BOOK I— THE SHIMERDAS

My Ántonia

By Willa Sibert Cather

Optima dies … prima fugit

Virgil

with illustrations by

W. T. Benda

[Illustration: The Riverside Press]

Boston and New York

Houghton Mifflin Companys

The Riverside Press Cambridge

1918

To

Carrie and Irene Miner

_In memory of affections old and true_

CONTENTS

Introduction

Book I— The Shimerdas

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

Book II—The Hired Girls

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

Book III—Lena Lingard

I

II

III

IV

Book IV—The Pioneer Woman’s Story

I

II

III

IV

Book V—Cuzak’s Boys

I

II

III

ILLUSTRATIONS

Illustration: Immigrant family huddled together on the train platform

Illustration: Mr. Shimerda walking on the upland prairie with a gun over

his shoulder

Illustration: Mrs. Shimerda gathering mushrooms in a Bohemian forest

Illustration: Jake bringing home a Christmas tree

Illustration: Ántonia ploughing in the field

Illustration: Jim and Ántonia in the garden

Illustration: Lena Lingard knitting stockings

Illustration: Ántonia driving her cattle home

INTRODUCTION

LAST summer I happened to be crossing the plains of Iowa in a season of

intense heat, and it was my good fortune to have for a traveling companion

James Quayle Burden—Jim Burden, as we still call him in the West. He and I

are old friends—we grew up together in the same Nebraska town—and we had

much to say to each other. While the train flashed through never-ending

miles of ripe wheat, by country towns and bright-flowered pastures and oak

groves wilting in the sun, we sat in the observation car, where the

woodwork was hot to the touch and red dust lay deep over everything. The

dust and heat, the burning wind, reminded us of many things. We were

talking about what it is like to spend one’s childhood in little towns

like these, buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes of

climate: burning summers when the world lies green and billowy beneath a

brilliant sky, when one is fairly stifled in vegetation, in the color and

smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests; blustery winters with little

snow, when the whole country is stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron. We

agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could

know anything about it. It was a kind of freemasonry, we said.

Although Jim Burden and I both live in New York, and are old friends, I do

not see much of him there. He is legal counsel for one of the great

Western railways, and is sometimes away from his New York office for weeks

together. That is one reason why we do not often meet. Another is that I

do not like his wife.

When Jim was still an obscure young lawyer, struggling to make his way in

New York, his career was suddenly advanced by a brilliant marriage.

Genevieve Whitney was the only daughter of a distinguished man. Her

marriage with young Burden was the subject of sharp comment at the time.

It was said she had been brutally jilted by her cousin, Rutland Whitney,

and that she married this unknown man from the West out of bravado. She

was a restless, headstrong girl, even then, who liked to astonish her

friends. Later, when I knew her, she was always doing something

unexpected. She gave one of her town houses for a Suffrage headquarters,

produced one of her own plays at the Princess Theater, was arrested for

picketing during a garment-makers’ strike, etc. I am never able to believe

that she has much feeling for the causes to which she lends her name and

her fleeting interest. She is handsome, energetic, executive, but to me

she seems unimpressionable and temperamentally incapable of enthusiasm.

Her husband’s quiet tastes irritate her, I think, and she finds it worth

while to play the patroness to a group of young poets and painters of

advanced ideas and mediocre ability. She has her own fortune and lives her

own life. For some reason, she wishes to remain Mrs. James Burden.

As for Jim, no disappointments have been severe enough to chill his

naturally romantic and ardent disposition. This disposition, though it

often made him seem very funny when he was a boy, has been one of the

strongest elements in his success. He loves with a personal passion the

great country through which his railway runs and branches. His faith in it

and his knowledge of it have played an important part in its development.

He is always able to raise capital for new enterprises in Wyoming or

Montana, and has helped young men out there to do remarkable things in

mines and timber and oil. If a young man with an idea can once get Jim

Burden’s attention, can manage to accompany him when he goes off into the

wilds hunting for lost parks or exploring new canyons, then the money

which means action is usually forthcoming. Jim is still able to lose

himself in those big Western dreams. Though he is over forty now, he meets

new people and new enterprises with the impulsiveness by which his boyhood

friends remember him. He never seems to me to grow older. His fresh color

and sandy hair and quick-changing blue eyes are those of a young man, and

his sympathetic, solicitous interest in women is as youthful as it is

Western and American.

