CAREFUL PLANNING When still very young, Donna Cole—in our home—had eaten an apple and was nibbling the core. My wife said to her niece, “Oh, oh—child, you must not eat that core.” Donna smiled, and taking another bite, said, “Ain’t goin’ be no core.” At another time, the wife and I were visiting in the Locknane home in Topeka—and Myrtle had taken Donna along with us, at the suggestion of Coral, who said they would try to get her pictured in the Sunday Daily Capital. Well, they did that easily. Donna was deservedly given a top position—a standout picture—among other youngsters. Myrtle and Coral were very proud of this—and Donna “rode high” during our stay. The Locknanes had a fine home, neatly, though not lavishly furnished—and a “hired girl”; a Cadillac car, and a colored chauffeur. Along with all her gayety, Donna did a little sound thinking. She whispered. “How can they beford all this, Aunt Myrtle?” RED RIFLEMEN Published in Wetmore Spectator, Feb. 7, 1936—and in Seneca Courier-Tribune’s Historical Edition. By John T. Bristow It was early autumn far back in the pioneer days. The wood which this story opens was one of the largest stands big trees in Northeast Kansas. It was bordered on the high slopes with sumac, hazelbrush, and tall grass. The trees had not yet fully shed their leaves. An Indian, blanketed, with a long rifle swung across withers of his buckskin pony, detached himself from the band of rovers and rode straight to the place where my father and I stood, under a great oak tree, frozen to the spot. A foreboding stillness pervaded the oak grove. I was terribly frightened. Somehow the idea had formed in my young head that the Indians would not kill children; that they carried them off alive, along with the scalps of adult whites. About that time frequent accounts of Indian depredations had filtered in from the west — gruesome, hellish, blood-curdling stories they were. A tribe of Indians lived then, as now, on a reservation only eight miles away. The fact that those Kickapoos were considered civilized and peaceable did not register in this all boy’s mind—nor even in some adult minds. My father, William Bristow, was reared in the heavily wooded sections of Kentucky and Tennessee, where, in his day, the gun and the “hound-dog” were man’s dearest possessions. I knew that he was a crack rifle-shot; that he could, without doubt, hold his own with the advancing redman—but not against that band of savages lurking in the background. Wrapped in flaming blood-red blankets, those Indians, silent and sinister, with the long barrels of their rifles sticking up like telegraph poles, looked as if they might be making ready to go on the warpath.