far above her elbows revealed arms used to rough hard work, and her
hands were red from the wash-tub. As she came into the street, she saw
the little boy sitting on the horse in front of the squaw. Walking to
them quickly, and lifting her arms, as she neared the squaw's pony,
the white woman said:--

"Why, Johnnie Barclay, where have you been?"

The boy climbed from the pony, and the two women smiled at each other,
but exchanged no words. And as his feet touched the ground, he became
conscious of the rag in his hand, of his bleeding heel, of his cramped
legs being "asleep"--all in one instant, and went limping and whining
toward home with his mother, while the Indians traded in the store and
tried to steal from the other houses, and in a score of peaceful ways
diverted the town's attention from the departing figures down the
path.

That was the first adventure that impressed itself upon the memory of
John Barclay. All his life he remembered the covered wagon in which
the Barclays crossed the Mississippi; but it is only a curious memory
of seeing the posts of the bed, lying flat beside him in the wagon,
and of fingering the palm leaves cut in the wood. He was four years
old then, and as a man he remembered only as a tale that is told the
fight at Westport Landing, where his father was killed for preaching
an abolition sermon from the wagon tongue. The man remembered nothing
of the long ride that the child and the mother took with the father's
body to Lawrence, where they buried it in a free-state cemetery. But
he always remembered something of their westward ride, after the
funeral of his father. The boy carried a child's memory of the
prairie--probably his first sight of the prairie, with the vacant