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Dusk and leave before it was light.” Weakness and illness, which the family attributed to his wound, often compelled his return. At such times, Julia wrote, “we had to be on the watch all the time....” 38 Once, when Isaac Cody was sick and confined to bed upstairs, Will and Julia stood guard over their father with a gun and an ax as a murderous pro-slavery partisan sat in their kitchen. Mary Cody prepared the man a meal, all the while claiming her husband had last been heard from at Topeka. The man sharpened his knife on a whetstone, vowing to kill that “damned abolitionist husband” of hers. 39
    In many other ways, the Cody children made extraordinary sacrifices and took horrifying chances. In the summer of 1856, a friendly neighbor brought word that men were waiting to ambush Isaac Cody on his return from Grasshopper Falls. Children rarely became targets in the border troubles, and even during the most violent periods, Will and Julia traveled thirty miles or more on horseback to move cattle or run family errands. Ten-year-old Will Cody was in bed with influenza when his mother received news of the plot to kill Isaac. The boy arose and clambered onto a horse. Taking a letter from his mother warning Isaac not to return in the near future, he set out for Grasshopper Falls. He made it eight miles, to Stranger Creek, when he noticed he was being pursued by a group of horsemen. As he later recounted the incident, one of the men said, “That is the damned abolitionist boy. Let’s go for him.” 40
    The boy put his heels to his horse, and for nine more miles the men chased the sick and terrified child. He finally reined up at the home of a family friend named Hewitt. The would-be assassins turned and fled. The boy told the man what had happened, and expressed his desire to continue to Grasshopper Falls. Hewitt feared the horse would die without rest, and he was concerned for Will Cody, too. The animal was covered in lather, and flecked with the boy’s vomit.
    Fortuitously, Hewitt himself had just returned from Grasshopper Falls. He had spoken to Isaac Cody, who told him that he would not be returning home for a few more days. Hewitt put the boy to bed. When he awoke, Will Cody insisted on carrying the message to Isaac anyway. It was a rare opportunity to spend two weeks with his father, who was among friends at Grasshopper Falls, notably the Free State militia of the militant Jim Lane. 41
    Isaac Cody’s condition soon worsened again. To recuperate in safety, he traveled to Ohio, where he visited with relatives. After returning from this trip he was followed by many new emigrants. Being a “locator,” a man who could read survey lines and claim locations for settlers, his home was a beacon for new arrivals. Numbers of them could be found there at any time, sometimes seated at the kitchen table, their tents pitched in the front yard. 42 In this small but very noticeable way, the westward expansion of the United States moved through the home of Isaac Cody. Amidst the swirling violence which threatened to demolish that home, he remained its link both to the money they needed and to the expanding West. Patriarch of the family, founder of the town of Grasshopper Falls, Isaac Cody was both a family bulwark and the center of a rapidly expanding Free Kansas community.
    Then, in the spring of 1857, Isaac Cody fell ill again, and finally died. 43 For William and Julia Cody, his passing was a catastrophe. Both children mention his death only briefly, as if it was too painful a memory to explain. Financially, the loss was devastating. Martha, Isaac’s daughter by his first marriage, had married and moved out. But Isaac’s death left Mary Cody to fend for herself, young Will, four girls, and another son, Charles, who was but an infant.
    The economic trial was complicated by the region’s rising tensions. Although some historians estimate that only a hundred Kansans died as a direct