There was nothing said at the meal which explained the things that were so blind to me; but there was a good deal of talk about rifles.  The farmer was named Preston, a middle-aged man who shaved all his beard except what grew under his chin, which hung down in a long black fringe over his breast like a window-lambrequin.  His wife’s father, who was an old Welshman named Evans, had worked in the lead mines over toward Dubuque, until Preston had married his daughter and taken up his farm in the oak openings.  They had been shooting at a mark that afternoon, with Sharp’s rifles carried by Dunlap and Thatcher, and the old-fashioned squirrel rifles owned on the farm.  After supper they brought out these rifles and compared them.  Preston insisted that the squirrel rifles were better.

“Not for real service,” said Dunlap, throwing a cartridge into the breech of the Sharp, and ejecting it to show how fast it could be done.

“But I can roll a squirrel’s eye right out of his head most every time with the old-style gun,” said Preston.  “This is the gun that won the Battle of New Orleans.”

“It wouldn’t have won against the Sharp,” said Thatcher; “and you know we expect to have a larger mark than a squirrel’s head, when we get to Kansas.”

This was the first breech-loader I had ever seen, and I looked it over with a buying eye.  It didn’t seem to me that it would be much better for hunting than the old-fashioned rifle, loaded with powder and a molded bullet rammed down with a patch of oiled cloth around it; for after you have shot at your game once, you either have hit it, or it runs or flies away.  If you have hit it, you can generally get it, and if it goes away, you have time to reload.  Besides those big cartridges must be costly, I thought, and said so to Mr. Dunlap.

“When you’re hunting Border Ruffians,” said he, “a little expense don’t count one way or the other; and you may be willing to pay dear for a chance to reload three or four times while the other man is ramming home a new charge.  Give me the new guns, the new ideas, and the old doctrine of freedom to fight for.  Don’t you see?”

“Why, of course,” said I, “I’m for freedom.  That’s why I’m going out on the prairies.”

“Prairies!” said old Evans.  “Prairies!  What do you expect to do on the prairies?”

“Farm,” I answered.

“All these folks that are rushing to the prairies,” said the old man, “will starve out and come back.  God makes trees grow to show men where the good land is.  I read history, and there’s no country that’s good for anything, except where men have cut the trees, niggered off the logs, grubbed out the stumps, and made fields of it—­and if there are stones, it’s all the better.  ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,’ said God to Adam, and when you go to the prairies where it’s all ready for the plow, you are trying to dodge God’s curse on our first parents.  You won’t prosper.  It stands to reason that any land that is good will grow trees.”