During that burning day when we were crossing Iowa, our talk kept

returning to a central figure, a Bohemian girl whom we had known long ago

and whom both of us admired. More than any other person we remembered,

this girl seemed to mean to us the country, the conditions, the whole

adventure of our childhood. To speak her name was to call up pictures of

people and places, to set a quiet drama going in one’s brain. I had lost

sight of her altogether, but Jim had found her again after long years, had

renewed a friendship that meant a great deal to him, and out of his busy

life had set apart time enough to enjoy that friendship. His mind was full

of her that day. He made me see her again, feel her presence, revived all

my old affection for her.

“I can’t see,” he said impetuously, “why you have never written anything

about Ántonia.”

I told him I had always felt that other people—he himself, for one—knew

her much better than I. I was ready, however, to make an agreement with

him; I would set down on paper all that I remembered of Ántonia if he

would do the same. We might, in this way, get a picture of her.

He rumpled his hair with a quick, excited gesture, which with him often

announces a new determination, and I could see that my suggestion took

hold of him. “Maybe I will, maybe I will!” he declared. He stared out of

the window for a few moments, and when he turned to me again his eyes had

the sudden clearness that comes from something the mind itself sees. “Of

course,” he said, “I should have to do it in a direct way, and say a great

deal about myself. It’s through myself that I knew and felt her, and I’ve

had no practice in any other form of presentation.”

I told him that how he knew her and felt her was exactly what I most

wanted to know about Ántonia. He had had opportunities that I, as a little

girl who watched her come and go, had not.

Months afterward Jim Burden arrived at my apartment one stormy winter

afternoon, with a bulging legal portfolio sheltered under his fur

overcoat. He brought it into the sitting-room with him and tapped it with

some pride as he stood warming his hands.

“I finished it last night—the thing about Ántonia,” he said. “Now, what

about yours?”

I had to confess that mine had not gone beyond a few straggling notes.

“Notes? I did n’t make any.” He drank his tea all at once and put down the

cup. “I did n’t arrange or rearrange. I simply wrote down what of herself

and myself and other people Ántonia’s name recalls to me. I suppose it has

n’t any form. It has n’t any title, either.” He went into the next room,

sat down at my desk and wrote on the pinkish face of the portfolio the

word, “Ántonia.” He frowned at this a moment, then prefixed another word,

making it “My Ántonia.” That seemed to satisfy him.

“Read it as soon as you can,” he said, rising, “but don’t let it influence

your own story.”

My own story was never written, but the following narrative is Jim’s

manuscript, substantially as he brought it to me.

BOOK I— THE SHIMERDAS

I

I FIRST heard of Ántonia(1) on what seemed to me an interminable journey

across the great midland plain of North America. I was ten years old then;

I had lost both my father and mother within a year, and my Virginia

relatives were sending me out to my grandparents, who lived in Nebraska. I

traveled in the care of a mountain boy, Jake Marpole, one of the “hands”

on my father’s old farm under the Blue Ridge, who was now going West to

work for my grandfather. Jake’s experience of the world was not much wider

than mine. He had never been in a railway train until the morning when we

set out together to try our fortunes in a new world.

We went all the way in day-coaches, becoming more sticky and grimy with

each stage of the journey. Jake bought everything the newsboys offered

him: candy, oranges, brass collar buttons, a watch-charm, and for me a

“Life of Jesse James,” which I remember as one of the most satisfactory

books I have ever read. Beyond Chicago we were under the protection of a

friendly passenger conductor, who knew all about the country to which we

were going and gave us a great deal of advice in exchange for our

confidence. He seemed to us an experienced and worldly man who had been

almost everywhere; in his conversation he threw out lightly the names of

distant States and cities. He wore the rings and pins and badges of

different fraternal orders to which he belonged. Even his cuff-buttons

were engraved with hieroglyphics, and he was more inscribed than an

Egyptian obelisk. Once when he sat down to chat, he told us that in the

immigrant car ahead there was a family from “across the water” whose

destination was the same as ours.

“They can’t any of them speak English, except one little girl, and all she

can say is ‘We go Black Hawk, Nebraska.’ She’s not much older than you,

twelve or thirteen, maybe, and she’s as bright as a new dollar. Don’t you

want to go ahead and see her, Jimmy? She’s got the pretty brown eyes,

too!”

This last remark made me bashful, and I shook my head and settled down to

“Jesse James.” Jake nodded at me approvingly and said you were likely to

get diseases from foreigners.

I do not remember crossing the Missouri River, or anything about the long

day’s journey through Nebraska. Probably by that time I had crossed so

many rivers that I was dull to them. The only thing very noticeable about

Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.

