and as they came to it she
said:--

"Boy--which way to town?"

He pointed the way and she turned into it, and the band followed. They
crossed the ford, climbed the steep red clay bank of the creek, and
filed up the hill into the unpainted group of cabins and shanties
cluttered around a well that men, in 1857, knew as Sycamore Ridge. The
Indians filled the dusty area between the two rows of gray houses on
either side of the street, and the town flocked from its ten front
doors before half the train had arrived. The last door of them all to
open was in a slab house, nearly half a mile from the street. A
washing fluttered on the clothes-line, and the woman who came out of
the door carried a round-bottomed hickory-bark basket, such as might
hold clothes-pins. Seeing the invasion, she hurried across the
prairie, toward the town. She was a tall thin woman, not yet thirty,
brown and tanned, with a strong masculine face, and as she came nearer
one could see that she had a square firm jaw, and great kind gray eyes
that lighted her countenance from a serene soul. Her sleeves rolled
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 tongu