Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/72

 flowers; his lips like lilies dropping sweet-smelling myrrh.

His hands are as gold rings set with the beryl.

His legs are as pillars of marble set upon sockets of fine gold; his countenance is as Lebanon, excellent as the cedars.

Miss Bossert, perhaps through a modesty which appears to have deserted her later in life, saw fit to delete one sentence of the passage. She writes that she saw him for the first time when she was standing in front of Petersen's General Store, where she had been sent to buy eggs by her afterward sainted mother.

"While I stood watching him with all the curiosity which we in Valencia felt for each newcomer, he lifted single-handed out of the rut into which it had sunk a whole laden ox-cart which two oxen had been unable to move."

Of that first appearance in Valencia there is no further record, but from Miss Bossert's description it is easy to see that he was no usual frontier youth. It may have been that he had in Valencia one of those adventures which later marked his progress back and forth across the face of the Middle West, but Miss Bossert, being at that time only seventeen, would scarcely have heard of it. Her own adventure came much later.

From Valencia he went westward to sell what remained of his store of commerce and then for nine years he appears to have been lost, like Saint John the Baptist, in the wilderness. They were years spent perhaps in trading and trapping. Throughout