I had been sleeping, curled up in a red plush seat, for a long while when

we reached Black Hawk. Jake roused me and took me by the hand. We stumbled

down from the train to a wooden siding, where men were running about with

lanterns. I could n’t see any town, or even distant lights; we were

surrounded by utter darkness. The engine was panting heavily after its

long run. In the red glow from the fire-box, a group of people stood

huddled together on the platform, encumbered by bundles and boxes. I knew

this must be the immigrant family the conductor had told us about. The

woman wore a fringed shawl tied over her head, and she carried a little

tin trunk in her arms, hugging it as if it were a baby. There was an old

man, tall and stooped. Two half-grown boys and a girl stood holding

oil-cloth bundles, and a little girl clung to her mother’s skirts.

Presently a man with a lantern approached them and began to talk, shouting

and exclaiming. I pricked up my ears, for it was positively the first time

I had ever heard a foreign tongue.

Another lantern came along. A bantering voice called out: “Hello, are you

Mr. Burden’s folks? If you are, it’s me you’re looking for. I’m Otto

Fuchs. I’m Mr. Burden’s hired man, and I’m to drive you out. Hello, Jimmy,

ain’t you scared to come so far west?”

[Illustration: Immigrant family huddled together on the train platform]

I looked up with interest at the new face in the lantern light. He might

have stepped out of the pages of “Jesse James.” He wore a sombrero hat,

with a wide leather band and a bright buckle, and the ends of his mustache

were twisted up stiffly, like little horns. He looked lively and

ferocious, I thought, and as if he had a history. A long scar ran across

one cheek and drew the corner of his mouth up in a sinister curl. The top

of his left ear was gone, and his skin was brown as an Indian’s. Surely

this was the face of a desperado. As he walked about the platform in his

high-heeled boots, looking for our trunks, I saw that he was a rather

slight man, quick and wiry, and light on his feet. He told us we had a

long night drive ahead of us, and had better be on the hike. He led us to

a hitching-bar where two farm wagons were tied, and I saw the foreign

family crowding into one of them. The other was for us. Jake got on the

front seat with Otto Fuchs, and I rode on the straw in the bottom of the

wagon-box, covered up with a buffalo hide. The immigrants rumbled off into

the empty darkness, and we followed them.

I tried to go to sleep, but the jolting made me bite my tongue, and I soon

began to ache all over. When the straw settled down I had a hard bed.

Cautiously I slipped from under the buffalo hide, got up on my knees and

peered over the side of the wagon. There seemed to be nothing to see; no

fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I

could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land:

not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.

No, there was nothing but land—slightly undulating, I knew, because often

our wheels ground against the brake as we went down into a hollow and

lurched up again on the other side. I had the feeling that the world was

left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man’s

jurisdiction. I had never before looked up at the sky when there was not a

familiar mountain ridge against it. But this was the complete dome of

heaven, all there was of it. I did not believe that my dead father and

mother were watching me from up there; they would still be looking for me

at the sheep-fold down by the creek, or along the white road that led to

the mountain pastures. I had left even their spirits behind me. The wagon

jolted on, carrying me I knew not whither. I don’t think I was homesick.

If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and

that sky I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night:

here, I felt, what would be would be.

II

I DO not remember our arrival at my grandfather’s farm sometime before

daybreak, after a drive of nearly twenty miles with heavy work-horses.

When I awoke, it was afternoon. I was lying in a little room, scarcely

larger than the bed that held me, and the window-shade at my head was

flapping softly in a warm wind. A tall woman, with wrinkled brown skin and

black hair, stood looking down at me; I knew that she must be my

grandmother. She had been crying, I could see, but when I opened my eyes

she smiled, peered at me anxiously, and sat down on the foot of my bed.

“Had a good sleep, Jimmy?” she asked briskly. Then in a very different

tone she said, as if to herself, “My, how you do look like your father!” I

remembered that my father had been her little boy; she must often have

come to wake him like this when he overslept. “Here are your clean

clothes,” she went on, stroking my coverlid with her brown hand as she

talked. “But first you come down to the kitchen with me, and have a nice

warm bath behind the stove. Bring your things; there’s nobody about.”

