the other unfortunate women
in mind. All of my relatives, however, were saved from death except
Charity Kerr, who was helpless in bed with the fever and she went down
with the wreck and her body, frightfully mangled, was afterwards taken
from the ruins. Mrs. McCorkle jumped from the window of the house and
escaped. This cousin was the daughter of Reuben N. Harris, who was
revenue collector for many years. A Virginian by birth, and a school
teacher for many years in various parts of Missouri, he was well known
throughout the state as an active sympathizer with the South. His home
was friendly to every Confederate soldier and scout in the West.
Information, newspapers, and the like, left there, were certain to be kept
for the right hands.

In September 1863, soldiers ransacked the Harris home, stole everything
they considered valuable, and burned the house. A daughter, Kate, who was
asleep upstairs, was rescued from the flames by her sister. As the raiders
left, one of them shouted:

"Now, old lady, call on your protectors. Why don't you call on Cole
Younger now?"

Among the women who lost their lives was Miss Josephine Anderson, whose
cruel death simply blighted her brother's life and so filled him with
determination to revenge that he afterward became the most desperate of
desperate men. "Quantrell sometimes spares, but Anderson never," became a
tradition of the Kansas line. Before he died in a skirmish with Northern
troops in 1864, he had tied fifty-three knots in a silken cord which he
carried in his buckskin pouch.

Every knot represented a human life.

Anderson was then ripe for the raid on Lawrence.

All this was cruelty, indeed, and enough to harden and embitter the
softest of hearts, but it was mild compared with the continuous suffering
and torture imposed upon my mother during the years from 1862 to 1870.

After the murder of my father she was so annoyed at her home in
Harrisonville that she sought peace at her country residence eight and a
half miles north of town. But she failed to find the comfort she sought,
for annoyances continued in a more aggravated form. She had with her only
the youngest children and was obliged to rely wholly for protection upon
"Suse," the only remaining servant left to the family, who proved her
worth many times over and in every emergency was loyalty and devotion
itself. Nothing could have proved her faithfulness more effectually than
an incident connected with