resist the troops.  There was much suppressed excitement; and, had the vote been taken then, it would undoubtedly have been in favor of resistance.  Father, in the meanwhile, was on a committee, in a back room.  Mr. Quiett began calling for Pardee Butler.  Others took up the call, and, hearing it in the committee room, he came out.  They demanded a speech on the question in debate.  He begged them to bear their wrongs patiently, and to allow no provocation to cause them to resist the United States authorities.  He besought them to be loyal to their country, and never fire on the old stars and stripes.  Mr. Quiett said it was a powerful speech, timely and eloquent.  When he sat down the tide had turned.  The vote was taken, and it was decided not to resist the troops.  Mr. Quiett says that without a doubt that speech not only saved them from a bloody battle that day, but that it saved the Territory from a long, fierce war.

After they disbanded, the members of the Convention went out and sat down on the prairie grass to eat their dinner, which each took from his pocket, or his wagon.  Mr. Quiett and Mr. Ross took theirs from the wagon, in which they had ridden to Topeka; but father had gone on horseback, as he usually did, and took his dinner from the capacious pocket of his preacher’s saddle-bags.  Mr. Quiett said that in getting out his dinner, father took a pistol out of his saddlebags.  This created much merriment for them, as they thought it would have been of little use to him in case of attack.  They told him that if that was where he carried it, the South Carolinians would shoot him some day before he could unbuckle his saddle-bags.

But father disliked very much to carry arms, and I think he never did in his life, except for about two months during that dreadful summer.

About two weeks afterwards we started to Illinois, in the buggy.  We crossed the River at Iowa Point.  About nine miles northeast of Savannah, in Gentry county, Missouri, father was taken very sick, and we were obliged to stop at the nearest house.  The man at whose house we happened to stop was a Mr. Brown, from Maine; and he and his family were very kind to us.  There, for four weeks, father lay sick of a fever.  One day, while mother was in father’s room, Mrs. Brown questioned me about living in Kansas, and whether the Border Ruffians ever troubled us.  So I told her how father had been treated.  Father called me into the bed-room, and said that I ought not to have told that, under the circumstances; that it would be a dreadful thing for us to be attacked, with him flat on his back, and we among strangers.  I replied that I thought it would do no harm, because Mr. Brown’s folks were from the North, and our friends.  But he said it might bring trouble on Mr. Brown if his neighbors should learn that he had harbored Pardee Butler.  When Mr. Brown came in at noon, his wife told him the news.  He went right in, and told father that Butler was such a common name, that he had no idea that he had the honor of sheltering Pardee Butler.  “Now,” said he, “you need not be uneasy while you are here.  Yonder hang four good Sharp’s rifles, and I and my boys know how to use them; and nobody shall touch you unless they walk over our dead bodies.”