V
The March Resumed
IT did not require the narration of this stirring tale to nerve our forward movement, but it certainly increased our determination to proceed at all hazard.
Our next halt was made at the cabin, some miles further on, from which, as mentioned in the first chapter, the young man whom we all knew and counted as one of us had been borne off a prisoner. As soon as it was made known, by the usual signs, that we were friends, we were joyfully if tearfully greeted. The family, consisting of aged parents, sister, brother's wife and little children, were in despair. Dreadful anxiety filled their minds. It was an illustration of the saying that "to know the worst is better than suspense." If in the great cause then firing their hearts this family had seen that son and brother shot down before their eyes, they would have borne the affliction silently and with submission. But the terrible uncertainty as to his fate wrought upon them. A price had previously been set upon the young man's head, and they had reason to fear the worst for him.
It must be added, in passing, that his beloved ones never saw him again alive. The good fortune fell to us to liberate him the next day from his captors, when we found him bound upon his horse, with his hands lashed behind him and his feet tied together under the animal; but, alas! his liberation gave him only a short respite from death. He fell, only a few days after, heroically fighting at the battle of Osawatomie.
Some miles beyond we had to make that ford of the Pottawatomie river of unenviable fame, and which we looked upon as the danger-point of all others in our journey; for there our enemy, we thought, would most likely be in ambush. But we swam the swift, dark, muddy stream, swelled by recent rains to a flood, with the water up to our horses' backs, luckily without hindrance or serious mishap.
That ford was the notorious Dutch Henry's crossing, so-called,—surely a gloomy, gruesome, and dreaded spot at that dark midnight hour. There, close by, had been enacted, just two months prior, the rightly named Pottawatomie tragedy, which made that locality, on account of this bloody event, verily for the time the "storm center" of the Kansas conflict. But, terrible as it was, it served a great purpose and was speedily followed by good.
The hero of our sketch was the central figure in this tragic act of the Kansas drama, as he was in most others at this trying period. Brown was the cyclonic force, the lightning's flash in the darkness, that cleared and lighted the way for the men of that day.
Despite all delays on the way, we made our forced night-march of twenty-two or more miles in remarkably good time, and arrived at our destination about two o'clock in the morning, as weary, exhausted, and hungry a set of troopers as ever drew rein and slipped stirrup to seek rest and refreshment.
