Peering into the well he drawled out, "Hello, Garland. W'at ye doin' down there?"
"Tryin' to lay a curb," replied my father lifting a gloomy face, "and I guess it's too complicated for me."
"Nothin' easier," retorted the old man with a wink at my uncle, "jest putt two a-top o' one and one a-toppo two—and the big eend out,"—and with a broad grin on his red face he went back to his team and drove away.
My father afterwards said, "I saw the whole process in a flash of light. He had given me all the rule I needed. I laid the rest of that wall without a particle of trouble."
Many times after this Barker stopped to offer advice but he never quite equalled the startling success of his rule for masonry.
The events of this harvest, even the process of moving into the new house, are obscured in my mind by the clouds of smoke which rose from calamitous fires all over the west. It was an unprecedentedly dry season so that not merely the prairie, but many weedy cornfields burned. I had a good deal of time to meditate upon this for I was again the plow-boy. Every day I drove away from the rented farm to the new land where I was cross-cutting the breaking, and the thickening haze through which the sun shone with a hellish red glare, produced in me a growing uneasiness which became terror when the news came to us that Chicago was on fire. It seemed to me then that the earth was about to go up in a flaming cloud just as my grandad had so often prophesied.
This general sense of impending disaster was made keenly personal by the destruction of uncle David's stable with all his horses. This building like most of the barns of the region was not only roofed with straw but banked with straw, and it burned so swiftly that David was trapped in a stall while trying to save one of his teams. He saved himself by burrowing like a gigantic mole through the side of the shed, and so, hatless, covered with dust and chaff, emerged as if from a fiery burial after he had been given up for dead.
This incident combined with others so filled my childish mind that I lived in apprehension of similar disaster. I feared the hot wind which roared up from the south, and I never entered our own stable in the middle of the day without a sense of danger. Then came the rains—the blessed rains—and put an end to my fears.
In a week we had forgotten all the "conflagrations" except that in Chicago. There was something grandiose and unforgettable in the tales which told of the madly fleeing crowds in the narrow streets. These accounts pushed back the walls of my universe till its far edge included the ruined metropolis whose rebuilding was of the highest importance to us, for it was not only the source of all our supplies, but the great central market to which we sent our corn and hogs and wheat.
My world was splendidly romantic. It was bounded on the west by The Plains with their Indians and buffalo; on the north by The Great Woods, filled with thieves and counterfeiters; on the south by Osage and Chicago; and on the east by Hesper, Onalaska and Boston. A luminous trail ran from Dry Run Prairie to Neshonoc—all else was "chaos and black night."