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

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My father then went as a scout with detachments the Union army. He served under Major E. N. Morrill, who was later Governor of Kansas, and a resident of Hiawatha for a number of years. The guerilla band was broken up. But hostilities did not stop altogether with the surrender of Lee. And bushwhacking” became a pastime with the embittered few.

My mother, with her sister, Nan Porter, went back to Tennessee some years later for a visit. And about the first thing they did was to attend church—a new church in the old neighborhood. My resident aunt — Aunt Harriet Lovell—had said to her sisters, “You-all will meet lots of friends after church.”

The two Kansas women, with their handsome and deeply religious young escort, marched into church a trifle late, and my mother was smiling and nodding to close seated old acquaintances, and properly attuned, all were living in the happy anticipation of a real love feast when church would be out. Then suddenly, abruptly, as if she had received some deadly stroke, the smile faded from her face. She looked at her sister, in crestfallen dejection, and whispered, “Let’s get out of here, Nan, just as soon as the services are over.” That pained look did not belong on my my mother’s sweet face. Some highly disturbing thing had happened.