Page:J Allan Dunn--The Girl of Ghost Mountain.djvu/111

Rh here and started to raise cattle. Then there came the slavery question. Arizona went pro-slavery. Grand-daddy couldn't stand that. He got in trouble, many of his friends deserted him. He studied the wild things, trapped some of them and sold their skins at Pioche. He went into mining. I have still got an agreement where he grubstaked an 'old-timer.' But nothing came of that.

"The Civil War commenced. I think only echoes of it came here for a while. Grandfather could not believe the whole country at one another's throats. Texas annexed it for the Confederacy. He was shut up here, in hiding, proscribed. And in May, in 'sixty-two, a company of Union soldiers came from California and wiped the Texans out.

"Grandfather went back East—to fight for the North. His father was already in it. Grand-daddy joined his regiment. He started as a private and he came out a captain. His father died in his arms, both together, at the last, at Chattanooga. After the war he went back to Massachusetts and married. But the war had not changed him. He would have gone West again but for my grandmother. She could not bear to leave New England. So they lived in a house he built for her, on Jefferson Mountain, near the New York line, in a little place called Hannibal.

"Poor Hannibal. It is a deserted village now. There is a church without a congregation, a post-office without mail, old houses, old people. Even part of its name has been taken from it. They call it Hannal.