The Ordways
“Once having heard it, I was not long in learning to dislike that picture, nor much longer then in persuading myself that it was not a good likeness. For just as the photographs of me accorded not at all with my own picture of myself, which is to say with my notions of the great deeds I was to do and the fine man I was to become, so that sad-looking, pinch-faced, whey-colored little boy with the tow hair parted in the middle and so thoroughly wetted down that he appeared to be bald, was not my L...ittle Ned. Such a wretched boy was not worth stealing and running off with into the Wild West. Or maybe he had looked like that before he was stolen, but certainly not for long afterwards. For Ned had been taken to a land where surely even mothers grew sensible and no longer wetted down one’s hair, a land where it never rained and there were two Saturdays a week instead of Sunday, and there he must have blossomed like a desert flower, overnight acquired a big, lean, loose-jointed, muscular frame and a mustache as black and thick as a shoe brush, a rangy gait like a mountain lion on the prowl, skin the color of a new saddle, sharp steady eyes the color of a western sky which seemed to notice nothing while taking in everything, and a ready broad smile instead of the frightened pucker on that little boy’s face as he sat for the itinerant photographer that day long ago.MoreLess
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