His weight overbore me but I
eased him as he came to the ground.
Dunn was still standing, knife in hand, seeking a chance for another
thrust.
"Look out, ye'll stab the kid!" somebody yelled. Another man, with a
vestige of decency, restrained the murderer. Riveley came out of the
store. There was a little breaking up of the crowd. Dunn was got away.
What happened to him later I shall tell you in another chapter.
With the help of a friend I got father into a wagon, when the crowd had
gone. I held his head in my lap during the ride home. I believed he was
mortally wounded. He had been stabbed down through the kidneys, leaving
an ugly wound. But he did not die of it--then. Mother nursed him
carefully and had he been spared further persecution, he might have
survived. But this was only the beginning.
The pro-slavers waited a few days, and finding there was no move to
molest them, grew bold. They announced that they were coming to our
house to finish their work.
One night we heard that a party was organized to carry out this
purpose. As quietly as possible mother helped take father out into the
sod corn, which then grew tall and thick close about the cabin. She put
a shawl round him and a sun-bonnet on his head to disguise him as he
was taken out.
There in the sod corn we made him a bed of hay and blankets and there
we kept him for days, carrying food to him by night.
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