Читать книгу Memory's Storehouse Unlocked, True Stories. Pioneer Days In Wetmore and Northeast Kansas онлайн

117 страница из 136

You must believe me now when I say to you that the never-to-be-dispensed-with three-time act, peculiarly and persistently the boy’s very own, was delayed somewhat.

“You bet!”

ssss1

My mother cautioned my sister Nannie when a very little girl as she was going out to play, to look good for snakes. After she had returned, Nannie told her mother that she had looked everywhere and did not see “ary snake.” Asked what would she have done had she found one, Nannie said, “I would of bringed it to you.”

ssss1

Published in Wetmore Spectator,

January 10, 1936.

By John T. Bristow

Now, I trust “Buddy” will be satisfied with the foregoing narration of events at the old swimming hole. He really should be. He is in it—figuring inversely, up to his neck.

Since the actual distance from the swimming hole to the tanyard was but twenty steps—and I mean literally steps—there should be no difficulty in making the switch over. Those twenty steps did, however, at times, present physical hazards. They were dirt steps carved out on a rather steeply inclined bank, up which the tanner’s sons carried water in buckets from pond to tanvat. Barefooted, with pants rolled up to our knees, we would dig in with our toes when going up with the filled buckets, always spilling a little water on the way, until those steps would become a veritable otter’s slide. As a boy’s bare heels, in the old days, were poorly fashioned for digging in, the water carriers would then have to use the longer rope-protected path provided for making the descent with the empty buckets. One slippery slide on one’s backside was a hint that it was time to make the switch.