and the howling joy of the audience, with his brown locks curled
and plastered, a ruffled shirt, new round-abouts, silk stockings
and patent leather shoes.

That sort of small town social sniping seems to have persisted.
But my mother, who at the age of fourteen was running a rather
large motherless household, rebelled after about ten years of it,
married Samuel who had been reading law and went away
with him to Pontiac where, having passed the bar, he tried to
practice.

Pontiac did not prove lucrative. It has genealogical impor-
tance only because it was here that my father used the double
expedient of dropping the T out of his spelling of his surname
and inserting a perfectly meaningless L between that and his
Christian name to rid himself of the repeated annoyance of
having his mail and practice confused with that of another
barrister, colored, and rejoicing in exactly the same address-
"Samuel Johnston, Esq., Attorney at Law, Pontiac, Illinois."

In view of the nature of that practice, I have always won-
dered what tenor of great affairs had been so sorely turned
awry as to warrant this drastic and confusing change. I have
a son, a brother, four cousins and two nephews, named John-
ston and an equally imposing array of agnation named Johnson.
Perhaps it is some humor of the blood and goes back to the
MacAlan-MacAloney affair for precedent.

A practice of presumed value was said to be vacant in Fort
Scott, Kansas, which in 1881 and for years thereafter was on
the edge of one of the toughest areas in the country -- the old
Indian Territory. There my father took his young wife and
there in the following year ( 1882) I was born.

Fort Scott, in spite of lawlessness across the border, didn't
afford much practice either. But homesteads were opening up
in Western Kansas and, with his savings so far gone that he
had to walk, leading two horses, one bearing a pack and the
other my mother holding me in her arms, my father trekked
more than half-way across Kansas to "take up a claim" at
Greenburg. He was a tall, powerful man "handy with his
hands" though he wasn't by training a farmer. But everybody
in those days knew how at least to live off the soil -- where and
how to dig wells, to plow, sow, and reap; to grow, slaughter,
skin, and cure hogs, sheep, and cattle; to preserve meat and
vegetables; to make all garments if not always to spin and

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