Posted by Elyse on July 08, 2000 at 21:06:55:

In Reply to: Re: Re: Bud posted by Dutch on July 08, 2000 at 18:38:03:

We were discussing something like this down below under the topic "PART ONE," and as Ray mentioned, Bud gets his 15 minutes of fame in "War Party." He's the main character, and the story's told in first person. It's just a short story, but it is something.

Here's how the story begins. "War Party" (just the one story) might be something good to read along with the bigger book.

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War Party

We buried pa on a sidehill out west of camp, buried him high up so his ghost could look down the trail he'd planned to travel.

We piled the grave high with rocks because of the coyotes, and we dug the grave deep, and some of it I dug myself, and Mr. Sampson helped, and some others.

Folks in the wagon train figured ma would turn back, but they hadn't known ma so long as I had. Once she set her mind to something she wasn't about to quit.

She was a young woman and pretty, but there was strength in her. She was a lone woman with two children, but she was of no mind to turn back. She'd come through the Little Crow massacre in Minnesota and she knew what trouble was. Yet it was like her that she put it up to me.

"Bud," she said, when we were alone, "we can turn back, but we've nobody there who cares about us, and it's of you and Jeanie that I'm thinking. If we go west you will have to be the man of the house, and you'll have to work hard to make up for pa."

"We'll go west," I said. A boy those days took it for granted that he had work to do, and the men couldn't do it all. No boy ever thought of himself as only twelve or thirteen or whatever he was, being anxious to prove himself a man, and take a man's place and responsibilities.

Ryerson and his wife were going back. She was a complaining woman -and he was a man who was always ailing when there was work to be...

27

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