Bands of armed men from the South arrived in Kansas, and one from Georgia came to camp near the Brown settlement on the Swamp of the Swan. On a May morning John Brown and four of his sons walked over to the new camp to learn the Georgians' plans. He had some surveying instruments with him, and the newcomers took him for a government surveyor and therefore a slave man, for almost every official that was sent into Kansas held the Southern views. Pretending to be a surveyor, the father directed his sons to busy themselves in making a section line through the camp. The men from Georgia looked on, talking freely. Presently one of them said: "We've come here to stay. We won't make no war on them as minds their own business; but all the Abolitionists, such as them Browns over there, we're going to whip, drive out, or kill,--any way to get shut of them!" The strangers went on to name other settlers they meant to drive out, not suspecting who their listeners were, and John Brown wrote every word down in his surveyor's book. A few days later the Georgians moved their camp nearer to the Brown settlement, and began to steal horses and cattle belonging to the free-state men. Brown took his list, and went to see the men whose names were on it. They held a meeting, and decided that it was time to teach the "border ruffians," as such men as the Georgians were called, a lesson. News of the meeting spread rapidly, and soon it was generally known that the free-state men about Osawatomie, which was the name of the town near which the Browns lived, were prepared to take the war-path. The old bitter feelings flamed up again in May of 1856. On the twenty-first of the month, a band of slavery men swept down on the town of Lawrence, and while the free-state citizens looked on, sacked and burned the place. John Brown and his sons hurried there, but when they reached Lawrence the houses were in ashes. He denounced the free-state men as cowards, for to his ardent nature it seemed an outrage that men should let themselves be treated so by ruffians. When a discreet citizen said that they must act with caution John Brown burst out at him: "Caution, caution, sir! I am eternally tired of hearing that word caution--it is nothing but the word for cowardice!" There was nothing for him to do, however, and he was about to turn toward home when a boy came dashing up. He reported that the ruffians in the Swamp of the Swan had warned all the women in the Brown settlement that they must leave Kansas by Saturday or Sunday, or they would be driven out. The women had been frightened, and taking their children, had fled in an ox-cart to the house of a relative at a distance. The boy added that two houses and a store near the settlement had been burned.