because they
were impatient to make better time; and as I went along so stylishly I
began turning over in my mind the question as to whether it might not
be better to get to Iowa a little later in the year with cattle for a
start than to rush the season with my fine mares and pull up standing
like a gentleman at my own imaginary door.

2

As I went on to the westward, I began to see Blue Mound rising like a
low mountain off my starboard bow, and I stopped at a farm in the
foot-hills of the Mound where, because it was rainy, I paid four
shillings for putting my horses in the stable. There were two other
movers stopping at the same place. They had a light wagon and a yoke of
good young steers, and had been out of Madison two days longer than I
had been. I noticed that they left their wagon in a clump of bushes, and
that while one of them--a man of fifty or more, slept in the house, the
other, a young fellow of twenty or twenty-two, lay in the wagon, and
that one or the other seemed always to be on guard near the vehicle. The
older man had a long beard and a hooked nose, and seemed to be a still
sort of person, until some one spoke of slavery; then he broke out in a
fierce speech denouncing slaveholders, and the slavocracy that had the
nation in its grip.

"You talk," said the farmer, "like a black Abolitionist."

"I'm so black an Abolitionist," said he, "that I'd be willing to
shoulder a gun any minute if I thought I could wipe out the curse
of slavery."

The farmer was terribly scandalized at this, and when the old man walked
away to his wagon, he said to the young man and me that that sort of
talk would make trouble and ruin the nation; and that he didn't want
any more of it around his place.

"Well," said the traveler, "you won't have any more of it from us. We're
just pulling out." After the farmer went away, he spoke to me about it.

"What do you think of that kind of talk?" he asked.

"I don't own any niggers," said I. "I don't ever expect to own any. I
don't see how slavery can do me any good; and I think the slaves
are human."

I had no very clear ideas on the subject, and had done little thinking
about it; but what I said seemed to be satisfactory to the young man. He
told his friend about it, and after a while the old man, whose name was
Dunlap, came to me and shook my hand, saying that he was glad to meet a
young fellow of my age who was of the right stripe.

"Can you shoot?" he asked.

I told hi