On the way out from Atchison, as we were nearing home, we ran into one of those fierce prairie fires that so often menaced life and property of the early settlers. I was very young then and cannot say positively that what I am about to relate here is from actual memory, although I have always believed that I retained a mental picture of that prairie fire. Details are now a bit hazy—and, you know, with the very young there is always a borderland not any too well defined between what you may have actually seen and what you may have heard others recount. Anyway, there was a prairie fire. And its sinister red flames—a long snake-like line of crackling, blazing hell — overhung with an ominous pall of thick black smoke, sent a spasm of fear surging through my uncle and my parents. That prairie fire was on one of the big creek bottoms — probably on the old Overland Trail — somewhere between Granada and Wetmore, only there was no Wetmore then. We had just forded a stream and were well out in a big bottom where the slough grass was as tall as the oxen, when the fire was sighted coming over the hills towards us, and fanned by a brisk wind it was traveling at terrific speed. My uncle, who was driving, ran up along side his oxen and yelled, “Whoa-haw-Buck! Jerry!” The oxen seemed to sense danger and the wagon was turned around in no time. Just then a man on horseback came running up. Without stopping to say a word the man jumped off his horse and touched a lighted match to the tall dead grass in front of the outfit. An effort was made by the man to beat out the fire on the windward side. The man then excitedly commanded my uncle to drive across the thin line of back-fire into the newly burned space. It looked like the rider had come out of that blazing inferno especially to warn us. And as the wagon moved away he yelled loudly so as to be heard above the roar of the encroaching flames from behind, “For God’s sake, man, follow it up as fast as you can.” That young man was Fred Liebig. Boyhood impressions stick like the bark on a tree, while later events are submerged in the whirlpool of life and are forgotten. One of the outstanding incidents of my young life took place upon this Wolfley creek farm. I remember it as distinctly as if it occurred only yesterday. It was my first—and last—alcoholic debauch. I have already told you that rattlesnakes infested that place way back in the distant past. One of them—a fat, seven-button specimen—took a whack at me one summer day, its fangs loaded with deadly green fluid sinking deep the top of my right foot. It was August — dogdays — and of course I was barefoot. The children of pioneer settlers didn ’ t wear shoes, except in cold weather, even when their fathers were excellent shoemakers, a distinction my father enjoyed at that time.