least disposition to receive commands as Kansas militia; they invoked
that name only as a cloak to shield them from the legal penalties due
their real character as organized banditti.

The Governor called the chiefs together and made them an earnest
harangue. He explained to them his conciliatory policy, read his
instructions from Washington, affirmed his determination to keep peace,
and appealed personally to Atchison to aid him in enforcing law and
preserving order. That wily chief, seeing that refusal would put him in
the attitude of a law-breaker, feigned a ready compliance, and he and
Reid, his factotum commander, made eloquent speeches "calculated to
produce submission to the legal demands made upon them."[14] Some of
the lesser captains, however, were mutinous, and treated the Governor
to choice bits of Border-Ruffian rhetoric. Law and violence vibrated in
uncertain balance, when Colonel Cooke, commanding the Federal troops,
took the floor and cut the knot of discussion in a summary way. "I felt
called upon to say some words myself," he writes naïvely, "appealing to
these militia officers as an old resident of Kansas and friend to the
Missourians to submit to the patriotic demand that they should retire,
assuring them of my perfect confidence in the inflexible justice of the
Governor, and that it would become my painful duty to sustain him at
the cannon's mouth."[15] This argument was decisive. The border chiefs
felt willing enough to lead their awkward squads against the slight
barricades of Lawrence, but quailed at the unlooked-for prospect of
encountering the carbines and sabers of half a regiment of regular
dragoons and the grape-shot of a well-drilled light battery. They
accepted the inevitable; and swallowing their rage but still nursing
their revenge, they consented perforce to retire and be "honorably"
mustered out. But for this narrow contingency Lawrence would have been
sacked a second time by the direct agency of the territorial cabal.