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

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Now we have left the Indian standing there by the side of his pony for a long time. But the Indian doesn’t mind. Not our Kickapoo, anyway. And, as a stickler for the truth, for accuracy of detail, I will admit that my deductions, my fears, did not coincide with the facts as later developed; that, in the language of the street and as my father said of me at the time out there in the wood—literally, I was “all wet.”

That Indian was not an emissary of destruction, rather, he was, after the manner of the wise one of his peoples, a maker of good medicine. My father’s great haste to get away from the Wolfley timber had been halted by a clump of black oak trees. There were two holes in a large limb of the great oak under which the Indian found us standing. The Indian looked up into the tree. “Long time go Indian’s tomahawk make holes,” he said. “Maybe catchum coon,” He shifted his beady black eyes to another part of the tree, and exclaimed, “Seeum squirrel!”

My father had hot noticed the holes in the limb, nor the squirrel which the Indian saw flattened out on a branch high up in the tree. To my father, that tree presented far more interesting possibilities. Before interrupted, his thoughts had, more or less, shifted from the man who had treated him so shabbily and had carried him back to the sunny Southland, to the evergreen hills of his boyhood home. There he had successfully operated a tannery—successfully, until the Civil War put him out of business.