“I notice some of you younger fellows have taken here lately to calling this town a city, but when I first came here, it wasn't even a town--just an overgrown wood landing, in the river bottom, with the shacks and houses stuck up on piles to keep 'em out of the river mud. There were still Indians a plenty too---Chickasaws and Creeks and some Shawnees---and some white folks who were mighty near as ignorant as the Indians. Why it hadn't been but a few years before--three or four at most, I reckon--since they'd tried to burn the widow woman Simmons as a witch. As boys, some of you must have heard tell of old Marm Simmons. Well, I can remember her and that's better. She lived alone with an old black cat for company, and she was poor and friendless and sort of peculiar in her ways and that started it. And one spring, when the high-water went down, the children got sickly and begun dying off of this here spotted fever. And somebody started the tale that old Marm Simmons was witching 'em to make 'em die--that she'd look at a child and then the child would take down sick and die. It was Salem, Massachusetts, moved up a couple of hundred years, but they believed it--some of them did. And one night a dozen men went to her cabin and dragged her out along with her cat--both of them spitting and yowling and scratching like blood sisters--and they had her flung up onto a burning brush pile and her apron strings had burnt in two when three or four men who were still sane came running up and broke in and kicked the fire apart and saved her. But her old cat went tearing off through the woods like a Jack-mer-lantern with his fur all afire.” He paused a moment to suck deliberately at his pipe, and I sat and thought about old Marm Simmons and her blazing tom cat, and was glad clear down to my wriggling toes that I didn't have to go home alone. In a minute or so Cap'n Jasper was droning on again: “So you can tell by that, that this here city of yours was a pretty tolerable rough place In its infancy, and full of rough people as most all new settlements are. You've got to remember that this was the frontier in those days. But the roughest of them all, as I recollect, rougher even than the keel-boaters and the trappers and even the Indian traders--was Harve Allen. He set himself up to be the bully of this river country.