Soon Be Free

by Lois Ruby

  Miz Pru sniffed the fragrant April air and said, “Kansas ain’t no Garden of Eden.”

  “No, ma’am, but it’s home,” James told her, realizing that Kansas truly was his home now, more so than Boston, where he’d spent the first twelve years of his life.

  Solomon herded their group together while James went to hire a coach to carry them to Lawrence. Suddenly he heard Solomon’s voice rise above the milling crowd. “Mr. James, you’d best come back.”

  Solomon had an arm around each of the women, and Homer clutched Callie’s hand while a man with a gravelly voice demanded to see their papers. Sabetha’s face flushed. Miz Pru had her feet planted wide, and James saw her dress ripple over shaking knees.

  He stepped forward. “Pardon me, sir. Is thee an official?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “These are my friends, sir.”

  The man glowered at James. “Thee are a snotty little kid. Leave me to my business, boy.”

  James mustered a cordial smile and looked the man full in the eyes. “Might I see thy badge, sir?”

  The man’s breathing was loose and wheezy as he yanked a leather billfold out of his back pocket. He flipped it open and shoved it up under James’s nose. His name was Lonny Brill, from St. Joseph, Missouri.

  “I thank thee kindly, sir, but thee is not a U.S. marshal.”

  James saw a flicker of a smile in Solomon’s eyes.

  “What I am is a citizen sworn to uphold the law, which says loud and clear that a man has a right to have his stolen property returned. Call me a wild dreamer, but I suspect these folks are runaways. Unless you can prove otherwise,” he added, daring Solomon.

  Solomon presented his own papers first.

  “Uh-huh, sure enough you’re a free Negro, in the hire of a Dr. Olney, says here.”

  “Yes, sir.” Solomon sounded calm, but James heard a tremor in his voice.

  Lonny Brill slid the other papers on top of Solomon’s. Now Sabetha stood behind Miz Pru, locking both the woman’s arms in place. Homer tossed his rubber ball from hand to hand; pieces of rubber flaked off onto his scuffed boots. Callie jammed her feet in her shoes and stared straight ahead.

  Lonny Brill’s eyes flitted across the words. “This doesn’t do it, friends.”

  “But they’re free papers,” Callie cried, before Sabetha could clap her hand across Callie’s mouth.

  “I suppose you’re the girl mentioned here? Callie Biggers?”

  “Yes, sir,” she mumbled.

  “Well, I’ve got news for you, Callie Biggers. This paper’s not worth the ink spilled on it. It’s a dang good forgery, that I’ll grant you, but it’s not the genuine article. You know how I can tell? There’s no official seal on this document. There’s got to be an official seal. Looks like my buddies and I will just have to return you folks to your owner.”

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  THE DELAWARE PROJECT

  If Mike and I had spent half as much time on schoolwork as we were spending on the Delaware Project, we’d be brilliant. Well, we’re already brilliant, but not in ways that get you on the honor roll.

  Ahn had wanted to come to the University of Kansas library with me and work on this project just as we’d worked together on the mystery of Miz Lizbet’s skeleton. I’d wheedled out of it so I could work with Mike. It’s true that he has never been a hotshot researcher before, but after we’d had our arms around each other at that party and clunked knees, it was kind of nice to sit in the dark at a blue-screened microfilm reader and exchange Significant Grimaces and Grunts. Love blooms in weird gardens, you know what I mean? That is, if you don’t mind a few weeds.

  We piled all kinds of Kansas history tomes on the table and rolled over to a microfilm reader to scan the old Lawrence city directories. Next to us was a serious student, a guy in a Kansas City Chiefs ball cap, who fast-forwarded through about thirty rolls while we were figuring out how to load the first one.

  Eventually we got it, and rolled and rolled until we found Jedediah Morrison, living on Vermont Avenue, in 1857. Occupation: oculist.

  Mike dashed over to the monster dictionary to look up oculist: Jedediah made spectacles—eyeglasses, that is—and spyglasses and magnifying lenses. He was listed as a widower with one son, Flint, age thirteen. The same age as James Weaver.

