My mother did not return
to Arkansas but went on to Joplin, Missouri, and for more than fifty
years, neither one of us knew where the other one was until one day a
man from Fayetteville went into a restaurant in Joplin and ordered his
breakfast, and my mother who was in there heard him say he lived in
Fayetteville, Arkansas. He lived just below the Hudgens home and when my
mother enquired about the family he told her I was still alive and was
with the family. While neither of us could read nor write we
corresponded through different people. But I never saw her after I was
eleven years old. Later Mr. Hudgens went to Joplin to see if she was
well taken care of. She owned her own little place and when she died
there was enough money for her to be buried.
"Civil War days are vivid to me. The Courthouse which was then in the
middle of the Square was burned one night by a crazy Confederate
soldier. The old men in the town saved him and then put him in the
county jail to keep him from burning other houses. Each family was to
take food to him and they furnished bedding. The morning I was to take
his breakfast, he had ripped open his feather bed and crawled inside to
get warm. The room was so full of feathers when I got there that his
food nearly choked him. I had carried him ham, hot biscuits and a pot of
coffee.
"After the War many soldiers came to my mistress, Mrs.
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