Page:Recollections of My Boyhood.djvu/34

Rh the bodies were yet rolled up in blankets and robes. Some had been torn into fragments by carrion crows and other scavenger birds, and skulls and other bony parts of the body lay bleaching in the sun; a few had fallen to the ground. After this ghastly find we did not tarry long, for the shades of evening were now creeping along the ground, and the Bannock, Shoshone, Crow, or Blackfeet spooks may have been already congregating to hold their nightly "wake" at this Golgotha. We fled to camp with the jackrabbit speed of barefoot backwoods children, to report our strange discovery and exhibit our beads. We were greatly disappointed that our report did not create a sensation in camp and decidedly grieved that the "old folks" did not admire our beads, but reproved us for having them, and made us throw them away. I don't remember another time on the plains when I thought the parents as unreasonable as on this occasion about the beads. I felt so hurt about it that I did not sleep well that night and several times almost made up my mind to run away and go back home. I knew the place where I had thrown the beads, and had not given up hope of being allowed to get them again. For in a case when mother had all the facts before her and fairly tried the case on its merits, I regarded her judgment as very nearly infallible. So I concluded that in the morning I would very easily convince her that she had made a mistake by showing her that as the Indians who owned the beads were dead, they would have no use for them any more, and that so far as the ants were concerned, there were plenty left for them. But as the morning came, probably some new adventure diverted my thoughts from the things of the day before, for I have no further recollection of the matter of the beads.

Our family had a very strong wagon we called the meat wagon. It was heavily laden with provisions, the bulk being flour and bacon. It was drawn by a team of two yoke of oxen, driven at the time I now speak of by a man by the name of George Beale, a dark-skinned, black-eyed young man, the son of a slave owner in Missouri. Mother told me not to ride in this wagon, but one day while we were traveling through this part of the country, I was walking, as I frequently did, and climbed into this wagon and up beside the driver on the top of a skin covered trunk, which was placed against the foregate