e mother dolls, and tie their babies to the
bedposts, and would storm into their pasteboard-box houses at night,
after we had fixed them all in order, and put the families to standing
on their heads. He was a dreadful tease. It was in this play-room that
the germ of his Wild West took life. He formed us into a regular little
company--Turk and the baby, too--and would start us in marching order
for the woods. He made us stick horses and wooden tomahawks, spears, and
horsehair strings, so that we could be cowboys, Indians, bullwhackers,
and cavalrymen. All the scenes of his first freighting trip were
acted out in the woods of Salt Creek Valley. We had stages, robbers,
"hold-ups," and most ferocious Indian battles.

Will was always the "principal scalper," however, and we had few of our
feathers left after he was on the warpath. We were so little we couldn't
reach his feathers. He always wore two long shiny ones, which had been
the special pride of our black rooster, and when he threw a piece of an
old blanket gotten from the Leavenworth barracks around his shoulders,
we considered him a very fine general indeed.

All of us were obedient to the letter on "show days," and scarcely ever
said "Now, stop," or "I'll tell mother on you!" But during one of these
exciting performances Will came to a short stop.

"I believe I'll run a show when I get to be a man," said he.

"That fortune lady said you'd got to be President of the United States,"
said Eliza.

"How could ze presiman won a show?" asked May.

"How could that old fortune-teller know what I'm going to be?" Will
would answer, disdainfully. "I rather guess I can have a show, in spite
of all the fortune-tellers in the country. I'll tell you right now,
girls, I don't propose to be President, but I do mean to have a show!"

Such temerity in disputing one's destiny was appalling; and though our
ideas of destiny were rather vague, we could grasp one dreadful fact:
Will had refused to be President of the United States! So we ran crying
to mother, and burying our faces in her lap, sobbed out: "Oh, mother!
Will says he ain't going to be President. Don't he have to be?"

Still, in spite of Will's fine scorn of fortune-tellers, the prophecy
concerning his future must have been sometimes in his mind. This was
shown in an episode that the writer is in duty bound, as a veracious
chronicler, to set down.

Our neighbor, Mr. Hathaway, had a son, Eugene, of about Will's age, and