Bleeding Kansas Read Online Free Page B

red. She ran back to the car, slipping on the gravel in the yard so that she ended up dropping the pie. She didn’t notice Arnie come out of the barn and take a tentative half step toward helping her back to her feet. She clambered into her car and drove home, blinking away tears, sliding in through the unused front door of the house so she could change out of her dirty jeans before Gram saw her and said, “I told you so.”
    Over at the Schapens’, Myra recounted her triumph to Arnie and Kathy. Kathy, who worked at a bank in Lawrence to help pay the farm bills, said she thought it was time they got over all this grudge holding. “It was brave of her to come here, Mother Schapen.”
    â€œBrazen, you mean,” Myra clacked. “I know you dated Jim Grellier when you were in high school, but you married my son, and I expect you to remember it. And remember that you’re a saved Christian and they’re no better than pagans. No, they’re worse than pagans, because they have the chance to hear God’s saving Word and they turn their backs on it.”
    In Myra’s eyes, people who worshipped at Riverside United couldn’t have been closer to hell if they’d been Catholics.

F ROM A BIGAIL C OMFORT G RELLIER’S J OURNAL
    June 22, 1855
Kansas Territory
    My new home! what is there in it to raise my spirits? We are settled in a fine piece of land about five miles east of Lawrence, but M. Grellier was unable to find lumber for a house, so we dwelt for four weeks in a tent, where I also was delivered of my son, whom I have christened Nathaniel Etienne, in memory of my dear father and my babe’s own father. How I have need of my father’s spirit and guidance in this land.
    As I lay ill, not knowing if I should live to suckle my little one, Mrs. Schapen, who has arrived to keep house for her son Robert, came to visit. She is one “whose mercy never fails,” for she saw the straits in which I was reduced, and her son, a fine young man of some two and twenty summers, appeared the very next day with a party of other young men, and within two days had a prairie home built for us. In truth, it is a rude shelter, and I try not to sigh too loud for the comforts of my mother’s home, the carpets, the glass windows: here, we put in sheets of unbleached muslin to keep the fleas and mosquitoes as far removed as is possible. And the unfinished floor allows the prairie mice to dance merrily around me as I nurse my little Nathaniel. But we are able to assemble a bed and raise it above the ground. We have a roof that keeps out the prairie showers, and with these good neighbors I would be unworthy of the love of God if I had a disposition like a perpetual dripping on a rainy day.
    The Fremantles, whom we also met on our journey westward, are settled near us as well. We are three little sailboats on the Kansas prairie, the Fremantles, the Schapens, and us. When you ride the California road west from Kansas City, and then turn a half mile to the north, you come first to the Fremantles, where Mr. Fremantle, who was a Judge in Boston, is building a fine house, two stories, and a stable to house three horses and a team of oxen. Then you arrive at our rude shanty, and a quarter mile farther on Robert Schapen and his mother, who live as simply as we do.
    July 17
    The Missourians pour into Kansas territory every day, seeking to harm us, and a woman alone with an infant is not an invitation to their mercy but to their rapacity. Last week, I heard horses’ hooves upon the road while I was washing Baby’s skimpy clothes and saw a cloud of dust as a band of eight or nine of these ruffians rode toward Lawrence along the great California Road. I gathered little Nathaniel and lay beneath the bed, pressing his face against my breast so that he should not whimper. I heard the men say, “No one here, shall we burn the place?” and another reply, “No, for we may want to move