A.R. or
fellowshipped with the soldiers after the war. I always hated him; but I
do him the justice to say here that he was a brave man, and except for
his one great weakness--the weakness that I am told Lord Byron was
destroyed by--he would have been a good man. I feel certain that if he
had been given a chance to make a career in either army, he would have
been a general before the war was over.
That afternoon, J.P. Roebuck, who had seen my smoke, came over to
welcome me home and to talk politics with me. We must have a township
for ourselves, he said. Now look at the situation in the school. We had
a big school in the Vandemark schoolhouse, thirteen scholars being
enrolled. We had a good teacher, too, Virginia Royall. But there wasn't
enough fuel to last two days, and those Monterey Centre folks were dead
on their feet and nobody seemed to care if the school closed down. He
went on with his argument for a separate township organization; I all
the time thinking with my mind in a whirl that Virginia was near, and I
could see her next day. When he said that we would have to get the vote
of Doc Bliven, who was a member of the Board of Supervisors, I began to
take notice.
"Bliven always seemed to like you," said Roebuck. "We all kind of wish
you'd see what you can do for us with him."
"I think I can get his vote," I said, after thinking it over for a
while--and as I thought of it, the Dubuque ferry in 1855, the arrest of
Bliven in the queue of people waiting at the post-office, my smuggled
passenger, and the uplift I felt as the Iowa prairie opened to my view
as we drew out of the ravines to the top of the hills--all this rolled
over my memory.
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