So old and weather-beaten was his buckskin shirt that ragged filaments, here and there, showed where proud fringes once had been.

He was a man of flying tatters.

I remember, at his waist, dangled dirty tufts of hair that, far back in the journey, after a shower of rain, were wont to show glossy black.

These I knew were Indian scalps, and the sight of them always thrilled me.
"It will do him good," father commended, more to himself than to me.
"I've been looking for days for him to blow up." "I wish he'd go back and take a couple of scalps," I volunteered.
My father regarded me quizzically.
"Don't like the Mormons, eh, son ?" I shook my head and felt myself swelling with the inarticulate hate that possessed me.
"When I grow up," I said, after a minute, "I'm goin' gunning for them." "You, Jesse!" came my mother's voice from inside the wagon.

"Shut your mouth instanter." And to my father: "You ought to be ashamed letting the boy talk on like that." Two days' journey brought us to Mountain Meadows, and here, well beyond the last settlement, for the first time we did not form the wagon-circle.
The wagons were roughly in a circle, but there were many gaps, and the wheels were not chained.