Boone's Lick

"Plenty, that's what I have in mind," Uncle Seth said. He cast his eyes down, so as not to have to face Ma, and started for the door.

"Seth!" Ma said--Ma could speak stern when she needed to, but I had never heard her speak quite this stern.

Uncle Seth stopped, but he didn't turn around.

"If you walk out that door I'm through with you," Ma said. "I wash my hands of you. I swear I'll take these younguns and go find Dick myself, and if we all get scalped, so be it."

Uncle Seth stood where he was for a minute, stiff and a

"Mary, are you teasing?" he asked, finally.

"What do you think, Rosie?" Ma asked. "Am I teasing?"

"She's not teasing, Seth," Rosie said.

Then she laughed a fu

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"Mary Margaret's not much of a teaser," she said.

"Oh, she can tease with the best of them, when the mood's on her," Uncle Seth said.

"Leave Joe Tate alone!" Ma said. "We don't need worse trouble than we've got."

"I've never been much of a hand for taking orders from females," Uncle Seth said.

There was a silence that wasn't comfortable-- such a tense silence that even Neva shut up, for once.

Then Uncle Seth turned from the door as if he had never intended to go out it. He made as if he felt light as a feather, all of a sudden--though none of us believed that. Still, we were all glad when the silence ended.

"There's Rosie McGee," he said, in a softer tone. "What do we do with her, when we start this big trip you're determined to go on?"

"Why, take her with us, of course," Ma said. "Did you suppose I pla

That surprised us all--and pleased me, I must say. I wouldn't be having to leave Aunt Rosie so quickly.

That seemed to ease Uncle Seth's mind.

"All right, Mary Margaret," he said. "But Joe Tate don't know how lucky he is."

"Go on--get the doctor, Shay," Ma said, and I went.

I ran all the way down the hill but then had to look in three saloons before I found Doc, who was a little tipsy. When I mentioned that it was Rosie who was hurt he got right up and came with me, but he had such trouble hitching his nag to the buggy that I finally did it for him.

"Let's hurry, Rosie's a prize," he said, offering me the reins. Twice more, on the way, he mentioned that Aunt Rosie was a prize. He doctored her cuts pretty well but shook his head over the matter of the ribs.

"They'll just have to mend in their own time, Rosie," he said.

The next night, while making his midnight rounds, Sheriff Joe Tate got trampled by a runaway horse. The horse came bearing down on him in a dark alley and knocked him winding--one hip was broken, plus his collarbone and several ribs; besides that, he was unconscious for several hours and could make no report on the horse or the rider, if there had been a rider.

I don't know what Ma or Aunt Rosie thought about the matter, but G.T. and I suspected Uncle Seth, who had gone to the saloon as usual, that night.

When G.T. asked him about it, Uncle Seth just looked bored.

"He should have carried a lantern," Uncle Seth said. "Any fool who wanders the streets at midnight without a lantern ought to expect to get 50

trampled by a horse, I don't care if he is a lawman. It's only common sense to carry a light."

He never changed his story, either. To this day I don't know if Uncle Seth was on the horse that trampled Sheriff Joe Tate.

15 THE morning before we left I went down to the lots alone about sunrise, to feed the mules--I always liked being out early, if I was awake. The world just seemed so fresh, in the first hour of the day. The river, usually, would be white with mist--then the big red sun would swell up over the world's edge and the light would touch the church spire and the few roofs of Boone's Lick. All the roosters in town would be crowing, and our three roosters too. The mules seemed glad to see me, though I imagine they would have been glad to see anyone who fed them. In the wintertime the frost would sparkle on the ground and on the trees.

Sometimes, when I got back to the cabin, Ma would allow me a cup of coffee, once she was satisfied that I had finished my chores.

G.T. was a late sleeper, and Neva too. Sometimes I'd get to sit alone with Ma for a minute, before the day got started.

Unless the weather was wet Uncle Seth slept outside, in a little camp he had made not far from the cabin. He had spent so much time on the open prairies, with the stars to look at, that he could no longer tolerate the confinements of a roof.

"I'd like to spend as many nights as possible looking straight up at heaven," he said.

"Looking is all you'll get to do," Ma said. "You're too bad a si

I didn't understand that, since about the most sinful thing Uncle Seth did was get drunk--since he was sleeping outdoors anyway, his getting drunk didn't bother anybody. Ma wasn't churchly, anyway--maybe her calling him a si

This morning, though, I got a kind of lonely feeling as I was walking down to the lots. The lonely feeling stayed with me all through my chores, although it was a lovely morning. I saw several skeins of Canada geese flying north, above the river, in the direction we would soon be going ourselves, the whole bunch of us, from baby Marcy to Granpa Crackenthorpe, piled in our wagon, on top of the sacks. Uncle Seth had arranged for a flatboat to take us all the way to Omaha, which was way upriver, I guess.

"After that, it'll be chancy travel," Uncle Seth informed us all. "I may not be able to find a boat willing to haul four mules and a bunch of crazy people into the Sioux country."

The geese soon circled around and landed on the river--it was the wrong time of year for them to be going very far north. But thinking about the north just fit in with my lonely feeling. I had never lived anyplace but our cabin. I knew every tree and bush for a mile or two around, knew the way to Boone's Lick, knew most of the folks who worked in the stores. I knew the river, too--in the summer I could even figure out where the big catfish fed.

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Now we were leaving the only place G.T. and Neva and I had ever lived.

The fact of it almost made me queasy, for a while, though part of me was excited at the thought of traveling up the river and over the plains, into the country where the wild Indians lived, where there were elk and grizzly bears and lots of buffalo. It would be a big adventure-- maybe Ma would find Pa and satisfy her feelings about his behavior--that was a part of it I just didn't understand, since there was no sign that Pa was behaving any differently than he had ever done.

Still, I was leaving my home--the big adventure was still just thoughts in my head, but our home was our place. The river, the town, the mules, the stables, the cabin, Uncle Seth's little camp under the stars, the wolf's den G.T. and I found, the geese overhead, the ducks that paddled around in big clusters along the shallows of the river, even the crawdads that G.T. trapped or the turtles that sank down, missing their heads, after Uncle Seth shot them--the white frost in the fall and the sun swelling up from beyond the edge of the world: all that, we were leaving, and a sadness got mixed in with the thought of the big adventure we would have. All around Boone's Lick there were cabins that people had just left and never came back to-many had emptied out because of the war. Once the people left, the woods and the weeds, the snakes and the spiders just seemed to take the cabins back. Pretty soon a few logs would roll down, and the roof would cave in. Within a year or two even a sturdy cabin would begin to look like a place nobody was ever going to come back to, or live in again.