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"You must go to the store," she told the barefooted child who nagged her for a slice of bread with sugar on it; that was me between five and six years old. "The lamp is empty and, therefore, hungry—just like you. We must give his wick a big drink or he will sulk and keep us in darkness tonight. You take this can and get some coal oil."

A withered, blackened potato was impaled upon the oil-can spout. Ours would get a fresh potato for his nose once a month, when our account would be squared at the store on payday.

What I wore that day was a gingham shirt and a little pair of jeans-cloth pants that buttoned to it. The empty oil can clanged musically as now and then a flowering weed swished against its emptiness. We lived on the south side of the tracks; the stores, the saloons and other excitements were on the north side of the tracks. Ellis, Kansas, the railroad town where we lived, was in the heart of the short-grass country.

Two utterly different streams of life bisected each other in the vicinity of our small, isolated community; east and west ran the railroad, and its tracks bridged the creek that slanted across the prairie. This creek was a yellow thread of wilderness at the edge of town. If the railroad and its attendant establishments represented the excitements of the tame world far to the east, the stream was sometimes a murmuring reminder of other kinds of excitement. Throughout my early years there were being freshly printed in the soft banks of that stream the tracks of wild animals of the prairie by which we were surrounded—of buffalo and antelope, and of coyotes. Sometimes there were tracks of a creature that wore moccasins, a creature that hated the railroad.