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Just to prove that we were in danger, the children were not allowed to play or make any noise. Every man who showed himself carried some kind of weapon; most had rifles, but a few younger men made savage gestures with axes and whiffle-trees. I remember one naked saber carried almost like a doll baby in the folded arms of an old man who leaned against the wall close to me. There was stable manure on his wrinkled black boots. That occasion was certainly one of our Indian scares. I think this was in 1880; it might have been in '81. However, the Indians never got me, in keeping with my mother's promise that they never would; she would reassure me whenever I hesitated to invade, alone, the awful blackness of the bedroom. Sometimes she tucked me in, not always.

Frontier hardships accounted for great changes in the lovely Missouri-born girl with peach-bloom complexion, tender mouth and youthful form whom my father married in 1871. She was a shapely bride when she left the comfortable German culture of her father's Missouri farmhouse. By the time I became conscious of my dependence on her, my mother's large dark eyes were set in a big powerful woman of the frontier. I was the third of four children she bore in Kansas railroad towns in the 70's before the prairies had been tamed. She ate buffalo meat to nourish her sons. Sometimes now I seem to see her eyes looking at me, miraculously, out of the face of one of my grandchildren. Sometimes, in a mirror, I catch a fleeting trace of her in my own eyes. At such times I hope afresh that they were right, those vanished Ellis neighbors who, when drinking coffee in our kitchen, would cast a nod at me and say, "Walt takes after his ma."