about even on the hottest days, when cooking on the grate placed in the fireplace, or when the Dutch oven baked something black on the bottom and raw inside.

“I'm out of practice,” she demurred.

“You'll still sound delightful,” Deborah said, rising. “Please, let's hear you, Mother! Thos and I'll do the dishes.”

So chairs were moved near the gracious little corner, where the pianoforte, portrait, and flowers made it possible, so long as one didn't notice the mud-chinked logs, to imagine this was their comfortable home in New Hampshire, an illusion quickly banished for Deborah as she measured stringy soft soap into the dishpan, poured in boiling water from the kettle, and tempered it with water from the drinking bucket.

The work went quickly, though, Thos rinsing and drying, while Mother played Mozart and Brahms and Chopin with a sure touch for each composition, be it sprightly or somber. As it grew dark, Josiah lit the brass Phoebe lamp, and in its soft flickering Leticia looked heart-catchingly lovely.

She played Father's beloved “Annie Laurie,” “Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming,” and she yielded to Thos's entreaties for something gay: “Pop Goes the Weasel” and “Sweet Betsy from Pike.” Josiah asked for “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and the Whitlaws sang it, standing around the pianoforte. With a quick smile at the Englishmen, Leticia struck up a stately tune Deborah didn't recognize till Dane and Rolf sang “God Save the Queen” in rich baritones.