one of my stolen visits home. I went home one
night to get medicine for the boys wounded in the battle of Lone Jack whom
I was nursing in the woods some miles away. As I sat talking with my
mother two of my brothers watched at the windows. There was soon the
dreaded cry, "the militia are surrounding the house," and in the
excitement which followed, "Suse" dashed open the door to find a score of
bayonets in her face. She threw up her hands and pushed aside the guns.
Her frantic screams, when they demanded that she deliver me up to them,
caused a momentary confusion which enabled me to gain her side and
together we made for the gate, where I took for the woods amid a shower of
lead, none of the bullets even so much as skinning me, although from the
house to the gate I was in the full glare of the light.

Two months after this incident the same persecutors again entered our home
in the dead of the night, and, at the point of a pistol, tried to force my
mother to set fire to her own home. She begged to be allowed to wait
until morning, so that she and her children and "Suse" would not be turned
out in the snow, then some two or three feet deep, in the darkness, with
the nearest neighbor many miles away. This they agreed to do on condition
that she put the torch to her house at daybreak. They were there bright
and early to see that she carried out her agreement, so, leaving her
burning walls behind her, she and the four youngest children and "Suse"
began their eight mile trudge through the snow to Harrisonville.

I have always felt that the exposure to which she was subjected on this
cruel journey, too hard even for a man to take, was the direct cause of
her death. From Harrisonville she went to Waverly, where she was hounded
continually. One of the conditions upon which her life was spared was
that she would report at Lexington weekly. It was during one of her
absences there that our enemies went to the house where she had left her
family and demanded that they turn over the $2,200 which had been
overlooked when my father was murdered. She had taken the precaution to
conceal it upon the person of "Suse," and although they actually hung this
faithful servant to a tree in the yard in their determination to force her
to divulge the hiding place of the money, she never even hinted that the
money at that very moment was secreted in her garments. She was left for
dead, and except for the timely arrival of a friend, wh