Free The Cross Timbers by Edward Everett Dale Page A

flour-and-water paste, and applied it to the newspapers with which they covered the rough walls. Although it was to be a surprise party, I am sure that someone must have given Father a tip as to what had been planned. It is true that he seemed surprised but rather overdid it. Everyone had a good time but, unfortunately for me, these amateur paper hangers pasted some papers upside down or “slaunch-wise” on the walls. This almost forced me to stand on my head or in a slanting position to read them!
    With the coming of warm weather we were kept very busy planting corn and cotton, setting out sweet-potato slips, and making a garden. We even planted a patch of peanuts and a few rows of popcorn. Father and George did most of the plowing, but in thinning corn or chopping cotton and other work done with a hoe George and I worked together. From the time I wasfour or five years old and had been told such stories as “Jack and the Beanstalk,” “Cinderella,” “Little Red Ridinghood,” and “Sinbad the Sailor,” George and I had told one another stories which we had “made up” ourselves. They usually began, “Once you and I were little fairies.”
    Now that we were older and had read a good deal we resumed this practice to relieve the tedium of working all day in the field at such mechanical tasks as thinning corn and chopping or picking cotton. After reading the Swiss Family Robinson our stories ran largely to being shipwrecked on some desert island. Sometimes we were accompanied by two of our playmates, Walter and Oscar Briley. With complete disregard for geography the wreck usually occurred while we were on a voyage across the Atlantic to enter school in England.
    Not all of our made-up tales were based on wrecks while at sea and attacks by pirates or savages. Some of them were “Westerns,” probably due to our reading Dick Onslow among the Indians or The Trader Spy. In these we were usually on our way to California with a wagon train and had been captured by Indians when we left it for an hour or so of hunting. After reading a book about Africa, which the Taylors had been kind enough to lend us, our yarns tended to shift to the Dark Continent. They usually dealt with lion hunts and adventures with Pygmies.
    Our story telling was to sustain an enormous advance from an unexpected source the following year. We made a good crop of corn and cotton in 1890, and the peach trees were loaded with fruit. As a result, we worked hard drying peaches all summer and harvesting the field crops during the autumn months. The wheat crop of the prairie farmers was also good, and Father was able tosell all the blackberries and best peaches at what was then considered a good price.
    In February, 1891, my brother John wrote that he had just married and settled on a claim, where he had built for his bride a large and comfortable sod house. There was little prospect of making a crop on freshly plowed sod, however, and if Father could rent some additional land he and his wife would be glad to come down and make a crop with us. Father accordingly rented a twenty-acre field about three-quarters of a mile southeast of us to be planted in cotton. The terms were for the renter to receive three-fourths and the landowner one-fourth of the money derived from the sale of the crop.
    This twenty-acre field was level, fertile land which had formerly had a house on it occupied by a family named Moore. The house had either burned or been moved but the tract of land was still known as the “Moore farm.” In the corner where the house had stood was a small plot of grass and a big apple tree that bore large, long apples resembling the variety called “sheep’s nose.” Evidently the tree was a seedling, for the fruit was extremely sour and never seemed to ripen.
    Once this field had been rented, Father wrote to John, who, with his wife, Ava, arrived by train late in February. We were all