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

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Quickly, my mother revised her plans. She could consistently have waited for the preacher to come down from the pulpit and address her as “sister” with more significance than ordinarily accrues to the church going woman. But no, thank you—not my mother. Not in that spot. She had recognized in that coarse-voiced preacher the leader of that guerilla mob. He was my non-consanguineous uncle — father’s own brother-in-law. And the accommodating young man who had been so kind as to “carry” them over in his shiny new buggy could not understand what made them in such a hurry to get away.

That meeting house was set in a small clearing in the dense woods on top of a high ridge. It was called “Sentinary.” The worshippers came in from the lower settlements from every direction. It was their custom to tarry after services for a visit — and especially^ if there were strangers in the congregation they must be wholeheartedly welcomed, Southern style, as I was to learn.

Some years later it was my pleasure to attend that same church. And Walter Cox “carried” me over in his buggy—the same rig in which my mother and my aunt had ridden with him—though the buggy was now, of course, somewhat the worse for wear, as the roads down there are rocky. Fully half that four-mile trip was in the bed of a creek which flowed, clear as crystal, over a rock bottom, between high hills. And when not in the middle of the creek that road crossed and recrossed the stream many times.