It seemed to me that father and mother spent a great deal of unnecessary time in discussing whether they would change their home from Mississippi to Texas. In fact I was beginning to despair of ever becoming a sheep raiser in the Peters colony, when father suddenly declared that he would go to see the country for himself, and if it was half as good as people said it was, he would lay out his claim of six hundred and forty acres and come back to sell the plantation and move the live stock. I begged hard to be allowed to go with him, but my request was not to be granted, for although we owned two slaves, John and Zeba, neither of them could be trusted to look after the cattle, the sheep, and the mules. [Illustration] Therefore it was decided that I should be the head of the family while father was away, and so proud was I over being given such a position of trust, that I failed to grieve, as I otherwise might have done, at not being allowed to go with him. He set out with a pair of our best mules hitched to a light wagon, intending to drive to Little Rock in Arkansas, and from there to Fort Towson, after which he would make his way across what is now Grayson County, spying out the land. OUR PLANTATION IN MISSISSIPPI It was not a very long journey, although he would probably travel two or three hundred miles before turning back. We lived in Bolivar County, in Mississippi, near Indian Point, where, as you know, the Arkansas River joins with the Mississippi. Our plantation was not well suited to cotton raising, and perhaps for this reason father was all the more willing to listen to those people who had so much to say about Texas, that one could almost believe it to be a veritable Promised Land. Father had set out to raise cattle, although our plantation was no better adapted for such a purpose, perhaps, than it was for cotton raising. We had about seventy head of oxen, and twenty mules, together with the seventy-two sheep which made up my own and my father's flocks. I did not realize that the profits from sheep raising in Texas might not be the same as in Mississippi. I counted the days while father was away, thinking with each sunrise that I would see him again before nightfall. After he had been gone two or three weeks I was foolish enough to wander up the road now and then, hoping to meet him on his return, and be the first to hear the good news. FATHER COMES HOME He had been absent nearly six weeks, and my heart had almost grown sick with waiting, when late one night, after I had gone to bed, I heard a commotion downstairs, followed by shouts for John or Zeba, and then I recognized my father's voice. There is little need for me to say that I tumbled, rather than ran, down the stairs, so great was my eagerness to learn the result of his visit into Texas, and even before he had had time to take me in his arms I insisted on knowing whether he had staked out his claim.