It was with a feeling of considerable importance that Sandy surveyed the interior of the sutler's store. The proprietor looked curiously at him, as if wondering why so small a boy should turn up alone in that wilderness; and when the lad asked for letters for the families up the river, Mullett's, Sparkins's, Battles's, Younkins's, and his own people, the sutler said: "Be you one of them Abolitioners that have named your place after that man Whittier, the Abolition poet? I've hearn tell of you, and I've hearn tell of him. And he ain't no good. Do you hear me?" Sandy replied that he heard him, and to himself he wondered greatly how anybody, away down here, ten miles from the new home, could possibly have heard about the name they had given to their cabin. Several soldiers who had been lounging around the place now went out at the door. The sutler, looking cautiously about as if to be sure that nobody heard him, said: "Never you mind what I said just now, sonny. Right you are, and that man Whittier writes the right sort of stuff. Bet yer life! I'm no Abolitioner; but I'm a free-State man, I am, every time." "Then what made you talk like that, just now?" asked Sandy, his honest, freckled face glowing with righteous indignation. "If you like Mr. John G. Whittier's poetry, why did you say he wasn't any good?" "Policy, policy, my little man. This yere's a pro-slavery guv'ment, and this yere is a pro-slavery post. I couldn't keep this place one single day if they thought I was a free-State man. See? But I tell you right here, and don't you fergit it, this yere country is going to be free State. Kansas is no good for slavery; and slavery can't get in here. Stick a pin there, and keep your eye on it." With some wonder and much disgust at the man's cowardice, Sandy packed his precious letters in the bosom of his shirt. Into one end of his meal-sack he put a pound of soda-biscuit for which his Uncle Charlie had longed, a half-pound of ground ginger with which Charlie desired to make some "molasses gingerbread, like mother's," and a half-pound of smoking-tobacco for his dear father. It seemed a long way off to his father now, Sandy thought, as he tied up that end of the bag. Then into the other end, having tied the bag firmly around, about a foot and a half from the mouth, he put the package of nails and a roll of sheet lead. It had been agreed that if they were to go buffalo-hunting, they must have rifle-balls and bullets for their shot-guns. The sutler, who had become very friendly, looked on with an amused smile, and said, "'Pears to me, sonny, you got all the weight at one end, haven't you?"