  Mike said, “Old Jedediah’s not listed in the 1858 directory. Think he died?”

  “Or moved suddenly.” I dropped three rolls of microfilm, and Chiefs Cap glared at us.

  “Bo Prairie Fire had mentioned land up near Leavenworth. I’ll check.” I scouted out the Leavenworth city directory for 1858. “Here he is.” Jedediah Morrison turned out to be on the Leavenworth County tax rolls for the next six years, but in his last year he’d had a walloping increase in his taxes.

  “He made a pile of money in 1863, Mike. Maybe he sold his land.”

  “What land?”

  “Good question,” I conceded.

  “And why in the middle of the Civil War?”

  “We’ve got loads of questions, just no answers,” I said with a sigh.

  Mike flipped through pages of a pictorial history of Kansas. He kept muttering, “1863 … 1863 … Nothing special happened.”

  The man in the Chiefs cap said, “Wrong, kid. That’s the year Congress turned over land to build the railroad in Kansas. Right across the Delaware Strip.”

  I looked at him curiously. Since when was this his project? But three heads are better than two, as the saying goes.

  Mike began doodling in his notebook. He drew a really awful Conestoga covered wagon with huge wheels. He has this theory that if you scribble swirly circles long enough, something important will start to appear on the paper out of your sheer boredom, so his pencil kept tracing around and around one of those wheels until it cut through the paper, which gave me an idea.

  “Look at it this way.” I drew an enormous wheel and printed JAMES WEAVER at the hub. “Let’s label all the spokes.” We came up with ten of them:

  (1)

  Miz Lizbet

  (2)

  Mattie and Ray Berk

  (3)

  Ernie’s Bait Shop

  (4)

  Delaware Indian land

  (5)

  Faith Cloud

  (6)

  Jedediah Morrison

  (7)

  Flint Morrison

  (8)

  Samuel Straightfeather

  (9)

  The missing treaty

  (10)

  Bo Prairie Fire

  “Who’s Bo Prairie Fire?” asked Chiefs Cap.

  “An old croupy Indian,” Mike explained.

  “Delaware?”

  “What else?”

  I yellow-highlighted each spoke as it fed to the center of our wheel. “Now all we have to do is figure out how each of these is connected to the hub.”

  “Which is James Weaver, of course,” Mike said with a sneer.

  I thought about it a minute. “Here’s what we know for sure: James knows Flint, and Bo Prairie Fire knows about Flint’s father, Jedediah Morrison. Also, Straightfeather and Bo and Faith are somehow related.”

  “Same clan, maybe?”

  “Faith tells her dear old neighbor Mattie about a treaty that was written but never ratified, or maybe it was ratified, then lost.”

  “Or stolen,” Chiefs Cap suggested.

  Mike said, “Suppose James knows something about Delaware land rights. Say he’s friends with an Indian, or his father’s the lawyer for some of the Delaware people, and there’s a big mess over who owns what land and who’s going to sell it to the railroad for a killing. Say James knows about the secret treaty, and he gives his buddy Flint some inside info.”

  I shook my head. “The James I know wouldn’t do anything so sleazy.”

  “Oh, no, of course not,” Mike said. “Saint James Weaver.”

  By now, Chiefs Cap was practically foaming at the mouth. “A treaty like that would be worth serious money in the ha
nds of the Delaware people, because they’d be entitled to reparations from the U.S. government with about one hundred fifty years’ worth of interest. Man, I wish I were on the Delaware rolls.”

  Mike said, “But, on the other hand, if the treaty doesn’t get to the tribe at all and lands in Washington first, it might just accidentally vanish and never resurface, right?”

  “Possibly,” I said thoughtfully, “but it would also be worth a lot of money if it never turned up. Think. If the railroad’s going to be built in Kansas, it’s got to buy land from somebody, right?”

  “Right,” Mike agreed. “And the land belongs to the Delaware Indians.”

  “Or it would, if the treaty ever got ratified,” Chiefs Cap added.

  Mike began tapping the desk furiously with his pencil. “Oh, man, what if Jedediah Morrison sells Indian land to the railroad?”

