mbridge, christened from the little
Indiana town of Cambridge City) was a good-souled, easy-going man,
handicapped for life by a shortness of vision no spectacle lens could
overcome. It might have been disfiguring to any other man, but Cam's
clear eye at close range, and his comical squint and tilt of the head to
study out what lay farther away, were good-natured and unique. He was in
Kansas for the fun of it, while his wife, Dollie, kept tavern from pure
love of cooking more good things to eat than opportunity afforded in a
home. She was a Martha whose kitchen was "dukedom large enough."
Whatever motive, fine or coarse, whatever love of spoils or love of
liberty, brought other men hither, Cam had come to see the joke--and he
saw it. While as to Dollie, "Lord knows," she used to say, "there's
plenty of good cooks in old Wayne County, Indiany; but if they can get
anything to eat out here they need somebody to cook it for 'em, and cook
it right."

Doing chores about the tavern for his board and keep was the little
orphan boy, Thomas O'Meara, whose story I did not know for many years.
We called him O'mie. That was all. Marjie and O'mie and Mary Gentry, Cam
and Dollie's only child, were my first Kansas playmates. Together we
waded barefoot in the shallow ripples of the Neosho, and little by
little we began to explore that wide, sweet prairie land to the west.
There was just one tree standing up against the horizon; far away to us
it seemed, a huge cottonwood, that kept sentinel guard over the plains
from the highest level of the divide.

Whately built a home a block or more beyond that of his young clerk,
Amos Judson. It was farther up the slope than any other house in
Springvale except my father's. That was on the very crest of the west
bluff, overlooking the Neosho Valley. It fronted the east, and across
the wide street before it the bluff broke precipitously four hundred
feet to the level floor of the valley below. Sometimes the shelving
rocks furnished a footing where one could clamber down half way and walk
along the narrow ledge. Here were cunning hiding-places, deep crevices,
and vine-covered heaps of jagged stone outcrop invisible from the height
above or the valley below. It was a bit of rugged, untamable cliff
rarely found in the plains country; and it broke so suddenly from the
level promontory sloping down to the south and away to the west, that a
stranger sitting by our east windows would never have guessed th