d yell of derision. Men began crowding
around him, cursing and shaking their fists. One of them, whom I
recognized as Charlie Dunn, an employee of my Uncle Elijah, worked his
way through the crowd, and jumped up on the box directly behind father.
I saw the gleam of a knife. The next instant, without a groan, father
fell forward stabbed in the back. Somehow I got off my pony and ran to
his assistance, catching him as he fell. His weight overbore me but I
eased him as he came to the ground.

Dunn was still standing, knife in hand, seeking a chance for another
thrust.

"Look out, ye'll stab the kid!" somebody yelled. Another man, with a
vestige of decency, restrained the murderer. Riveley came out of the
store. There was a little breaking up of the crowd. Dunn was got away.
What happened to him later I shall tell you in another chapter.

With the help of a friend I got father into a wagon, when the crowd had
gone. I held his head in my lap during the ride home. I believed he was
mortally wounded. He had been stabbed down through the kidneys, leaving
an ugly wound. But he did not die of it--then. Mother nursed him
carefully and had he been spared further persecution, he might have
survived. But this was only the beginning.

The pro-slavers waited a few days, and finding there was no move to
molest them, grew bold. They announced that they were coming to our
house to finish their work.

One night we heard that a party was organized to carry out this
purpose. As quietly as possible mother helped take father out into the
sod corn, which then grew tall and thick close about the cabin. She put
a shawl round him and a sun-bonnet on his head to disguise him as he
was taken out.

There in the sod corn we made him a bed of hay and blankets and there
we kept him for days, carrying food to him by night. These were anxious
days for my mother and her little family. My first real work as a scout
began then, for I had to keep constantly on the watch for raids by the
ruffians, who had now sworn that father must die.

As soon as he was able to walk we decided that he must be got away.
Twenty-five miles distant, at Grasshopper Falls, were a party of his
friends. There he hoped one day to plant a colony. With the help of a
few friends we moved him thither one night, but word of his whereabouts
soon reached his enemies.

I kept constantly on the alert, and, hearing that a party had set out
to murder him at the Falls, I got into the s