The cold, calculating teacher saw the fire that flashed from her heart to her cheek, and he stepped to her desk. She saw him coming and she spat upon the slate and smote the sentiment at one swift sweep. Then the teacher stormed. He said the very fact that she rubbed it out was equal to a confession of guilt, and he “reckoned he’d haf to flog her.” A school-mate of Creede’s told this story to me, and he said all the big boys held their breath when the teacher went for his whip, and young Creede sat pale and impatient. “He’ll never dare to strike that pretty creature,” they thought; “she is so sweet, so gentle, and so good.”
The trembling maiden was not so sure about that as she stepped to the whipping corner, shaking like an aspen. “Swish” went the switch, the pretty shoulders shrugged, and the young gallant saw two tears in his sweetheart’s eyes, and in a flash he stood between her and the teacher and said: “Strike me, you Ingin, and I’ll strike you.” “So’ll I, so’ll I,” said a dozen voices, and the teacher laid down his hand.
CHAPTER II.
HIS FATHER’S DEATH—DRIFTING WESTWARD—ADVENTURES ON THE MISSOURI.
DEATH came to the Creede family when young Creede was but eight years old. A few years later the youth found a step-father in the family, and they were never very good friends. The boy’s home-life was not what he thought it should be, and he bade his mother good-by and started forth to face the world. In that thinly settled country, the young man found it very difficult to secure work of any kind, and more than once he was forced to fancy himself the “merry monarch of the hay-mow,” or a shepherd guarding his father’s flocks, as he lay down to sleep in the cornfield and covered with the stars. The men, for the most part, he said, were gruff and harsh, but the women everywhere were his friends, and many a season of fasting was shortened by reason of a gentle woman’s sympathy and kindness of heart. The brave boy battled with life’s storms alone; and when but eighteen years old he set his face to the West.
Omaha was the one bright star in the western horizon toward which the eyes of restless humanity were turned, and on the breast of the tide of immigration our young man reached the uncouth capital of Nebraska. Perhaps he had not read these unkind remarks by the poet Saxe:
“Hast ever been to Omaha, where rolls the dark Missouri down,
And forty horses scarce can draw an empty wagon through the town?
If not, then list to what I say: You’ll find it just as I have found it,
And if it lie upon your way, take my advice, and you’ll go round it.”