A Son of the Middle Border | Page 2

His arms rose. "Yes, Belle! Here I am!" he
answered.
Nevertheless though he took my mother in his arms, I could not relate
him to the father I had heard so much about. To me he was only a
strange man with big eyes and care-worn face. I did not recognize in
him anything I had ever known, but my sister, who was two years older
than I, went to his bosom of her own motion. She knew him, whilst I
submitted to his caresses rather for the reason that my mother urged me
forward than because of any affection I felt for him. Frank, however,
would not even permit a kiss. The gaunt and grizzled stranger terrified

him.
"Come here, my little man," my father said. "My little man!" Across
the space of half-a-century I can still hear the sad reproach in his voice.
"Won't you come and see your poor old father when he comes home
from the war?"
"My little man! How significant that phrase seems to me now! The war
had in very truth come between this patriot and his sons. I had forgotten
him the baby had never known him.
Frank crept beneath the rail fence and stood there, well out of reach,
like a cautious kitten warily surveying an alien dog. At last the soldier
stooped and drawing from his knapsack a big red apple, held it toward
the staring babe, confidently calling, "Now, I guess he'll come to his
poor old pap home from the war."
The mother apologized. "He doesn't know you, Dick. How could he?
He was only nine months old when you went away. He'll go to you by
and by."
The babe crept slowly toward the shining lure. My father caught him
despite his kicking, and hugged him close. "Now I've got you," he
exulted.
Then we all went into the little front room and the soldier laid off his
heavy army shoes. My mother brought a pillow to put under his head,
and so at last he stretched out on the floor the better to rest his tired,
aching bones, and there I joined him.
"Oh, Belle!" he said, in tones of utter content. "This is what I've
dreamed about a million times."
Frank and I grew each moment more friendly and soon began to tumble
over him while mother hastened to cook something for him to eat. He
asked for "hot biscuits and honey and plenty of coffee."
That was a mystic hour and yet how little I can recover of it! The

afternoon glides into evening while the soldier talks, and at last we all
go out to the barn to watch mother milk the cow. I hear him ask about
the crops, the neighbors. The sunlight passes. Mother leads the way
back to the house. My father follows carrying little Frank in his arms.
He is a "strange man" no longer. Each moment his voice sinks deeper
into my remembrance. He is my father that I feel ringing through the
dim halls of my consciousness. Harriet clings to his hand in perfect
knowledge and confidence. We eat our bread and milk, the trundle-bed
is pulled out, we children clamber in, and I go to sleep to the music of
his resonant voice recounting the story of the battles he had seen, and
the marches he had made.
The emergence of an individual consciousness from the void is, after
all, the most amazing fact of human life and I should like to spend
much of this first chapter in groping about in the luminous shadow of
my infant world because, deeply considered, childish impressions are
the fundamentals upon which an author's fictional out-put is based; but
to linger might weary my reader at the out set, although I count myself
most fortunate in the fact that my boyhood was spent in the midst of a
charming landscape and during a certain heroic era of western
settlement.
The men and women of that far time loom large in my thinking for they
possessed not only the spirit of adven turers but the courage of warriors.
Aside from the nat ural distortion of a boy's imagination I am quite sure
that the pioneers of 1860 still retained something broad and fine in their
action, something a boy might honorably imitate.
The earliest dim scene in my memory is that of a soft warm evening. I
am cradled in the lap of my sister Harriet who is sitting on the doorstep
beneath a low roof. It is mid-summer and at our feet lies a mat of
dark-green grass from which a frog is croaking. The stars are out, and
above the high hills to the east a mysterious glow is glorifying the sky.
The cry of the small animal at last