Children of the Market Place

by Edgar Lee Masters

And so Dorothy didn't know. I left the matter where it was. I could not go on. You see I was nineteen and Dorothy was eighteen and the year was 1834.

But Lamborn. I had made an enemy of him. Rather, he had turned himself into my enemy. He was running with a gang of rough fellows called the McCall boys. They drank and fought, using clubs or stones or knives. They were suspected of trying to rob the stage when it was driven by the poor wretch who had died of the cholera two summers before. That driver was noted for his courage, his ready use of the rifle; and he had frightened the marauders off, and had wounded one of them, who limped away until the trail of his blood was obscured.

Every time I came into town I was subjected to wolfish leers from some member of this gang. Evidently they had taken up Lamborn's cause. Something was preying upon him. He was drinking more heavily. Perhaps he was tormented with the thought that I knew his secret and abided some vengeance upon him. Perhaps his conscience tortured him. At any rate he had become a skulking figure of hatred, showing his teeth and snarling when he saw me and sidling away like a wolf. He had muttered curses as he hurried to one side. "Bloody Englishman" and the like were his remarks. Something told me to watch him, to watch the McCall boys. I began to take pains to guard my house in the country, sleeping always with my rifle by my side; and I had provided my men with rifles, instructing them to shoot if trespassers approached during suspicious hours or when warned away.

The autumn was the most delicious weather I had experienced since coming to America. Enough of the summer was carried over into October, and even November, to keep the days warm and full of sunlight, while the nights were clear and frosty, and always over this boundless prairie the far scattered stars. I had bought an astronomical chart and located the constellations, in which Zoe had joined me in increasing wonder. Then I had a taste of real hunting. Reverdy and I had gone to marshes a few miles away for wild geese and ducks; and we had come back loaded with game for ourselves and friends. There were many parties and what were called "shucking bees," where the company set to to assist the host in ridding the corn of its sheath; and quilting bees; and apple parings. These were occasions of festival, the local rituals of Dionysius. Earlier in the fall I had gone to a county fair and had seen the products of the field on display; and had studied the people: the tall angular gawks, the men carrying whips, the dust, the noise, the cheap fakirs and gamblers, the fights, the drunkenness, the women tired and perspiring carrying their babies and leading a brood. To me it was more like a cattle pen befogged with dust than an assemblage of human beings. And there was no happiness, no real joy; only barbaric breaking away from hard labor and the silence of the farms; only a reeling and a howling and a war dance; and only here and there a flash of breeding and fineness, and intelligent use of the occasion for sweeter joys and fuller life.

The winter came down; but I was better prepared for it than I was the year before. My house with its walls a foot thick of solid oak and tightly plastered against the penetrating winds kept out the cold. And my fireplaces built under my very eye threw a steady heat into the rooms. I was giving parties from time to time and attending them as well. Douglas always came. He was unfailingly the life of the party. He had reënforced his political successes with a genuine hold upon the hearts of the young people and the older people. He was attacked weekly by the Whig newspaper. But he was not without defense. Almost upon arriving at Jacksonville he had written a letter of praise to the editor of a newly started journal. The editor was greatly pleased at this spontaneous expression of interest and had become Douglas' friend and stanch champion. Ah! Douglas was only manipulating. He had written this letter to win a newspaper to his support. The wily schemer! "Genius has come into our midst," wrote the editor. "No one can doubt this who heard Mr. Douglas expound Democratic doctrine in his wonderful debate with John Wyatt. This country is richer for having attracted Douglas to it. He is here to stay. And he will be one of the great men of the country as President Jackson is now the greatest figure since Washington; and Illinois will send him forth as her son to speak and to act on the great questions that are already beginning to fill the minds of the people."

