This is how this story goes, or at least what I can remember from how Dad told it. I have probably told this story as many, if not more, times than my dad. Uncle Les had gone off to college in the late 1800’s. Every now and then a letter from him would arrive that first semester, and then they didn’t. My Grandfather Noel, Les’ brother, saddled up his horse and rode off to check on things. When he arrived, Les’ dorm room appeared as if Les had just walked out and would return any minute. He had been missing for several months. Then years later, around 1906, when my dad was three years old, a man came riding up to the “dirt” farm Noel struggled to eek a living from out near Liberty Hill. The man had two large saddle bags draped over his horse, two bandoliers criss-crossing his chest, and two large pistols hanging from his hips. The man was Uncle Les. After he dismounted, he walked into the house and hung his pistols from a peg on the wall. Les never touched those guns again. “Leave those guns alone, Ralph They’re nothing but trouble,” my Grandmother Pearl told the excited three year old. Les took his saddle bags out to the barn where he slept for the next 7 years as he worked for his brother on the farm for room and board. After seven years, Les took the almost forgotten saddle bags and bought a ranch out west. Even as children, we saw the holes in Dad’s story: Where did Les get the money for his ranch? Noel only paid him with food and a place to sleep. Where had Les been all those years after disappearing from his college? What had he been doing? After being gone for so long, why did he wait for seven years before he bought his ranch? What was in those two saddle bags? Was any of what Dad said over the years about Les true in any way? How much have I filled in the holes of my memory with conjecture?
(September 7, 2025)
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