We gazed at each other until father gave the signal for me to drive down on the clumsy raft-like boat behind the covered half-wagon half-carriage that held the other members of our family, which I did in fear and trembling that did not cease until we had swung in and out as the boat strained at the rope to which it was attached, the waters of the "Old Muddy," the like of which I had never seen before, straining and drawing it down with the current, and a fresh spasm of fear was added as we reached the far shore and dropped off the boat with a thud down into the soft bank. We had reached Decatur, our future Nebraska home, adjoining the Indian reservation with its thousand Omahas.
For a long time I did not know anything further of the girl of the log cabin by the river side, only that they told us the family were named Keyou and the men were boatmen and fishermen and ran the ferry. This first chapter of my little story opened in the spring of 1863.
Six years later my girlhood's romance brought marriage with my home-coming soldier, who in his first days in the territory of Nebraska had passed through many of the romantic events that a life among the Indians would bring, among them clerking in a trading post with one "Billy" Becksted, now the husband of my maiden of the riverside log cabin. And Billy and John always continued the comradeship of the free, happy, prairie hunting life, riding the "buckskin" ponies with which they began life together, although they came together from very different walks of life.
And I learned of my husband that "Addie," as we had learned to call her, young as she was when first I saw her, had been the wife of a Frenchman named Jules, after whom the town of Julesburg (Colorado) is named, and his dreadful death at the hands of one Slade was one of the stock stories of the plains well known to every early settler.
Billy and Addie after a time drifted away from Decatur down the river and we lost sight of them.
We, too, left the home town and became residents of Plattsmouth.
One day my husband, returning from a trip in the country said, "I ran across Billy and Addie Becksted today and they were so glad to see me that Addie put her arms round me and kissed me, with tears in her eyes." Later we learned with sorrow that Billy was drinking and then that he had come down to Plattsmouth and tried to find my husband, who was out of town and had gone back home and when almost there had taken a dose of morphine, and they had found him unconscious and dying near their log cabin under the bluffs half a mile above the Bellevue station. And my husband really mourned that he had not been at home, perhaps to have kept good-hearted Billy from his woeful fate. After a time Addie married Elton, a brother of Billy's, and one Sunday I persuaded my husband to go down to them in their cabin under the bluffs.
"I have always wanted to get Addie to tell me her story of her life with Jules," I said.
"I don't believe you can get her to talk about it," said Mac, "she never speaks of it, Elton says."
We went, and they were delighted to see us, killed the fatted chicken and gathered for us some of the wild berries that grew in the bluffs, and then as we sat under the trees with the bluff towering above us, I asked her for the story of her girlhood's days out on the plains, when only a single house that sheltered three or four people was her home, and not another for many miles.