I think it was the word of what Gowdy said about the christening that finally wrought Magnus up to the act he had all along resolved upon, the attempt on Gowdy’s life.  He armed himself and went over to the Blue-grass Manor looking for Buck; but found that his man had gone to Kentucky.  Magnus left word for Gowdy to go armed and be prepared to protect himself, and went home.  He said nothing to me about this; but the next spring when Gowdy came back, Magnus started after him again with a gun loaded with buckshot, and Gowdy, who, I suppose, looked upon Magnus as beneath him, had him arrested.  I went to Monterey Centre and put my name on Magnus’s bond when he was bound over to keep the peace.

I hinted to Magnus that he needn’t mind about the bond if he still believed in his heart that Gowdy needed killing; but Rowena pleaded with him not to ruin himself, me and her by pursuing his plan of executing what both he and I believed to be justice on a man who had forfeited his life by every rule of right.  This lapse into lawlessness on his part and mine can not be justified, of course.  It is set forth here as a part of the history of the place and the time.

I am not equipped to write the history of the celebrated Gowdy Case, which grew out of these obscure circumstances in the lives of a group of pioneers in an Iowa township.  Probably the writers of history will never set it down.  Yet, it swayed the destiny of the county and the state in after years, when Gowdy had died and left his millions to be fought over in courts, in caucuses, in conventions, state and county.  If it does not go into the histories, the histories will not tell the truth.  If great law firms, governors, judges, congressmen and senators, lobbyists and manipulators, are not judged in the light of the secret as well as the surface influence of the Gowdy Case, they will not be rightly judged.

The same thing is true of the influence of the loss of the county funds by Judge Stone.  Who was guilty?  Was the plan to have the bag of “treasure” stolen from us by the Bunker gang a part of the scheme of whoever took the money?  Did the Bushyagers know about the satchel?  Did they know it was full of salt instead of money?  Of course not, if they were in the thing.

Did some one mean to fix it so the Bunkers would rob us of the satchel and thus let everybody off?  And if so, what about me?  I should have had to fight for the money, for that was what I was hired for.  Was I to be killed to save Judge Stone, or Governor Wade, and if so, which?

My part in the affair was never much spoken of in the hot newspaper and stump-speech quarrels over the matter; but after a while, when I had had time to figure it all out, I began to think I had not been treated quite right; but what was I anyhow?  This was another thing that made me sore at all the Monterey Centre crowd, including the elder and grandma, with their truckling to Gowdy and Wade and Stone and the rest who helped the elder build his church.  I suppose that the stolen money, some of it, went to pay for that church; but if every church had remained unbuilt that has stolen money in it, there would be fewer temples pointing, as the old song says, with taper spire to heaven, wouldn’t there?