FINDING THE CAT
I came to Denver in the spring of 1880, at the age of eleven, as mildly
inoffensive a small boy as ever left a farm--undersized and weakly, so
that at the age of seventeen I commonly passed as twelve, and so
unaccustomed to the sight of buildings that I thought the five-story
Windsor Hotel a miracle of height and magnificence. I had been living
with my maternal grandfather and aunt on a farm in Jackson, Tennessee,
where I had been born; and I had come with my younger brother to join
my parents, who had finally decided that Denver was to be their
permanent home. The conductors on the trains had taken care of us,
because my father was a railroad man, at the head of the telegraph
system; and we had been entertained on the way by the stories of an old
forty-niner with a gray moustache, who told us how he had shot buffalo
on those prairies where we now saw only antelope. I was not
precocious; his stories interested me more than anything else on the
journey; and I stared so hard at the old pioneer that I should
recognize him now, I believe, if I saw him on the street.
My schooling was not peculiar; there was nothing "holier than thou" in
my bringing up.
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