I shall now dwell a bit on a personal incident in connection with this beautiful girl. It was away back in 1884. I don’t think the girl was on my mind that day when I went to St. Joe. But, in St. Joe, I ran onto Bill (Hickorynut) Bradley who was on his way to Savannah, and he asked me to go along with him. One Oliver Bateman was to be hanged for the murder of two little girls who had caught him in an embarrassing act. The railroad was offering excursion rates, and the sleepy old Missouri town was decked out in celebration colors, with refreshment stands all along the lane from the jail to the gallows in an amphitheater in the nearby woods—everybody on the make. Unlike Hickorynut, the hanging did not interest me, but the thought of seeing Mamie did. I called at the Blakeslee home on the outskirts of Savannah — it was a farm traded by G. N. Paige for the Blakeslee farm near Wetmore—on the pretense of wanting to see Mamie’s brother Edwin, who had been my schoolmate in Wetmore. He was not at home. I remained a reasonable time with Mamie, aiming to work up a little courage, and maybe ask her to go places with me—but lost my nerve. Two hours later I met Mamie, with another girl, on a downtown street near the St. Charles hotel. Mamie said there was to be skating at the rink that night, and would I like to go? I certainly would. So now, after all, we would be going places together. I called at the Blakeslee home for the two girls, and the ‘skating was going fine. Then, of a sudden, Miss West told me that Mamie was in a jam. Her steady, a traveling salesman, had unexpectedly dropped in on her — and, for some reason, likely well founded, Mamie had not intended to let him know about her going out with another fellow. I told Miss West that we could fix that all right, if she herself did not have a steady sticking around somewhere. Miss West laughed, and assured me she did not have a steady. “If agreeable,” I said, “you shall now be my company, and, to all appearances, Mamie shall be the hanger-on, free to desert me for her steady.” Miss West laughed again, though she looked as if she were a little concerned about my reference to Mamie as the new hanger-on. Well, it was a slip. It was a term often applied to the extra girls in our Silver Stocking circle. While visiting in Wetmore before this, Mamie had gone to a dance in Netawaka with a local man who proved to be not to her liking, and she had quit him cold at the dance hall door. Though it would hardly cause a ripple now, it was then considered about the worst thing that could happen to a young fellow’s social standing. I do not wish to identify him—yet I must give him a name to be used in Mamie’s pay-off to me for liberating her at the Savannah rink.