I had Dr. Graham send for Dr. Charley Howe, of Atchison, known as “The Smallpox Doctor,” on account of his having stamped out an epidemic at Lenora with his vinegar treatment, or rather his vinegar preventive. Dr. Howe first had a talk with Dr. Graham, and decided I did not have it. He came to see me without putting on his rubber suit. On first entering the room, however, he said, “You don’t need to tell me anything, you’ve got it, I can smell it—but I thought you were so scared of catching it, that you would never get it.” A few weeks before this I had met Dr. Howe at the depot in Wetmore, while on his way to Centralia to see a man whom the local doctor believed might be coming down with smallpox. I had known Charley Howe for a long time — had worked with him on his brother Ed’s Daily Globe in Atchison, and worked for Charley on his Greenleaf newspaper before he was a doctor. When he stepped off the train to tell me about his findings, I hung back a little from the start, but when he said the fellow was broken out, I backed still farther away from him before he had got around to saying it was not smallpox. Dr. Howe laughed about this, and said, “Oh, you’ll never get it.” The doctor asked me if I had a shotgun? I told him Dad had one in the kitchen. He said, “You better have it brought in here. If the people try to force you away to a pest house, stand them off with it. To move you now would mean almost sure death.” Dr. Howe told my sister Nannie — she had been attending me up to this time, and thought she was in for it too—that she could continue waiting on me, without risk, if she would ring off my bed with chairs”, come into the room as little as possible, not touch dishes or anything else handled by me, without rubber gloves—and take the vinegar preventive, she would be safe. He said the danger was not so much with the first fever stage, as later. The doctor said I should eat no solids; nothing but soft food for eight days— “ and then,” he laughed, “you’ll not care to eat solids or anything else, for awhile.” That’s when the smallpox patient erupts internally. We settled on cream of wheat, and my sister, not getting the short term well fixed in mind, kept me on that one diet for forty-two days—long after I was well enough to get out. The County Health Officer was afraid to come down from Seneca to release me. He took plenty of time, and then without ever seeing me, issued an order for my release, with a “guess so” attachment. My sister Nannie, at seventeen, was rather plump — not bulky fat—but after the vinegar treatment she came out as slim as a race horse, and has been trim ever since. An awful lot of cider vinegar —it had to be cider vinegar — was consumed in Wetmore that winter. I believe the vinegar produced an acid blood.