With the help of a friend I got father into a wagon, when the crowd had gone.  I held his head in my lap during the ride home.  I believed he was mortally wounded.  He had been stabbed down through the kidneys, leaving an ugly wound.  But he did not die of it—­then.  Mother nursed him carefully and had he been spared further persecution, he might have survived.  But this was only the beginning.

The pro-slavers waited a few days, and finding there was no move to molest them, grew bold.  They announced that they were coming to our house to finish their work.

One night we heard that a party was organized to carry out this purpose.  As quietly as possible mother helped take father out into the sod corn, which then grew tall and thick close about the cabin.  She put a shawl round him and a sun-bonnet on his head to disguise him as he was taken out.

There in the sod corn we made him a bed of hay and blankets and there we kept him for days, carrying food to him by night.  These were anxious days for my mother and her little family.  My first real work as a scout began then, for I had to keep constantly on the watch for raids by the ruffians, who had now sworn that father must die.

As soon as he was able to walk we decided that he must be got away.  Twenty-five miles distant, at Grasshopper Falls, were a party of his friends.  There he hoped one day to plant a colony.  With the help of a few friends we moved him thither one night, but word of his whereabouts soon reached his enemies.

I kept constantly on the alert, and, hearing that a party had set out to murder him at the Falls, I got into the saddle and sped out to warn him.

At a ford on the way I ran into the gang, who had stopped to water their horses.

As I galloped past, one of them yelled:  “There’s Cody’s kid now on his way to warn his father.  Stop, you, and tell us where your old man is.”

A pistol shot, to terrify me into obedience, accompanied the command.  I may have been terrified, but it was not into obedience.  I got out of there like a shot, and though they rode hard on my trail my pony was too fast for them.  My warning was in time.

We got father as quickly as we could to Lawrence, which was an abolition stronghold, and where he was safe for the time being.  He gradually got back a part of his strength, enough of it at any rate to enable him to take part in the repulse of a raid of Missourians who came over to burn Lawrence and lynch the Abolitionists.  They were driven back across the Missouri River by the Lawrence men, who trapped them into an ambush and so frightened them that for the present they rode on their raids no more.

When father returned to Salt Creek Valley the persecutions began again.  The gangsters drove off all our stock and killed all our pigs and even the chickens.  One night Judge Sharpe, a disreputable old alcoholic who had been elected a justice of the peace, came to the house and demanded a meal.  Mother, trembling for the safety of her husband, who lay sick upstairs, hastened to get it for him.  As the old scoundrel sat waiting he caught sight of me.