Returning to the Gilbert area, again, the family crossed cotton country.  Near Russellville, they asked about an old house close to the cotton fields where they chose to work.  They asked permission to rent the place from the owner.  With this coment, the owner gave his consent, “you may stay there if you can without any charge.”  This aroused no suspicion and the little group found shelter.  Ten days passed when Grandpa Amos made this announcement,  “I am tired of this.  We are going home.”  For five days the men could sleep in the house without any breathing difficulty and for five days the women could sleep well.  One night the women would sleep fine but the men would have to go outside in order to breathe.  The next night the situation was reversed.  But the children’s sleep was never disturbed.

Arriving home the last of November, the Holt family began to live as all the hill people did.  They were content as the birds are till that time of the year came to migrate.  Thei family stayed in the Gilbert area until August of each year.  The neighbors all knew fall was near when they saw the covered wagons moving along the Ozark hills.

In the evening, the older people would talk about what they had learned on their trip west, which two of the stories are similar to this:

While on a trip, Wayne and Virginia met a man named Starr in the Boston Mountains.  Mr. Starr found out that Virginia was interested in medicine and showed her a “Mad Stone.”  Here is his acount of the stone: A Cherokee Indian had killed a white deer in the Boston Mountains, and in the stomach of the deer was this stone.  The stone was round in shape, little larger than a silver dollar, and light brown in color.  The stone was said to cure rabies caused from animal bites and rattlesnake bites.  The stone was a highly prized possession of the Starr family.  It had been handed down from one generation to another.  They would boil the stone in sweet milk until it became soft and spongy, then apply it to the wound.  If there were poison in the wound, the stone would stick on till it was full of the poison, then drop off.  After the stone had been applied to the bite, it was boiled in milk again.  While in the milk, the liquid would turn green from the poison.  The stone would be removed from the milk, dried carefully, wrapped, and put away until the next victim. 

Virginia told about her half-sister, who was a young mother and a single parent after the Civil War.  This was Bud McClung’s sister, who foreknew her own death.  She began to clean and iron her white cotton dress with the white slip.  She ironed two ribbons; one was red and the other blue.  She requested that she was to be buried in the white dress with the red ribbon in her hair and the blue tied around her wrist and made into a bow.  She requested that her brother, Bud, rear her child.  At the time she was making burial preparations, she seemed perfectly well.  But within a week, she took sick.  She lived one week after she took sick.

Bud took the young child with him everyplace he went, even to pick huckleberries.  He put the young child on a quilt by a log where a rattlesnake was hiding.  The snake crawled out from the log and bit the child.  It was on a Sunday morning.  The grief stricken housekeeper took down the conk shell, which was a signal for emergency.  It is said the neighbors for two miles around could hear the blowing of the conk shell, and came immediately to the Bud McClung Mountain.