Only this which agitated me so terribly was different from them--no matter what happened, it would be pure and blameless--for it would be us! 4 I suppose it may have been midnight or after, when I heard a far-off splashing sound in the creek far above us.

At first I thought of buffalo--though there were none in Iowa so far as I knew at that time--and only a few deer or bear; but finally, as the sound, which was clearly that of much wading, drew even with my camp, I began to hear the voices of men--low voices, as if even in that wilderness the speakers were afraid of being overheard.
"I'm always lookin'," said one, "to find some of these damned movers campin' in here when we come in with a raise." "If I find any," said another, "they will be nepoed, damned quick." This, I knew--I had heard plenty of it--was the lingo of thieves and what the story-writers call bandits--though we never knew until years afterward that we had in Iowa a distinct class which we should have called bandits, but knew it not.

They stole horses, dealt in counterfeit money, and had scattered all over the West from Ohio to the limits of civilization a great number of "stations" as they called them where any man "of the right stripe" might hide either himself or his unlawful or stolen goods.

"A raise" was stolen property.

"A sight" was a prospect for a robbery, and to commit it was, to "raise the sight," or if it was a burglary or a highway robbery, the man robbed was "raked down." A man killed was "nepoed"-- a word which many new settlers in Wisconsin got from the Indians[9].
[9] This bit of frontier argot was rather common in the West in the 'fifties.