The Holbrook news., 1912-09-13


 Creek and shuts from sight the big stone house that cost $4,-
 900, the last southern outpost of Kansas City that is sprawling out and engulfing all this rolling prairie. You look for the old bee tree and there is a catch in your throat when you miss it-but no-that clump of walnut trees hit 1t for a moment. The ax of the real estate speculator has not come quite that far yet.
 Those bees fitting far up among the dead brances against background of gray sky are the oldest settlers of this county. The colony was there in that same tree long years before a white man set foot in Missouri. There are men living who knew that tree and It's wild bees sixty years ago.
 Turn to the right after you cross h. dian Creek and go about two hundred yards to where the stream pours in broad white waterfall over low ledge of rock and drifts lazily in a wide pool with streak of silver bubbles down its center. The banks here are rock, with hollows gouged in them and overhang- ing shelves that cast black shadows upon the stream.
 Watts's mill squats low upon the op- posite bank. The weathered gray of its sides and roof Is the exact. shade of the limestone beneath and all around 1t and the old mill seems to merge with it and is a part of 1t. You look in vain for any line of cleavage be- tween mill and rock. The years have blended them into one somber gray.
 An Atmosphere of Gray.
 The naturalists tell of birds and lesser creatures of the wood who take on the color of the bark or the grasses upon which they live. You think of this as you see the miller in the door way. His clothing. even to his cloth slippers, his long beard, his soft felt hat, sprinkled with flour, are a uni form gray, the gray of rocks and mill
 Stubbins Watts, great-great-grand- son of Daniel Boone, is 75 years old. But the old water mill Is older than he. It was built in 1880 and for eighty two years has been grinding corn and wheat within ten miles of Kansas City. The hands that hewed it's walnut beams and fashioned the hickory pins that keep its weathered boarding in place moldered into dust half cen tury ago, but the old mill grinds on just as patiently, as faithfully, as un- mindful of passing time and genera tions as it did long years before this city was dreamed of.
 You pass your hand over the sur face of a walnut beam, hewed out by the ax of John Fitzhugh, eighty-two years ago, and lay your fingers in a gaping notch just as his ax blade left 1t, and think of the changes that have come to Western Missouri since then. Westport Landing grew out along the old wood road until 1t bridged with paved streets the miles between it and Westport and overhowed south ward and yet the old mill wheel turn ed and the corn was ground to meal between the homemade stones of rock quarried on the bank of Indian Creek.
 Since this mill was built the com merce of the Santa Fe Trail came, f1ourished for a time and died; and then the rush of forty-niners to Cali fornia flowed past it, and after them the railroads came and passed on to the Pacific, and with them the legions of pioneers like the clouds of locusts overspreading all the land beyond to the westward. The Mormons of Inde- pendence, who brought their grist to this mill, departed to found a new em- pire beside the dead sea in the un- known desert. Past this old mill, just | two hundred yards to the east, where 1 the big elm leans out over the creek, | armies of the Civil War hurried, | splashing wildly through the ford, the Southern amy in flight from the defeat | at Westport, the Northern forces hot | in pursuit.
 Indian Creek Has Never Hurried.
 A great city of tall buildings and | all things modern has made the coun- try to the north like a teeming ant | hill. where all Is hurry, hurry, hurry, | but Indian Creek has never hurried; | It's stream has flowed placidly, basking | ing the sun, pausing in the shadows of | its trees; and just as placidly the old | mill wheels have turned. their slow creakings attuned to the liquid mur murings of the waterfall.
 Placidly has Stubbins Watts gone in and out among the turning shafts for sixty-two years, barring those four years of strife when he fought in the Southern army. In those years he was aroused and filled with fervor that got him honorable mention more than once for deeds on the battle front. But when 1t was over he returned to h. dian Creek and the old mill and the Eurgling of the water as it ran under the floor soothed him into a calm philosophy and he talks but little.
 "Yes," he says. ''it's pretty here: