a young man, with no
dependents, and we felt no compunctions of conscience, that dark night,
when two wagon-loads of us, one of which came from the direction of
Monterey Centre, drove quietly up and knocked at the door.

"Who's there?" he said, with a quiver in his voice.

"Open up, and find out!" said a man in the Monterey Centre crowd, who
seemed to take command as a matter of course. "Kick the door
open, Dutchy!"

As he said this he stepped aside, and pushed me up to the door. I gave
it a push with my knee, and the leader jerked me aside, just in time to
let a charge of shot pass my head.

"It's only a single-barrel gun," said he. "Grab him!"

I was scared by the report of the gun, scared and mad, too, as I
clinched with the fellow, and threw him; then I pitched him out of the
door, when the rest of them threw him down and began stripping him. At
the same time, some one kindled a fire under a kettle filled with tar,
and in a few minutes, they were smearing him with it. This looked like
going too far, to me, and I stepped back--I couldn't stand it to see the
tar smeared over his face, even if it did look like a map of the devil's
wild land, as he kicked and scratched and tried to bite, swearing all
the time like a pirate. It seemed a degrading kind of thing to defile a
human being in that way. The leader came up to me and said, "That was
good work, Dutchy. Lucky I was right about its being a single-barrel,
ain't it? Help get his team hitched up. We want to see him
well started."

"All right, Mr. McGill," I said; for that was his name, now first told
in all the history of the county.

"Shut up!" he said. "My name's Smith, you lunkhead!"

Well, we let the claim-jumper put on his clothes over the tar and
feathers, and loaded his things into his wagon, hitched up his team, and
whipped them up to a run and let them go over the prairie. All the time
he was swearing that he would have blood for this, but he never stopped
going until he was out of sight and hearing.

2

("What a disgraceful affair!" says my granddaughter Gertrude, as she
finishes reading that page. "I'm ashamed of you, grandpa; but I'm glad
he didn't shoot you. Where would I have been?" Well, it does seem like
rather a shady transaction for me to have been mixed up in. The side of
it that impresses me, however, is the lapse of time as measured in
conditions and institutions. That was barbarism; and it was Iowa! And it
was in my lifetime. It was i