know that it was Mrs. Bliven's husband--we
always called her that, of course--who expected to arrest the pair of
them as they crossed the Dubuque ferry; and that I was made a cat's-paw
in slipping her past her pursuers and saving Bliven from arrest. I know
that Buckner Gowdy was a wild and turbulent rakehell in Kentucky and
after many bad scrapes was forced to run away from the state, and was
given his huge plantation of "worthless" land--as he called it--in Iowa;
that he had married his wife, who was a poor girl of good family named
Ann Royall, because he couldn't get her except by marrying her.

I know that her younger sister, Virginia Royall, came with them to Iowa,
because she had no other relative or friend in the world except Mrs.
Gowdy. I pretty nearly know that Virginia would have killed herself that
night on the prairie by the Old Ridge Road, because of a sudden feeling
of terror, at the situation in which she was left, at the prairies and
the wild desolate road, at Buck Gowdy, at life in general--if she had
had any means with which to destroy her life. I know that Buck Gowdy
took her into the house and comforted her by telling her that he would
care for her, and send her back to Kentucky.

* * * * *

A funeral by the wayside! This was my first experience with a kind of
tragedy which was not quite so common as you might think. Buckner Gowdy
instead of giving his wife a grave by the road, as many did, sent the
man of the house back to Dubuque for a hearse, the women laid out the
corpse, and after a whole day of waiting, the hearse came, and went back
over the road down the Indian trail through the bluffs to some graveyard
in the old town by the river. Virginia Royall sat in the back seat of
the carriage with Buckner Gowdy, and the darky, Pinckney Johnson--we all
knew him afterward--drove solemnly along wearing white gloves which he
had found somewhere. Virginia shrank away over to her own side of the
seat as if trying to get as far from Buckner Gowdy as possible.

The movers moved on, leaving me four of their cows instead of two of
mine, and I went diligently to work breaking them to the yoke. New
prairie schooners came all the time into view from the East, and others
went over the sky-line into the West.

4

And that day the Fewkes family hove into sight in a light democrat wagon
drawn by a good-sized apology for a horse, poor as a crow, and carrying
sail in the most ferocio