e. 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. The movers' wagon was never absent
from the boy's picture of that time and place. Either the
canvas-covered wagon was coming from the ford of Sycamore Creek, or
disappearing over the hill beyond the town, or was passing in front of
the boys as they stopped their play. Being a boy, he could not know,
nor would he care if he did know, that he was seeing one of God's
miracles--the migration of a people, blind but instinctive as that of
birds or buffalo, from old pastures into new ones. All over the plains
in those days, on a hundred roads like that which ran through Sycamore
Ridge, men and women were moving from east to west, and, as often has
happened since the beginning of time, when men have migrated, a great
ethical principle was stirring in them. The pioneers do not go to the
wilderness always in lust of land, but sometimes they go to satisfy
their souls. The spirit of God moves in the hearts of men as it moves
on the face of the waters.

Something of this moving spirit w