The man remembered nothing of the long ride that the child and the mother took with the father's body to Lawrence, where they buried it in a free-state cemetery.

But he always remembered something of their westward ride, after the funeral of his father.

The boy carried a child's memory of the prairie--probably his first sight of the prairie, with the vacant horizon circling around and around him, and the monotonous rattle of the wagon on the level prairie road, for hours keeping the same rhythm and fitting the same tune.

Then there was a mottled memory of the woods--woods with sunshine in them, and of a prairie flooded with sunshine on which he played, now picking flowers, now playing house under the limestone ledges, now, after a rain, following little rivers down rocky draws, and finding sunfish and silversides in the deeper pools.

But always his memory was of the sunshine, and the open sky, or the deep wide woods all unexplored, save by himself.
The great road that widened to make the prairie street, and wormed over the hill into the sunset, always seemed dusty to the boy, and although in after years he followed that road, over the hills and far away, when it was rutty and full of clods, as a child he recalled it only as a great bed of dust, wherein he and other boys played, now battling with handfuls of dust, and now running races on some level stretch of it, and now standing beside the road while a passing movers' wagon delayed their play.