Read Online Soon Be Free by Lois Ruby - Free Book Online

shore. People greeted them with hugs and handshakes, and for a flash James felt a pang of homesickness, even for the bratty Rebecca.
    Then Will said, “Psst, James, over here.” Will had caught sight of a very different sort of greeting as immigrants from the east claimed their wagons and oxen. A band of Missouri Border Ruffians held the men at bay with pistols while their confederates smashed locks on the trunks and crates. They slashed baskets and bags. Flour poured like water. Beans and rice clattered onto the dusty ground. Sewing notions and medicine bottles and gimcracks of every kind tumbled out and rolled all over while the owners gasped at the wreckage of their life’s accumulation.
    â€œNo way are you Yankees bringing this stuff into Kansas,” one frenzied man yelled, and another said, “Hobie, look. I found me a cache of Beecher’s Bibles.”
    James recognized the code name for Sharps rifles, repeating guns meant for the defenders of Lawrence.
    A third man held a billowy red dress up to his torso and did a little dance. “Molly Ruth’s gonna look right pretty in this, reckon?”
    One of the men guarding the owners yelled, “Quit your sporting, men, we’ve got work to do.” They began herding the passengers into a tight circle like sheep.
    â€œGo get your women and children if you want to wake up anything but dead tomorrow. Y’all are taking another trip, back east.”
    One brave soul shouted, “We’ve come across the country, and we mean to settle in the Free State of Kansas.”
    â€œOh, yeah?” Dry earth rushed up and blinded the men when one of the ruffians fired a couple of shots into the ground. More shots ricocheted off the ground, and the Eastern men ran for cover.
    Will tamped the ground around those gunshots. “Who put you men up to this?”
    Oh, no! Why did he have to open his mouth?
    â€œWhat did you say, boy?”
    â€œI asked, who are you working for?”
    A big man with a buffalo mane of white hair stepped forward and hung his huge frame over Will. James’s heart jumped as he inched closer, but for what? He didn’t know the first thing to do as the pot began to boil.
    â€œYou soft on slavery, boy?”
    Will stood his ground, that sack of leg swinging just as if a light breeze rocked a porch chair. “Yes, sir, I am.”
    â€œWell, listen here, boy. If you’ve got a mind to steal you a few Nigras from their rightful owners and haul them over the border into Kansas, well, boy, you can count on this: Me and a thousand like me will be here waiting for you.”
    The buffalo man seemed to notice James for the first time. “You, sissy-boy, you a fancy slave-stealer, too?”
    â€œNo, sir,” James said. Lying didn’t come easily to him, but he remembered Ma saying, “One man cannot own another,” and so what they’d be doing with the runaways couldn’t be stealing. “I’d never steal property. Sir.” Again, Ma’s voice: “James, people are not chattel. They are human beings, with souls that belong to God.”
    The mean man glared at Will. “This boy your friend?”
    Will pivoted on his heel. “Who, him? I never saw him in my life.”
    James swallowed a lump in his throat the size of a crab apple.
    The man waved his gun. “Git, both of you, go on.”
    Will raced his crutch to the end of the loading dock, and James made himself walk slowly, as if he had nothing to hide. But he did have something to hide: a huge ball of fear knotting in his stomach like the eye of a storm.
    Will found him when they were out of sight of the brigands. “Well, you didn’t get all lily-livered back there with that wild man.”
    â€œFelt lily-livered, though.”
    â€œWho cares what you feel, James? It’s what you show that counts.”
    â€œI’m never going to have thy kind of courage.”
    Will pulled an apple out of