en me and the fort many people were passing to and fro, some of
whom were to walk with me down the long trail of years. Evermore that
April day stands out as the beginning of things for me. Dim are the days
behind it, a jumble of happy childish hours, each keen enough as the
things of childhood go; but from that one day to the present hour the
unforgotten deeds of busy years run clearly in my memory as I lift my
pen to write somewhat of their dramatic record.

And that this may not seem all a backward gaze, let me face about and
look forward from the beginning--a stretch of canvas, lurid sometimes,
sometimes in glorious tinting, sometimes intensely dark, with rifts of
lightning cleaving through its blackness. But nowhere dull, nowhere
without design in every brush-stroke.

I had gone out on the bluff to watch for the big fish that Bill Banney,
a young Kentuckian over at the fort, had told me were to be seen only on
those April days when the Missouri was running north instead of south.
And that when little boys kept very still, the fish would come out of
the water and play leap-frog on the sand-bars.

If I failed to see them this morning, I meant to run back to the
parade-ground and play leap-frog myself with my cousin Beverly, who
wanted proof for most of Bill Banney's stories. Beverly was growing wise
and lanky for his age. I was still chubby, and in most things innocent,
and inclined to believe all that I heard, or I should not have been
taken in by that fish story.

We were orphans with no recollection of any other home than the log
house near the fort. We had been fathered and mothered by our uncle,
Esmond Clarenden, owner of the little store across the square from our
house, and a larger establishment down at Independence on the Missouri
River.

Always a wonderful man to me was that Esmond Clarenden, product of one
of the large old New England colleges. He found time to guard our young
years with the same diplomatic system by which he controlled all of his
business affairs. He laid his plans carefully and never swerved from
carrying them through afterward; he insisted on order in everything; he
rendered value for value in his contracts; he chose his employees
carefully, and trusted them fully; he had a keen sense of humor, a
genial spirit of good-will, and he loved little children. Fitted as he
was by culture and genius to have entered into the greater opportunities
of the Eastern States, he gave himself to th