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 horses constitute the means of communication, the motive power for the farm and the most easily marketable form of property, the stealing of horses was the commonest sort of crime; and where the population was so sparse and unorganized, and unprovided with means of sending news abroad, horse-stealing, offering as it did to the criminally inclined a ready way of making an easy living, gradually grew into an occupation which flourished, extended into other forms of crime, had its connections with citizens who were supposed to be honest, entered our politics, and finally was the cause of a terrible crisis in the affairs of Monterey County, and, indeed, of other counties in Iowa as well as in Illinois.