“It is true,” was the astounding answer, when he said bad words, rushed from the room and slammed the door.  Then followed ten days, the only ones since he became my brother when he would not call me “Sis.”  Elizabeth said: 

“I would have seen Lowrie and his money in the bottom of the sea, first!  What would mother say?”

The next issue of the Visiter made no allusion to its change of base, and there was plenty of time to discuss the question.  Those who knew my record refused to believe I had sold out, and took bets on it.  However, the next number contained an editorial which relieved the minds of friends, but which created the gravest apprehension.  It stated that the Visiter would, in future, support Buchanan’s administration, and went on to state the objects of that administration as being the entire subversion of Freedom and the planting of Slavery in every State and Territory, so that Toombs could realize his boast, and call the roll of his slaves at the foot of Bunker Hill.  It reminded its readers that John Randolph had said in the United States Senate when speaking to Northern men: 

“We have driven you to the wall, and will drive you there again, and next time we will keep you there and nail you to the counter like base money.”

Mr. Buchanan, a Northern man, had fulfilled the prediction.  Henry Clay had said that Northern workingmen were “mudsills, greasy mechanics and small-fisted farmers.”  These mudsills had been talking of voting themselves farms; but it would be much more appropriate if they would vote themselves masters.  Southern laborers were blessed with kind masters, and Mr. Buchanan and the St. Cloud Visiter were most anxious that Northern laborers should be equally well provided for.

When the paper was read, there was a cry of “Sold!  Sold!  Lowrie had sold himself instead of buying the Visiter.”  At first there was a laugh, then a dead stillness of dread, and men looked at me as one doomed.

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

BORDER RUFFIANISM.

In Lowrie’s first ebulition of wrath, he vowed vengeance, but an intimate friend of his, who had been a Democrat in Pittsburg, begged him to do nothing and said: 

“Let her alone, for God’s sake!  Let her alone, or she will kill you.  I know her, and you do not.  She has killed every man she ever touched.  Let her alone!”

But Lowrie knew it was too late for letting alone, and sent me a verbal message, by one he knew I would believe, that I must stop or the consequences would be fatal.  Stopping was no part of my plan, and so I told his messenger.