Page:Recollections of My Boyhood.djvu/18

Rh and as we traveled along, making a wagon road through the high grass (it was now early summer), we saw at a distance of probably a mile, a lone horseman galloping across the prairie. They said he was a Pawnee on a pony and that he had small bells in his ears. I thought I could hear them ring.

In this part of the country we crossed the Big and Little Blue Rivers; the Little was small and the Big not a large river. I had heard of the Blue Rivers many days before we reached them, and expected to find the water really blue, and my recollection now is that the water was of a blue color. Which we crossed first, the Little or Big, I don't remember. We arrived at the Big Blue about sundown, and forded the stream. It was not deep, as I remember it. We went into camp on the west shore not far from the river. The weather was fair, and early in the evening I went to bed in a tent with an old man of the name of Alexander McClellan, whom I will now introduce to you. He came to our house in Missouri when I was quite an infant, too young to remember when he came. But I was told that when he came I was almost dead with a fever. The old man was familiar with the herbs and roots used by the Indians in sickness, and at once took charge of me and soon restored me to health. He was then between sixty and seventy years of age; had been a soldier, had been crossed in love and never married. The first tune I learned was of a song he sometimes sang when he had me on his knee. It was called "The Rosetree." This is the first verse:

Well, I went to bed with the old man, "Uncle Mack," we called him. I had always slept with him before my earliest recollections, when he was with us, as he almost always was. How long I had slept I do not know, but some time during the night, I suddenly awoke. The rain was pouring down into my face, my eyes were blinded with the glare of lightning, the wind was roaring like a furnace, and the crash of thunder was terrible and almost continuous. I could see nothing hut what looked like sheets of fire, and hear nothing but the wind, the