  “How does he get it?” Suddenly another theory popped into my mind. “James and Flint go to school together. Let’s say James knows about the treaty Mr. Prairie Fire was rambling on about. He tells his buddy Flint about the treaty. James wants to make sure it gets into the right hands, like under the nose of a Delaware chief.”

  Mike finished my thought: “But somebody steals it.”

  “Flint Morrison!”

  “And it’s lost forever.”

  “Until now!” I said, triumphantly.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  April 1857

  A MORAL DILEMMA

  A band tightened around James’s chest as he saw panic replace the smile in Solomon’s eyes. “These are my kinfolk,” Solomon told Lonny Brill. “I’m carrying them to Lawrence to help out the Olneys.”

  “Good try, Mr. Free Negro Man, but I happen to know that four slaves matching the description of your kinfolk have gone missing out of Owensboro, Kentucky. An old lady, oh, I’d say about like this one. A big, strong buck. A young woman, lithe and pretty, and, what do you know, a girl said to be ten or eleven. Can you beat that coincidence?”

  James said, “Sir, these people have been traveling with me. I can swear to thee that they’re free citizens. Go after my father, please. He’s a lawyer in Lawrence. He’ll straighten this all out.”

  “I don’t care if he’s Jesus walking on water, boy. These are now my Negroes, and they are worth a nice stack of dollars.” The man pulled out a gun. Homer tugged at Miz Pru’s safety rope.

  James and the others drew together into a tighter circle. How could they come this close to victory and still lose? James saw that Sabetha was looking for a way to run. He flashed her a warning—no!—while his own mind raced through possibilities.

  A tall, angular man with a curled mustache stepped forward. “How much are these Negroes worth to you, sir?”

  “None of your business, unless you’re buying,” said Lonny Brill.

  “I have a proposition for you.” The man tugged at his white cuffs. He wore a wide-brimmed hat stained with sweat, but was otherwise immaculate.

  James scanned the man’s face; was he a true abolitionist, a Free-Soiler? Or was he offering to pay for the runaways only to sell them to someone else in the South for lots more money?

  “Permit me to confer with the young man who appears to be their champion. Hold your fire on these unfortunate wretches, sir, until the boy and I can—shall we say—reach favorable terms?” The man led James aside by the elbow. “I scratch your back, you scratch mine.”

  “Sir?”

  “It’s the American way of doing business, son. You have a commodity you wish to preserve, at any cost, am I right? Mr. Brill, there, has a commodity he wishes to possess so he can sell it to the highest bidder. Do you follow me so far?”

  “I think so, sir.”

  “Very good. I, as the third leg of this tripod, have a document, a certain Delaware land rights treaty, that I wish to misplace until I can raise a little capital. I aim to purchase the land that already belongs to my family—by squatter sovereignty, by God—but that greedy Delaware near-savages claim as their own.”

  Cringing at those harsh words, James asked, “Might I ask how thee came by this treaty, sir?” He was trying to piece the picture together, but it was all muddled in his mind.

  “I happened to be at the unfortunate demise of a certain Bureau of Indian Affairs agent, a man of rectitude and resolve, but alas, he’s just as dead today as a man of my own caliber would be under the same circumstances, which is to say, a knife to the heart.”

  James’s stomach tightened with the gasp he held in.

  “On the Indian agent’s last breath he thrust this document into my hand and entreated me to see it safely to Washington.” The man laughed heartily, not at all the response James would expect from someone honoring a deathbed plea.

  “Now, I could simply burn this magnificent piece of parchment or watch it turn to pulp in the river. But I’m a good man at heart.”

  James suspected he was anything but good as the man patted his chest in pride. “I trust you’re a member of the Society of Friends, as the Quakers call themselves, am I right? Conscientious folk, all of you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now, understand me, I do not wish to finagle those poor Indians out of their land. I only want my share. I’ll build a sweet little house, plant forty acres in corn, and live like the gentleman I was born to be.”

  “Forgive me, sir, but I can’t help wondering why thee’s so keen on that plot of land when there’s this vast prairie out here and room enough for everyone.”

