As I rode up, he said, “Whither, friend?” I said “Hither.”  Then he asked, “Air you spying around for one of them dinged game wardens arter that deer I killed yisteddy?” I told him I had never even seen a game warden and that I didn’t know he had killed a deer.  “Wall,” he said, “air you spying around arter that gold mine I diskivered over on the west side of Baldy?” But after a while I convinced him that I was no more nor less than a foolish woman lost in the snow.  Then he said, “Light, stranger, and look at your saddle.”  So I “lit” and looked, and then I asked him what part of the South he was from.  He answered, “Yell County, by gum!  The best place in the United States, or in the world, either.”  That was my introduction to Zebulon Pike Parker.

Only two “Johnny Rebs” could have enjoyed each other’s company as Zebulon Pike and myself did.  He was so small and so old, but so cheerful and so sprightly, and a real Southerner!  He had a big, open fireplace with backlogs and andirons.  How I enjoyed it all!  How we feasted on some of the deer killed “yisteddy,” and real corn-pone baked in a skillet down on the hearth.  He was so full of happy recollections and had a few that were not so happy!  He is, in some way, a kinsman of Pike of Pike’s Peak fame, and he came west “jist arter the wah” on some expedition and “jist stayed.”  He told me about his home life back in Yell County, and I feel that I know all the “young uns.”

There was George Henry, his only brother; and there were Phoebe and “Mothie,” whose real name is Martha; and poor little Mary Ann, whose death was described so feelingly that no one could keep back the tears.  Lastly there was little Mandy, the baby and his favorite, but who, I am afraid, was a selfish little beast since she had to have her prunellas when all the rest of the “young uns” had to wear shoes that old Uncle Buck made out of rawhide.  But then “her eyes were blue as morning-glories and her hair was jist like corn-silk, so yaller and fluffy.”  Bless his simple, honest heart!  His own eyes are blue and kind, and his poor, thin little shoulders are so round that they almost meet in front.  How he loved to talk of his boyhood days!  I can almost see his father and George Henry as they marched away to the “wah” together, and the poor little mother’s despair as she waited day after day for some word, that never came.

Poor little Mary Ann was drowned in the bayou, where she was trying to get water-lilies.  She had wanted a white dress all her life and so, when she was dead, they took down the white cross-bar curtains and Mother made the little shroud by the light of a tallow dip.  But, being made by hand, it took all the next day, too, so that they buried her by moonlight down back of the orchard under the big elm where the children had always had their swing.  And they lined and covered her grave with big, fragrant water-lilies.  As they lowered the poor little home-made coffin into the grave the mockingbirds began to sing and they sang all that dewy, moonlight night.  Then little Mandy’s wedding to Judge Carter’s son Jim was described.  She wore a “cream-colored poplin with a red rose throwed up in it,” and the lace that was on Grandma’s wedding dress.  There were bowers of sweet Southern roses and honeysuckle and wistaria.  Don’t you know she was a dainty bride?