Page:Recollections of My Boyhood.djvu/13

Rh had now overcome her resolution, and a smile was seen to start at the corners of her mouth, a harbinger of mercy our eyes were not slow to detect. She finally assisted us in getting into our clothes, and then warned us that the NEXT time we would be punished to the full extent of the law.

My mother bribed me with wild plums to go to school. I rode to school on the teacher's shoulders, sitting astride of his neck. I was wearing my first trousers with suspenders; it was play time at school, and the teacher happened to be a fiddler as well as a pedagogue. I never had seen or heard a fiddle before. While he was playing I ventured to approach very near the instrument, thinking I would be able to account for the wonderful and strange voice issuing from the flat box with the crooked neck; but I could not, and trembling with fear said, "Where does the noise come from?" Some one answered, "The devil makes the noise." Frightened almost into fits, I fled from the house, and running down the hillside probably thirty yards, took refuge in a small cave where was a spring. Some of the children came after me and by assuring me that the devil was gone, persuaded me to return to the house.

The school house was a rough log cabin, and had a fire place and flue built of rocks, clay, and sticks. The children used to pick clay out of the logs and eat it. When I came out of the cave, I looked up, and on the top of the little hill, about thirty feet above the cave, I saw a man standing. He was not a white man nor a negro; as I see him now in memory, he was dressed in buckspin and carried a tomahawk in his belt. They said he was an Osage Indian. Before we started to Oregon I saw a few other Indians, said to be Osages. They looked like the first one I had seen. They were hunting horses.

It seems to me now that for a long time before we started to Oregon, the journey was talked of. Of course I did not know anything about Oregon. Oregon was, in my mind, a country a long way off, and I understood that to get there we would have to travel through a country swarming with wild Indians who would try to kill us with tomahawks and scalp us. Some girl cousins, older than I, would take a coffee cup after drinking the coffee, and turn the mouth down, and after it had set a short time, look into it for pictures of future scenes.