Page:John Brown (W. E. B. Du Bois).djvu/195

Rh to guard the ballot-boxes and, hearing that John Brown was back again in Iowa, he sent for him in hot haste. His messengers found the old man sick and disappointed among his staunch Quaker friends at Tabor. Brown offered to come if supplied with "three good teams, with well-covered wagons, and ten really ingenious, industrious (not gassy) men, with about one hundred and fifty dollars in cash." These demands were not met until too late, so that Brown returned the money and did not appear in Kansas until the election was over, and the free state forces had triumphed. This had now but passing interest for him. He had other objects in Kansas and flitted noiselessly about among the picked men who had promised their aid. Then he disappeared again. Eight months passed away, when suddenly another Kansas outrage startled the nation. It was the last vengeful echo of that first night of murder in the Swamp of the Swan. In 1856 Linn and Bourbon counties, some miles below the original Brown settlement, had been cleared of free state settlers. In 1857 these settlers ventured to return and found the pro-slavery forces centred at Fort Scott, waiting for Congress to pass the Lecompton constitution. Thus in 1857 and 1858 the expiring horror of Kansas guerrilla warfare centred in southeast Kansas. The pro-slavery forces saw the state slipping from them, but they determined by desperate blows to plant slavery so deeply in the counties next Missouri that no free state