Douglas often came out to stay for the night or for a day or two. He had little law business, but his energies were always employed in shaping his powers toward a participation in the politics of the country. His superhuman energy was intensified by the fact that he had been deprived of an opportunity to educate himself. It was the gadfly that drove him forward with such restless industry. I could see that he had no patience for a detailed study of the law; that he might be ignorant of the technical steps to be taken in the collection of a promissory note, but he would know something about the resources of a treaty; that if he did not know how to settle the title to a farmer's field, he had considered ways to put at rest any claim of England to the territory of the Oregon. Yet he had to live as a lawyer before he could flourish as a statesman. And he had become the prosecuting attorney. His enemies said it was by a trick; that he had had the state law changed so that the legislature could appoint him state's attorney for the district of Jacksonville. The accusation proved too much. Douglas was not quite twenty-two when he reached this office. He had been in the state but two years, not quite that. How had such a youth first won the confidence of enough people who wished to give him this office and were able to do it; and then won the legislature to do the extraordinary thing of changing the law to give him the office, while at the same time supplanting a seasoned and experienced man in the place? How? Was every one corrupt, people and legislature? But it was February and he was the prosecuting attorney for the people.

He came out to see me, and we drank his health and fortune. It was on this occasion that Douglas talked to me with the greatest freedom about my own affairs. His frankness and sincerity, his friendship for me, relieved this broaching of my intimate interests of intrusiveness. I felt no inclination to resent it. He had glanced at Zoe who had come into the room once or twice, remarking that she was an unusual young woman. Then he said: "Your father must have been much of a man. I think his marriage worked upon his feelings ... and Zoe. Don't let this get on your imagination. You are handling it in the right way ... just go on. Let me warn you. The McCall gang is a desperate one. Do not on any account come to an issue with them. There are too many of them. They will sneak up upon you. They carry grudges ... and another thing, there's Lamborn ... as bad as the McCalls. He's been talking too, making threats against you. I tell you this for your own good. He has been boasting of Zoe's interest in him ... to speak euphemistically of the matter ... but just be careful." Whatever else he had in his mind he communicated it to me by the look of his speaking eyes, keen and blue. Then he arose and went.

Dorothy had returned to Nashville for the winter. She expected to take her place again in Reverdy's household in the spring. And we were writing. I had thought of proposing marriage to her the night before she left. But I could not bring myself to do so. I needed some one in my life. But I was just twenty, and Dorothy seemed so much more mature and wise than I. Then always there was this matter of Zoe. I lived in the expectation that something would come out of Zoe's misfortune; and if it did my name was bound to be connected with it. What would Dorothy say if in the midst of our engagement, if she engaged herself to me, the word should be brought to her that I was the father of Zoe's aborted child and that by some one, perhaps Mrs. Brown, Zoe had been saved the open shame of giving birth to the child and while an inmate of my house? I could see the probative force of these facts against me. This is what kept me from speaking to Dorothy on the subject of becoming my wife and having it settled before she went to Nashville. And then something happened that made my situation infinitely worse before it was any better.

The spring had come on early and I had much to do. I was buying machinery. The mowers that I had ordered were soon to be delivered and I had need to be in town almost daily. There were always loafers about the streets; and among them, not infrequently, the McCall boys or Lamborn. Reverdy had told me that Lamborn had been talking in the barber shop, saying that I was living in a state of adultery with my nigger sister. At the same time I knew, and Reverdy knew, that Lamborn was trying to get Zoe to meet him. He had sent her a note to that effect, which Zoe had turned over to me. Once he had accosted Zoe as she was coming from Reverdy's to join me at the courthouse preparatory to starting home. Reverdy thought that the fellow was eaten up with insane jealousy and had brought himself to the belief that I had taken Zoe from him, if he could be said ever to have had a right to her.

It is an April day and I have come into town and am rushing from place to place attending to many things. Reverdy has met me at the bank to tell me of another opportunity to buy a team of horses and some oxen; for we use the latter mostly to draw the plows that turn up the heavy sod of the prairie. Reverdy has just told me of Lamborn's threat to come to my farm and take Zoe: that when a girl was once his she was always his. He had said these things at the barber shop. Something came over me. I resolved that this intolerable state of affairs, of anxiety for Zoe, of misunderstanding for myself, of dread of the future, of a sort of brake on my life as of something holding me back and impeding my happiness and peace of mind ... all this had to end somehow and soon. I could not live and go on with things as they were.