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his family, now expanded to include four boys and three girls. In 1866 the family settled in Hill County, Texas, between Fort Worth and Waco— a county adjacent to Limestone County where, twenty years later, the Howard brothers would establish themselves on a farm. 6
    Although the farm prospered, the Ervins did not remain long in Hill County. Robert E. Howard attributed his grandfather's move from Hill County to restlessness, but there are other possibilities. While Colonel Ervin was primarily a planter, he was also something of an entrepreneur. He lent money, dealt in cattle, and speculated in real estate. It may be that the Hill County farm did not give him enough scope for his many enterprises, especially since planters all over that part of Texas were having trouble getting harvest hands. Many freed slaves refused to enter into labor contracts, and those who signed contracts did not always live up to them. Believing their new freedom meant freedom from work, many of these ex-slaves gathered in the towns and eked out a subsistence by begging and stealing while the crops lay unharvested in the fields. Spring planting, likewise, was delayed or curtailed.
    To add to the planters' anxieties, Indian unrest was increasing. During the Civil War, the western frontier had retreated eastward, and settlements heretofore secure from Indian raids were again being encroached upon. Although the movement westward had picked up again, the front line of white settlements still lay east of its outer limits in 1860. Many planters were predicting a full-scale Indian war before the Indian problem was resolved.
    These prophecies proved correct. After a series of campaigns intended to expel the Indians from Texas, General R. S. Mackenzie in 1873 engaged them in a decisive conflict that brought an end to the Indian depredations in West and Northwest Texas. But before that time, caught between disorganized bands of hungry blacks roaming the countryside and the Indian threat from the west, many planters sold their farms and moved away. These factors, also, must have entered into Colonel Ervin's decision to move his family to Dallas.
    The year 1868 was sad for the Ervins. Although it began auspiciously with the birth of Robert F. Ervin in January, the family was crushed by grief in October when young John Ervin died two months short of his thirteenth birthday. Less than two years later, on July 11, 1870, there in Dallas, Hester Jane Ervin, the girl who was to become Robert E. Howard's mother, was born.
    In his autobiographical sketch, "The Wandering Years," Robert Howard reports the events somewhat differently: "There [in Dallas, Texas] in 1876, just three years after the last Comanche raid in Central Texas, my mother, Hester Jane Ervin, was born." 7 If this date were correct, then nothing in Robert's account of the Ervins' Texas experience is consistent.
    Mrs. Howard could not have been born in 1876 because by that time her mother had been dead for two years. Her husband must have consciously entered into the deception about her age, because Mrs. Howard's death certificate, based on information supplied by Dr. Howard, records her birth date as July 11, 1874. Even this modification is incorrect. Hester Jane's mother died of complications attendant upon the birth of her last child, Lizzie Ervin, on June 2, 1874. 8 Mrs. Howard's tombstone, however, carries the correct date, 1870.
    This discrepancy in ages seems such a small, inconsequential thing that it is hardly worth mentioning except for Mrs. Howard's attitude about it. Mrs. Howard was older than Dr. Howard, who was born in
    1871. In those last months of her life, when she confided this age difference to Miss Merryman, her nurse, Mrs. Howard's admission was in the nature of a confession. Since in those days a wife was ideally about five years younger than her husband, Mrs. Howard and her husband invented the polite fiction that led their son Robert wrongly to believe in this difference between