The Wakarusa Valley, Douglas County, Kansas: August 1863
“Noah! I got five eggs today!” Katie Wheeler announced happily to her brother. The hens flapped down from their nests and pecked greedily at the dried corn she had put down for them, while Katie gathered the eggs into her apron.
Noah didn’t look up from the stool where he sat milking the cow, but muttered, “That’s good, Katie.”
Katie could tell Noah was upset. Any other day he would tease her, saying, “Just enough for me, too bad you won’t get any!” or something like that. She guessed it was because he’d argued with Papa—again—before he came out to the barn. She wanted desperately to make Noah happy, and said, “We’ll have a good breakfast, won’t we?”
Noah hardly heard his sister’s voice. His mind wasn’t on breakfast, or the cow or the chickens, or anything else on this godforsaken farm. All he could think about was the heated argument he’d had with his father before coming out to milk. Heated on his part, at least. Papa never raised his voice, was always reasonable, and as usual, had the last word. Noah had stalked off to the barn and closed the door, trying to shut out his father’s words.
The argument was the same one they had almost every day now. Noah was itching to get off the farm and start preparing for a career as a teacher, or even a professor, like Papa. He was only thirteen, but Papa was helping him with his Greek and Latin, and he loved mathematics. If he could go back to Boston, he could stay with Uncle Wesley and prepare to go to Harvard.
But Papa wanted Noah to stay on the farm until he was fourteen and then enroll at Baker, the first four-year university in Kansas. Papa was proud to be teaching there, but as far as Noah could tell, the students were nothing special, and they even admitted young ladies! He longed to rub shoulders with the sons of lawyers and bankers and ministers at Harvard. How, he had asked, would another year of following a plow and pitching hay help him become the man he wanted to be?
“Ah, but it’s the principle,” said Papa. “The future of this country is moving west. We’ll need educated people here, even more than back in Boston.”
The principle. It always came back to that—the reason they had come to Kansas in the first place. Papa was an Abolitionist who had eagerly moved his family west to help stop the spread of slavery. After years of violence along the Missouri border, Kansas had finally entered the Union as a free state two years earlier. Noah was grateful for that. Why then, he asked, couldn’t they go back to Boston now?
His thoughts were interrupted by shouts and the sound of horses galloping into the barnyard where his father was hitching up the wagon. He heard a man’s voice say, “Amos Wheeler?” followed by Papa’s polite reply. Probably someone from a neighboring farmstead who needed Papa’s help. Noah shut the voices out.
As Katie chattered on to her hens, Noah was startled at the sound of a gunshot. Suddenly his senses were on high alert. Milk pail forgotten, he leaped to his feet, angry with himself for shutting the barn door. Then he smelled the smoke. He looked up in alarm and saw a gray cloud billowing from the hay in the loft.