My father was over at Granada. A neighbor was sent after him — and for whiskey, the then universal remedy for snakebite. Finding no whiskey at Granada, the courier, on horseback, came on to Wetmore, which town was just starting then, and failing again, pushed on the Seneca, stopping on the way long enough to change horses. The round trip approximately sixty miles and eight hours had elapsed when the rider returned with whiskey. He brought a generous supply. In the meantime my mother had dumped a package of baking soda into a basin of warm water. She bade me put my foot in it — and two little fountains of green came oozing up through the soda-whitened water. And she gave me tea made from yard plantain—why, I wouldn’t know. Also my Uncle Nick had arrived by the time the rider returned with the whisky. I didn’t like the taste of the nasty stuff and, boy-like, set up a howl about having to drink it. And my Uncle, desirous of helping in every possible way, said, soothingly, “Johnny, take a little, and Uncle take a little.” We both passed out about the same time. I don’t mean to infer by this that my Uncle was a drunkard. He was not. And, mind you, he grew up in a country at a time when you could buy good old Bourbon at any crossroads grocery store as you would buy a jug of vinegar—and almost as cheaply. My Uncle Nick was a soldier in the Mexican war of 1848. And he was a soldier in the Civil war—an adventurer, and in a way a “soldier of fortune.” He prospected for gold, and hunted mountain lions—with the long rifle—in the Rockies, just as he and my father had hunted panthers in Tennessee. This ferocious beast, if you don’t know, is the big cat with four names. In the South and East—extinct in most sections now—he is the dreaded panther. In the Rockies he is the mountain lion. Farther west, in Arizona and the Sierras, he is the cougar. Somewhere he is called the puma. And everywhere he is “the killer.” Two strangers stopped at our home just after I had passed out—that is, after I had become limp, unable to stand, unable to talk, from the effects of the whisky. But I could understand as well as ever what was said. One of the men suggested that if they could find the snake and cut it open and bind the parts to my foot that it would draw the poison out. I knew that Jim Barnes had killed that snake, and the stranger’s suggestion gave me a mental spasm. I could not speak out and tell’ them that I had had about all of that snake that I could stand. The earthquake of 1868 — or thereabout — greatly frightened my mother. It was her first experience with quakes. And, woman-like, with a perpetual grudge against the erratic Kansas weather changes, she laid this shakeup in climate, which, it seemed, she never could become accustomed to. And when the house trembled and the dishes cupboard began to rattle, she rushed out into the yard, where my father and the children were, and said, “If we must all go to the devil I would just as soon walk as ride.”