There was a great deal of sympathy with the Bunkers all over the country, I know where one of the men who did the deed lives now, out in Western Iowa, near Cherokee.  He was always looked upon as a murderer here—­and so, of course, he was, if he consented.

At the time when this conversation took place in Judge Stone’s office, the Bunkers were in the heyday of their bad eminence, and while they were operating a good way off, there was some terror at the mention of their name.  The judge looked me over for a minute when Henderson L. suggested me for the second time as a good man for his body-guard.

“Will you go, Jake?” he asked.  “Or are you scared of the Bunkers?”

Now, as a general rule, I should have had to take half an hour or so to decide a thing like that; but when he asked me if I was scared of the Bunkers, it nettled me; and after looking from him to Henderson L. for about five minutes, I said I’d go.  I was not invited to the party, of course; for it was an affair of the big bugs; but I never thought that an invitation was called for.  I felt just as good as any one, but I was a little wamble-cropped when I thought that I shouldn’t know how to behave.

“How you going, Judge?” asked Henderson L.

“In my family carriage,” said the judge.

“The only family carriage I ever saw you have,” said Henderson L., “is that old buckboard.”

“I traded that off,” answered the judge, “to a fellow driving through to the Fort Dodge country.  I got a two-seated covered carriage.  When it was new it was about such a rig as Buck Gowdy’s.”

“That’s style,” said Burns.  “Who’s going with you—­of course there’s you and your wife and now you have Jake; but you’ve got room for one more.”

“My wife,” said the judge, “is going to take the preacher’s adopted daughter.  The preacher’s wife thought there might be worldly doings that it might be better for her and the elder to steer clear of, but the girl is going with us.”

“Well, Jake,” said Henderson L., “you’re in luck.  You’ll ride to the party with your old flame, in a carriage.  My wife and I are going on a load of hay.  Jim Boyd is the only other man here that’s got a rig with springs under it.  The aristocracy of Monterey County, a lot of it, will ride plugs or shank’s mares.  You’re getting up among ’em, Jakey, my boy.  Never thought of this when you were in jail, did you?”

Nobody can realize how this talk made me suffer; and yet I kind of liked it.  I suffered more than ever, because I had not seen Virginia for a long time for several reasons.  I quit singing in the choir in the fall, when it was hard getting back and forth with no horses, and the heavy snow of the winter of 1855-6 began coming down.