At Galveston, I met Mrs. Poynter—she was our Bancroft correspondent—with several of the grainmen’s wives. Usually very sociable, she acted as if she were looking for a chance to run, and I backed out of a rather embarrassing position. Evidently not knowing of my smallpox siege, Secretary E. J. Smiley gave me a cordial ham, even laughed as if he were remembering the illegal grain contract which he and my local competitor had virtually forced upon me, “for benefit of the Association” — a similar one of like illegality, which had, reputedly, within a few weeks therefrom, got someone a 30-day jail sentence at Salina. Other acquaintances in the grain dealers party acted as if they could get along very well without me—and I troubled them no more. Back home, the people gradually stopped their shying, and in the week I waited for the County Health Officer’s instructions for fumigating the house, I talked matters over with the family. For the peace of mind of our town people, it was decided that everything in the smallpox house should be burned—and my parents and my sister would go to Fresno, California, where my brothers Dave and Frank were in business. My Aunt Nancy, with her husband, Bill Porter, drove in from their Wolfley creek home, and had dinner with the folks the day I was to start the fires. Bill Porter said it would be rank foolishness for us to burn the stuff. I said, “All right, Bill; drive by this afternoon and I’ll load your wagon.” He said, quickly, “Don’t want any of the things — on account of our neighbors.” Several years later, the Porter family all had smallpox—and Bill, the elder, died of it. And Bill, the second — there is a third Bill Porter, and a fourth Bill Porter now — tells me that not for six months thereafter did they have callers. Had I loaded his wagon that day of my fire, the loss of my uncle would have made it regrettable—but I don’t think that I would have allowed him to cart away anything, even had he accepted my offer. Jessie Bryant’s three-months old daughter, Violet, was first in the Porter family to have it, and she was thought to have contracted the disease in a rather peculiar way. Jessie was holding the baby on her lap as she read a letter from her husband, Lon Bryant, who was working in Nebraska, saying he would have to move from the place he was staying, on account of the people in the home having smallpox.