Between me and the fort many people were passing to and fro, some of whom were to walk with me down the long trail of years.  Evermore that April day stands out as the beginning of things for me.  Dim are the days behind it, a jumble of happy childish hours, each keen enough as the things of childhood go; but from that one day to the present hour the unforgotten deeds of busy years run clearly in my memory as I lift my pen to write somewhat of their dramatic record.

And that this may not seem all a backward gaze, let me face about and look forward from the beginning—­a stretch of canvas, lurid sometimes, sometimes in glorious tinting, sometimes intensely dark, with rifts of lightning cleaving through its blackness.  But nowhere dull, nowhere without design in every brush-stroke.

I had gone out on the bluff to watch for the big fish that Bill Banney, a young Kentuckian over at the fort, had told me were to be seen only on those April days when the Missouri was running north instead of south.  And that when little boys kept very still, the fish would come out of the water and play leap-frog on the sand-bars.

If I failed to see them this morning, I meant to run back to the parade-ground and play leap-frog myself with my cousin Beverly, who wanted proof for most of Bill Banney’s stories.  Beverly was growing wise and lanky for his age.  I was still chubby, and in most things innocent, and inclined to believe all that I heard, or I should not have been taken in by that fish story.

We were orphans with no recollection of any other home than the log house near the fort.  We had been fathered and mothered by our uncle, Esmond Clarenden, owner of the little store across the square from our house, and a larger establishment down at Independence on the Missouri River.

Always a wonderful man to me was that Esmond Clarenden, product of one of the large old New England colleges.  He found time to guard our young years with the same diplomatic system by which he controlled all of his business affairs.  He laid his plans carefully and never swerved from carrying them through afterward; he insisted on order in everything; he rendered value for value in his contracts; he chose his employees carefully, and trusted them fully; he had a keen sense of humor, a genial spirit of good-will, and he loved little children.  Fitted as he was by culture and genius to have entered into the greater opportunities of the Eastern States, he gave himself to the real up-building of the West, and in the larger comfort and prosperity and peace of the Kansas prairies of to-day his soul goes marching on.