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

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About that time frequent accounts of Indian depredations had filtered in from the west — gruesome, hellish, blood-curdling stories they were.

A tribe of Indians lived then, as now, on a reservation only eight miles away. The fact that those Kickapoos were considered civilized and peaceable did not register in this all boy’s mind—nor even in some adult minds.

My father, William Bristow, was reared in the heavily wooded sections of Kentucky and Tennessee, where, in his day, the gun and the “hound-dog” were man’s dearest possessions. I knew that he was a crack rifle-shot; that he could, without doubt, hold his own with the advancing redman—but not against that band of savages lurking in the background. Wrapped in flaming blood-red blankets, those Indians, silent and sinister, with the long barrels of their rifles sticking up like telegraph poles, looked as if they might be making ready to go on the warpath.

Closer and closer came the Indian. And why the devil didn’t my father shoot? Was he going to let that redskin take his scalp? In a fit of panic I dodged behind the big oak tree; and then just as suddenly I popped out again and backed up my father by clutching his trousers legs from behind. It is surprising what amount of terror can flit through a small boy’s mind in so short a time.