This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1921 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER XXX A Brighter Outlook--Love Creeps In--Marriage--Home Ties SOME may have thought me a woman hater for refusing many invitations to social affairs, but I was not. I had become acquainted with a few ladies but had seen only one for whom I thought I cared. That was Miss Elizabeth Burke, who since her father's accidental death, had relinquished many social duties among the officers' wives and daughters at Fort McPherson. She thought it her duty to assist her widowed mother in home duties and in the care of seven little brothers. She was a graduate of Brownell Hall in Omaha. She was born in Illinois and came with her parents and family to eastern Nebraska near Tecumseh, where the Jayhawkers stole nearly all of their stock. They finally settled on the California and Oregon Trail between Fort McPherson and Platte City. Here her father erected a road ranch, which as I have related in a previous chapter, was destroyed by a band of Sioux Indians, who took all their live stock except one team, which they managed to save with their lives by jumping into the wagon with what few things they could grab and running the team at break-neck speed to Fort McPherson. The Indians took all their bedding, provisions and clothing except what they had on, and burned the ranch. The commander of the Fort and the officers' wives furnished the family with a house to live in until they could build another. At another time, prior to destroying the ranch, while the mother and children were alone, two young Indian chiefs rode up and asked that the mother give them her little daughter. While the mother was driving the best bargain she could with the Indians, simply to kill time, expecting relief every moment, the Indians finally offered thirty ponies for the...