I couldn't think what he meant by a station; but it was about time to make camp anyhow, and so I took him into the wagon with me, and we drove across country by a plain trail, through a beautiful piece of oak openings, to a big log house in a fine grove of burr oaks, with a log barn back of it--as nice a farmstead as I had seen. There were fifteen or twenty cattle in the yards, and some sheep and hogs, and many fat hens. If this was a station, I thought, I envied the man who owned it. As we drove up I saw a little negro boy peeping at us from the back of the house, and as we halted a black woman ran out and seized the pickaninny by the ear, and dragged him back out of sight. I heard a whimper from the little boy, which seemed suddenly smothered by something like a hand clapped over his mouth. Mr. Dunlap's wagon was not in sight, but its owner came out at the front door and greeted me in a very friendly way. "What makes you call this a station?" I asked of Thatcher. Dunlap looked at him sternly. "I forgot myself," said Thatcher, more to Dunlap than to me. "Never mind," replied Dunlap. "If I can tell B from a bull's foot, it's all right." Then turning to me he said, "The old lady inside has a meal of victuals ready for us. Come in and we'll let into it." There was nothing said at the meal which explained the things that were so blind to me; but there was a good deal of talk about rifles. The farmer was named Preston, a middle-aged man who shaved all his beard except what grew under his chin, which hung down in a long black fringe over his breast like a window-lambrequin. His wife's father, who was an old Welshman named Evans, had worked in the lead mines over toward Dubuque, until Preston had married his daughter and taken up his farm in the oak openings. They had been shooting at a mark that afternoon, with Sharp's rifles carried by Dunlap and Thatcher, and the old-fashioned squirrel rifles owned on the farm. After supper they brought out these rifles and compared them. Preston insisted that the squirrel rifles were better. "Not for real service," said Dunlap, throwing a cartridge into the breech of the Sharp, and ejecting it to show how fast it could be done. "But I can roll a squirrel's eye right out of his head most every time with the old-style gun," said Preston. "This is the gun that won the Battle of New Orleans." "It wouldn't have won against the Sharp," said Thatcher; "and you know we expect to have a larger mark than a squirrel's head, when we get to Kansas."