The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton Read Online Free Page A

a thin brown stream toward the woods. Thomas Newton, it appeared, neither smoked nor chewed.
    I came to realize that this is what my sisters had decided on, marrying me off to the first stranger to pass through Quincy, or the second, or the third.
    He said, "Only as long as I can help it ..."
    "Tom Newton’s on his way to Kansas," said Howell. "He’s with the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company. Roland around?" Now Howell grinned again. "I do want to make sure that Roland meets Tom. I know he’ll want to."
    "My goodness me," said Harriet. "You mean you want to give him a fit! Are you an argumentative man, Mr. Newton?"
    "He’s from Boston, an’t he?" said Howell, laughing aloud.
    "Let me suggest, sir," said Harriet soberly, "that you refrain from engaging Mr. Brereton in discussion if you find him armed."
    "He’s always armed," said Howell.
    Harriet nodded at this, as if to say, There, you see.
    Howell roared, "He’s itching to kill some d— abolitionist!"
    Thomas Newton paled and quickly took a sip of his water. Howell shouted, "Here he comes now!" and Harriet started and looked around, and Thomas Newton kind of hunched into himself, but Howell was laughing to beat the band, pleased to have made fools of us. I finished my glass and stood up, ready enough to get back to stirring the clothes, but Harriet said immediately, "Lidie, pass Mr. Newton one of these cakes you made yesterday," and what could I do? I passed the cakes, which I had never seen before, and they began to slide off the plate, and he didn’t have the sense to catch them, so they all fell in his lap. A hapless young man, that much was clear.
    Frank fell over laughing.
    Harriet seemed to place the blame on me. She exclaimed, "Oh, Lidie, for goodness’ sake!" Howell was laughing, too, but I got up without glancing at Mr. Newton and went back to stirring my clothes, which heaved and billowed in the steaming waters. It seemed the most harmless thing I could do.
    Soon enough the bald-pated older man and the pale young man got into the gig and went off, and not long after that, Harriet, with a distinct air of disappointment married to long-suffering resignation, declared that she was going to her room—"because, Frank, you have given me a headache with that infernal cheroot"—and after we were finished with the rinsing, would we leave the clothes to sit in the bluing tub, and so we did, Frank pausing twice to relight his seegar, because, taken all in all, he wasn’t nearly as experienced with it as he liked us to think.
    The stream below Roland Brereton’s farm cut down its banks in muddy steps, and in spots you could stand in the middle of the stream and see only the sky and tufts of thick grass edging the banks high above your head. By late afternoon, there were two shady spots, cool under the giant cotton-woods, and at one of these Frank had dammed a little pool that in mid-August ran about a foot deep, deep enough for bullheads, sunfish, a crappie or two, and, of course, numerous scuttling crawdads. The small terraces that defined the height of the waters in earlier periods of the year were dried and cracked into angular shapes. Frank liked to pluck the little squares out of the mud and spin them into the pool, or follow the crawdads with a stick and poke after them into their hiding places. A few late rays of sunshine through the cottonwood leaves fell on the muddy water and sparkled, but without disturbing the sense of cool shade and privacy that I always felt in this spot. I could hear Roland’s cows lowing in the pasture above us, but the banks of the creek were too steep for them until some quarter of a mile downstream. Often, we saw turtles in the water, snakes, which held no fear for me, and the tracks of coons and skunks in the mud. The banks had a number of otter holes, and a ways upstream the otters had made a slide, but we didn’t often see the otters themselves, unless it was the flash of a rounded little head accompanied by the sense of