AMOS DECKER. 



SKITTERING FOR PIKE LEGERDEMAIN MY ONLY BUF- 

 FALO HUNT. 



AMOS was a raw-boned six-footer, about fifty years 

 old when I met him, bronzed with exposure, 

 and tough as a pine knot. He had drifted 

 ahead of civilization for over a quarter of a century, clear- 

 ing timber in Michigan, breaking prairie in Illinois, tak- 

 ing up claims and selling out when the neighborhood 

 became too thickly settled ; one of those restless men that 

 were always found on the best quarter-section within a 

 township awaiting a customer for his betterments. Un- 

 like his class, he was a man of fair education, whose mem- 

 ory retained much of what had evidently been an exten- 

 sive course of reading in his youth; but his associations 

 had sadly impaired any grammatical rules he might once 

 have known. 



Amos may or may not have been a bachelor. He 

 lived alone in a well-built log house on a bank of the 

 Neosho, near where Burlington now stands; and it was 

 <not good form in Kansas in those days to be curious 

 ( about the past of such men as you chanced to meet. 

 [What little I knew of his early life I gathered from 

 stories that he related in the intimacy of camp life. War- 

 ren and I had been down the Verdigris River as far as 

 Independence, and then struck off northeast to the Neo- 

 sho and up that stream. We were looking for land for 

 several Eastern men who wanted to settle together if 

 certain conditions of wood, water, etc., could be found 

 on Government land, for they would not buy claims. 



