In the doorway of a log cabin near by stood a young girl two or three years older than I. We gazed at each other shyly. She was bare-headed and bare-footed, her cheeks tanned, and her abundant black hair roughened with the wind, but her eyes were dark and her figure had the grace of untrammeled out door life. To my girl's standard she did not appeal, and I had not then the faintest conception of the romance and tragedy of which she was the heroine. We gazed at each other until father gave the signal for me to drive down on the clumsy raft-like boat behind the covered half-wagon half-carriage that held the other members of our family, which I did in fear and trembling that did not cease until we had swung in and out as the boat strained at the rope to which it was attached, the waters of the "Old Muddy," the like of which I had never seen before, straining and drawing it down with the current, and a fresh spasm of fear was added as we reached the far shore and dropped off the boat with a thud down into the soft bank. We had reached Decatur, our future Nebraska home, adjoining the Indian reservation with its thousand Omahas. For a long time I did not know anything further of the girl of the log cabin by the river side, only that they told us the family were named Keyou and the men were boatmen and fishermen and ran the ferry. This first chapter of my little story opened in the spring of 1863. Six years later my girlhood's romance brought marriage with my home-coming soldier, who in his first days in the territory of Nebraska had passed through many of the romantic events that a life among the Indians would bring, among them clerking in a trading post with one "Billy" Becksted, now the husband of my maiden of the riverside log cabin. And Billy and John always continued the comradeship of the free, happy, prairie hunting life, riding the "buckskin" ponies with which they began life together, although they came together from very different walks of life. And I learned of my husband that "Addie," as we had learned to call her, young as she was when first I saw her, had been the wife of a Frenchman named Jules, after whom the town of Julesburg (Colorado) is named, and his dreadful death at the hands of one Slade was one of the stock stories of the plains well known to every early settler. Billy and Addie after a time drifted away from Decatur down the river and we lost sight of them. We, too, left the home town and became residents of Plattsmouth.