But I insisted.  I said, “You did me a real kindness, and I want to do you a kindness in return.  I want you to take it.”  Then they bade me good night and went into the saloon.

The wind had been rising, and the snow was drifting; and it was evident that in many places the road would be obliterated, and I had a long stretch of prairie to travel over on which there was not a human habitation.  It was dangerous to undertake it, and I had to stay in Atchison.  I found an empty corral, where my teams would be decently sheltered, and went to the only hotel in town.  The sleeping room they assigned me was separated from the bar-room only by a thin board partition, and I could hear every word that was said.  This hotel was the boarding-place of the South Carolinians, and they soon began to drop in from about town, and word was passed among them that Butler was in the house.  Then one fellow, who was decidedly drunk, got turbulent, and protested, with terrible oaths, that such a man should not stay in the house, but that he would go in and drag him out of bed.  Then another company came in and demanded:  “What’s all this fussing about?” These were my friends, the South Carolinians from under the bluff They heard what this fellow had to say, then said:  “This thing has to be dried up.”  They then told what had happened down at the river, and concluded:  “Butler is a gentleman.  He talks like a gentleman; he treats like a gentleman; he came into this house like a gentleman, and we will show him that we are gentlemen.”  And when the drunken fellow became uproarious they hustled him off to bed.

I was evidently among friends, and slept soundly and without apprehension till morning.  I never saw my South Carolina friends again.  They returned home at an early day.

They had not made Kansas a slave state, but they had seen a Yankee trick.

CHAPTER XXIV.

Gov.  Geary, sick in body and sick at heart, had left the Territory in fear of private assassination, his best friends at Lecompton being the treason prisoners.  These, with something of bitterness, remarked that the Governor went away in such haste that he had forgotten to pardon them as he had promised; and thus while he got had out of prison, they still stayed in.

The party in power at Lecompton had said to the President at Washington:  “We are sick of Northern Governors.  They won’t do to tie to.  For pity’s sake give us a man from the South.”  And so a Southern Governor was given them in the person of Robert J. Walker.  Rehoboam, the son of Solomon, said to the Jews:  “My little finger shall be thicker than my father’s loins.”  So this Lecompton party found the little finger of this Southern Governor to be thicker than the loins of Gov.  Geary.