Also in our hunting party, riding a small pony, was a little Indian boy whom they called—shall I say—Nish-a-shin. This might not be correct. When we got lined out, Eagle Eye rode first, then my father. I was third in line and Nish-a-shin was fourth. Three Indians followed in single-file formation with long rifles carried crosswise in front of them. The Indians all rode bareback, even Nish-a-shin. My father had secured two saddles for us. In the gray of that early Sunday morning after the storm abated and the white prairie lay still, Eagle Eye headed west toward the John Wolfley timber. We traveled in silence, never out of a walk. From the head of Spring creek we went across to Elk creek and Soldier creek. At that time the whole southwest country was practically virgin prairie. The Dixon 40-acres where Maurice Savage now lives, and the Bill Rudy land where Joe Pfrang’s home now is, were the only fenced tracts in that section of the country. Bill Rudy went to California. Years later when my father went out there they renewed their friendship. And one time when I was visiting in Fresno my father took me to see Mr. Rudy. He owned an 80-acre ranch and seemed to be well pleased with the change he had made. He had much to say about the intense cold weather he had endured on his homestead here. The winters Mr. Rudy experienced in Kansas were very much like the one we are now having, only in the old days real blizzards were the rule. On October seventeenth, 1898, Jack Hayden lost nineteen head of cattle, in a pasture north of the Rudy — or Pfrang — place, in an unusually early and unusually severe blizzard. The cattle drifted with the blinding snow-storm over a bank and piled up in a ditch. I was in Chicago at the time. It rained in Chicago, but coming home on the Burlington, the first snow appeared near the north line of Missouri, got heavier toward Atchison, and from Atchison west on the Central Branch, it was really heavy. That snow, and succeeding falls, kept the ground here covered in a sea of white until spring. Those Indians called me “paleface papoose.” I was, of course, beyond the normal age of a papoose, but your old Indian was no fool. They probably reasoned that whiteman would not understand Indian’s word for youth. Eagle Eye had started calling me “paleface papoose” when my father was saddling the pony. Maybe it was because I had to have a saddle. Little Nish-a-shin you know rode bareback. He did not make much talk. It was in the wilds of Soldier creek, in the big timber, where we made camp for dinner. One of the Indians carried a stew-kettle in a grain-sack and I carried a flour-sack having in it several loaves of bread baked by my mother, and maybe four or five links of butcher-shop bologna. Also two tin-cups, two tin-plates, with knives and forks for two. My mother did not think to put in spoons, but then of course she could not know the kind of mess we were in for.