.

Night began to fall. The woods became alive with night creatures, and
the most harmless made the most noise. The owls began to hoot, and
soon we heard the wildcat, whose cry--a screech like that of a lost and
panic-stricken child--is one of the most appalling sounds of the forest.
Later the wolves added their howls to the uproar, but though darkness
came and we children whimpered around her, our mother still sat in her
strange lethargy.

At last my brother brought the horses close to the cabin and built fires
to protect them and us. He was only twenty, but he showed himself a man
during those early pioneer days. While he was picketing the horses and
building his protecting fires my mother came to herself, but her face
when she raised it was worse than her silence had been. She seemed to
have died and to have returned to us from the grave, and I am sure she
felt that she had done so. From that moment she took up again the burden
of her life, a burden she did not lay down until she passed away; but
her face never lost the deep lines those first hours of her pioneer life
had cut upon it.

That night we slept on boughs spread on the earth inside the cabin
walls, and we put blankets before the holes which represented our doors
and windows, and kept our watch-fires burning. Soon the other children
fell asleep, but there was no sleep for me. I was only twelve years old,
but my mind was full of fancies. Behind our blankets, swaying in the
night wind, I thought I saw the heads and pushing shoulders of animals
and heard their padded footfalls. Later years brought familiarity with
wild things, and with worse things than they. But to-night that which I
most feared was within, not outside of, the cabin. In some way which I
did not understand the one sure refuge in our new world had been taken
from us. I hardly knew the silent woman who lay near me, tossing from
side to side and staring into the darkness; I felt that we had lost our
mother.

II. IN THE WILDERNESS

Like most men, my dear father should never have married. Though his
nature was one of the sweetest I have ever known, and though he would
at any call give his time to or risk his life for others, in practical
matters he remained to the end of his days as irresponsible as a child.
If his mind turned to practical details at all, it was solely in their
bearing toward great developments of the future. To him an acorn was not
an acorn, but a forest of young oaks.