“Down to the kitchen” struck me as curious; it was always “out in the

kitchen” at home. I picked up my shoes and stockings and followed her

through the living-room and down a flight of stairs into a basement. This

basement was divided into a dining-room at the right of the stairs and a

kitchen at the left. Both rooms were plastered and whitewashed—the plaster

laid directly upon the earth walls, as it used to be in dugouts. The floor

was of hard cement. Up under the wooden ceiling there were little

half-windows with white curtains, and pots of geraniums and wandering Jew

in the deep sills. As I entered the kitchen I sniffed a pleasant smell of

gingerbread baking. The stove was very large, with bright nickel

trimmings, and behind it there was a long wooden bench against the wall,

and a tin washtub, into which grandmother poured hot and cold water. When

she brought the soap and towels, I told her that I was used to taking my

bath without help.

“Can you do your ears, Jimmy? Are you sure? Well, now, I call you a right

smart little boy.”

It was pleasant there in the kitchen. The sun shone into my bath-water

through the west half-window, and a big Maltese cat came up and rubbed

himself against the tub, watching me curiously. While I scrubbed, my

grandmother busied herself in the dining-room until I called anxiously,

“Grandmother, I’m afraid the cakes are burning!” Then she came laughing,

waving her apron before her as if she were shooing chickens.

She was a spare, tall woman, a little stooped, and she was apt to carry

her head thrust forward in an attitude of attention, as if she were

looking at something, or listening to something, far away. As I grew

older, I came to believe that it was only because she was so often

thinking of things that were far away. She was quick-footed and energetic

in all her movements. Her voice was high and rather shrill, and she often

spoke with an anxious inflection, for she was exceedingly desirous that

everything should go with due order and decorum. Her laugh, too, was high,

and perhaps a little strident, but there was a lively intelligence in it.

She was then fifty-five years old, a strong woman, of unusual endurance.

After I was dressed I explored the long cellar next the kitchen. It was

dug out under the wing of the house, was plastered and cemented, with a

stairway and an outside door by which the men came and went. Under one of

the windows there was a place for them to wash when they came in from

work.

While my grandmother was busy about supper I settled myself on the wooden

bench behind the stove and got acquainted with the cat—he caught not only

rats and mice, but gophers, I was told. The patch of yellow sunlight on

the floor traveled back toward the stairway, and grandmother and I talked

about my journey, and about the arrival of the new Bohemian family; she

said they were to be our nearest neighbors. We did not talk about the farm

in Virginia, which had been her home for so many years. But after the men

came in from the fields, and we were all seated at the supper-table, then

she asked Jake about the old place and about our friends and neighbors

there.

My grandfather said little. When he first came in he kissed me and spoke

kindly to me, but he was not demonstrative. I felt at once his

deliberateness and personal dignity, and was a little in awe of him. The

thing one immediately noticed about him was his beautiful, crinkly,

snow-white beard. I once heard a missionary say it was like the beard of

an Arabian sheik. His bald crown only made it more impressive.

Grandfather’s eyes were not at all like those of an old man; they were

bright blue, and had a fresh, frosty sparkle. His teeth were white and

regular—so sound that he had never been to a dentist in his life. He had a

delicate skin, easily roughened by sun and wind. When he was a young man

his hair and beard were red; his eyebrows were still coppery.

As we sat at the table Otto Fuchs and I kept stealing covert glances at

each other. Grandmother had told me while she was getting supper that he

was an Austrian who came to this country a young boy and had led an

adventurous life in the Far West among mining-camps and cow outfits. His

iron constitution was somewhat broken by mountain pneumonia, and he had

drifted back to live in a milder country for a while. He had relatives in

Bismarck, a German settlement to the north of us, but for a year now he

had been working for grandfather.

The minute supper was over, Otto took me into the kitchen to whisper to me

about a pony down in the barn that had been bought for me at a sale; he

had been riding him to find out whether he had any bad tricks, but he was

a “perfect gentleman,” and his name was Dude. Fuchs told me everything I

wanted to know: how he had lost his ear in a Wyoming blizzard when he was

a stage-driver, and how to throw a lasso. He promised to rope a steer for

me before sundown next day. He got out his “chaps” and silver spurs to

show them to Jake and me, and his best cowboy boots, with tops stitched in

bold design—roses, and true-lover’s knots, and undraped female figures.

These, he solemnly explained, were angels.

Before we went to bed Jake and Otto were called up to the living-room for

prayers. Grandfather put on silver-rimmed spectacles and read several

Psalms. His voice was so sympathetic and he read so interestingly that I

wished he had chosen one of my favorite chapters in the Book of Kings. I

was awed by his intonation of the word “Selah.” “_He shall choose our

inheritance for us, the excellency of Jacob whom He loved. Selah._” I had

no idea what the word meant; perhaps he had not. But, as he uttered it, it

became oracular, the most sacred of words.