  The man looked at him as if he were daft. “Well, you’re just a boy. I’ve got a lad about your age, and he’s green as sapling, too. There’s going to be a railroad come through here, right across that prime Delaware reserve. Right across my land. My very valuable land, if you’re viewing it through the eyes of the Leavenworth, Pawnee, and Western Railroad.”

  James swallowed a dry lump in his throat and realized he was no match for this man. If only Will were there… .

  “Now, I am an excellent judge of character,” the man said. He looked James up and down as if he were fitting him for a suit.

  “I’m losing my patience,” Lonny Brill shouted, waving the pistol he’d kept the runaways in line with.

  “We’re reaching the end of our negotiations,” the man called back, then turned again to James. “I trust you, with all your thees and thous, to hide this document while I raise the money out east to buy a handsome passel of that land.”

  “But, sir, the land belongs to the Delaware people. The U.S. government moved them out here to Kansas Territory and deeded them that land. My pa’s a lawyer. He explained it all to me.”

  “Quite right, son, until two, three years ago, when the government convinced those poor souls to sell cheap all but a ten-mile-by-forty-mile swath of that land on the north bank of the river. Haven’t you heard about the Delaware Strip? Some call it the Delaware Trust Lands?”

  “Yes, sir, I’ve heard those words,” James said with a sigh.

  “Those fools should have known better than to trust,” the man said. “One of their chiefs woke up one fine Kansas morning and realized just what they’d given away for mere cents on the dollar, and he called for a new treaty. This piece of paper”—the man patted his breast pocket—“deeds them back a handsome patch of land. My land, I might add. Or, more precisely, it shall be my land as soon as I raise the sizable capital.”

  “That land, sir, which ought to belong to the Delaware tribe, now’s owned by the government?”

  “Unless this treaty goes into effect. You see my dilemma. The Delawares, of course, would never sell it to me.”

  “And the government aims to sell Delaware land right out from under them?”

  The man shrugged. “We’ve all got our price, boy. You, too, I suspect.”

  What would Will do? Will always had the sure, right word ready to roll off his tongue. James glanced back at the band of his friends, sorely minus Will. All of their lives hung on these words. Callie had her arm around Miz Pru, and Miz
Pru’s empty eyes darted nervously as she chewed her gums as if they were a wad of tobacco. The spring air hung heavy with expectancy.

  He could feel his own will bending. “And what of the treaty, sir?”

  The man said, “I’m obliged to misplace the document, you see, because a certain officer of the law suspects it’s in my possession. It wouldn’t be, if it were in yours. Do you understand?”

  James did not understand, but he waited to hear more.

  “Oh, I suppose I could bury the document in a steel box out on the wild prairie, but somebody might strike it when they were turning sod. Well, a lesser man might take that chance.”

  “It’s a mighty big prairie out there,” James reminded the man again. He glanced over and caught Callie’s pleading look.

  “But, alas,” the man was saying, “it’s in my best interest not to know where this document rests, should anybody ask me. I’m a gentleman. I would not thrive behind bars, imbibing federal swill. Do I make myself clear, boy?”

  “I believe so, sir.”

  “We have an agreement, then? You promise me to bury the treaty and not let on to a soul?”

  “And in return, sir?” The words tasted foul on James’s tongue, milk gone sour in the sun.

  “In return I pay Mr. Brill, there, the paltry sum he’d get for the Negroes—less his considerable handling expenses—you take the wretches home, and everybody’s needs are served.”

  “Except the Delaware Indians’, sir.”

  “Ah, yes, but in five years’ time you’ll mail that treaty document to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. You’ll swear you’ve just located it, say, among some tornado rubble. Then the Delaware will get what’s coming to them for their trouble, courtesy of Uncle Sam in all his bounty. The railroad will bring the outside world to the prairie. As for me, I will have sold my land to the railroad and will be living in the throes of luxury in a far-off state. I fancy New Hampshire. As I mentioned, everybody’s happy.”

  James bent over, stalling, tugging at his trousers, which were high over his ankles now. Straightening up, he said, “One thing still troubles me, sir, if thee doesn’t mind my asking.”