hat they existed
only for that sort of companionship with men with which my eyes were so
ignorantly familiar; that all their protestations and refusals were for
effect only; that a man need only to be a man, to know what he wanted,
and conquer it. And I felt rising in me like a tide the feeling that I
was now a man. The reader who has believed of me that I passed through
that canal life unspotted by its vileness has asked too much of me. The
thing was not possible. I now thought of the irregular companionships of
that old time as inexplicable no longer. They were the things for which
men lived--the inevitable things for every real man. Only this which
agitated me so terribly was different from them--no matter what
happened, it would be pure and blameless--for it would be us!

4

I suppose it may have been midnight or after, when I heard a far-off
splashing sound in the creek far above us. At first I thought of
buffalo--though there were none in Iowa so far as I knew at that
time--and only a few deer or bear; but finally, as the sound, which was
clearly that of much wading, drew even with my camp, I began to hear the
voices of men--low voices, as if even in that wilderness the speakers
were afraid of being overheard.

"I'm always lookin'," said one, "to find some of these damned movers
campin' in here when we come in with a raise."

"If I find any," said another, "they will be nepoed, damned quick."

This, I knew--I had heard plenty of it--was the lingo of thieves and
what the story-writers call bandits--though we never knew until years
afterward that we had in Iowa a distinct class which we should have
called bandits, but knew it not. They stole horses, dealt in counterfeit
money, and had scattered all over the West from Ohio to the limits of
civilization a great number of "stations" as they called them where any
man "of the right stripe" might hide either himself or his unlawful or
stolen goods. "A raise" was stolen property. "A sight" was a prospect
for a robbery, and to commit it was, to "raise the sight," or if it was
a burglary or a highway robbery, the man robbed was "raked down." A man
killed was "nepoed"--a word which many new settlers in Wisconsin got
from the Indians[9].

[9] This bit of frontier argot was rather common in the West in the
'fifties. The reappearance in the same sense of "napoo" for death in the
armies of the Allies in France is a little surprising.--G.v.d.M.

In a country in which h