Feeling, as undoubtedly he did, that public knowledge of those conditions, for which he was in no way responsible, might be a bar to all future aspirations, he was not loath to let the matter rest, so far as he and his immediate family were concerned, under a cloak of mystery. If such were in truth the case, I think few would find cause to blame him. When we view the whole subject in this double light, of a duty owed to his family and of the possibility that conflicting stories had come to him at an earlier day, any embroidery or confusion which appears in many of his statements of a personal nature can be better understood. Such an explanation would be quite convincing if payments had actually come to him from his own mother's estate. We will only add that Mrs. Audubon, who seemed to have shared her husband's intimate thoughts, apparently believed to the last in his high birth. When her younger son, John Woodhouse Audubon, lay at the point of death, in February, 1862, she was summoned to his bedside, but reached it too late to see him alive; upon entering the room Mrs. Audubon is said to have exclaimed: "Oh, my son, my son! to think that you should have died without having known the secret of your father's early life!" When asked by members of her family to what she then referred, she turned their questions aside, saying only that such remarks were common in moments of intense grief and excitement. CHAPTER XVIII EARLY "EPISODES" OF WESTERN LIFE Methods of composition—"A Wild Horse"—Henderson to Philadelphia in 1811—Records of Audubon and Nolte, fellow travelers, compared—The great earthquakes—The hurricane—The outlaw—Characterization of Daniel Boone—Desperate plight on the prairie—Regulator law in action—Frontier necessities—The ax married to the grindstone.