Early the next morning I ran out of doors to look about me. I had been

told that ours was the only wooden house west of Black Hawk—until you came

to the Norwegian settlement, where there were several. Our neighbors lived

in sod houses and dugouts—comfortable, but not very roomy. Our white frame

house, with a story and half-story above the basement, stood at the east

end of what I might call the farmyard, with the windmill close by the

kitchen door. From the windmill the ground sloped westward, down to the

barns and granaries and pig-yards. This slope was trampled hard and bare,

and washed out in winding gullies by the rain. Beyond the corncribs, at

the bottom of the shallow draw, was a muddy little pond, with rusty willow

bushes growing about it. The road from the post-office came directly by

our door, crossed the farmyard, and curved round this little pond, beyond

which it began to climb the gentle swell of unbroken prairie to the west.

There, along the western sky-line, it skirted a great cornfield, much

larger than any field I had ever seen. This cornfield, and the sorghum

patch behind the barn, were the only broken land in sight. Everywhere, as

far as the eye could reach, there was nothing but rough, shaggy, red

grass, most of it as tall as I.

North of the house, inside the ploughed fire-breaks, grew a thick-set

strip of box-elder trees, low and bushy, their leaves already turning

yellow. This hedge was nearly a quarter of a mile long, but I had to look

very hard to see it at all. The little trees were insignificant against

the grass. It seemed as if the grass were about to run over them, and over

the plum-patch behind the sod chicken-house.

As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water

is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the color of

wine-stains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And

there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be

running.

I had almost forgotten that I had a grandmother, when she came out, her

sunbonnet on her head, a grain-sack in her hand, and asked me if I did not

want to go to the garden with her to dig potatoes for dinner. The garden,

curiously enough, was a quarter of a mile from the house, and the way to

it led up a shallow draw past the cattle corral. Grandmother called my

attention to a stout hickory cane, tipped with copper, which hung by a

leather thong from her belt. This, she said, was her rattlesnake cane. I

must never go to the garden without a heavy stick or a corn-knife; she had

killed a good many rattlers on her way back and forth. A little girl who

lived on the Black Hawk road was bitten on the ankle and had been sick all

summer.

I can remember exactly how the country looked to me as I walked beside my

grandmother along the faint wagon-tracks on that early September morning.

Perhaps the glide of long railway travel was still with me, for more than

anything else I felt motion in the landscape; in the fresh, easy-blowing

morning wind, and in the earth itself, as if the shaggy grass were a sort

of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo were galloping,

galloping …

Alone, I should never have found the garden—except, perhaps, for the big

yellow pumpkins that lay about unprotected by their withering vines—and I

felt very little interest in it when I got there. I wanted to walk

straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which

could not be very far away. The light air about me told me that the world

ended here: only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if one went a

little farther there would be only sun and sky, and one would float off

into them, like the tawny hawks which sailed over our heads making slow

shadows on the grass. While grandmother took the pitchfork we found

standing in one of the rows and dug potatoes, while I picked them up out

of the soft brown earth and put them into the bag, I kept looking up at

the hawks that were doing what I might so easily do.

When grandmother was ready to go, I said I would like to stay up there in

the garden awhile.

She peered down at me from under her sunbonnet. “Are n’t you afraid of

snakes?”

“A little,” I admitted, “but I’d like to stay anyhow.”

“Well, if you see one, don’t have anything to do with him. The big yellow

and brown ones won’t hurt you; they’re bull-snakes and help to keep the

gophers down. Don’t be scared if you see anything look out of that hole in

the bank over there. That’s a badger hole. He’s about as big as a big

’possum, and his face is striped, black and white. He takes a chicken once

in a while, but I won’t let the men harm him. In a new country a body

feels friendly to the animals. I like to have him come out and watch me

when I’m at work.”

Grandmother swung the bag of potatoes over her shoulder and went down the

path, leaning forward a little. The road followed the windings of the

draw; when she came to the first bend she waved at me and disappeared. I

was left alone with this new feeling of lightness and content.

I sat down in the middle of the garden, where snakes could scarcely

approach unseen, and leaned my back against a warm yellow pumpkin. There

were some ground-cherry bushes growing along the furrows, full of fruit. I

turned back the papery triangular sheaths that protected the berries and

ate a few. All about me giant grasshoppers, twice as big as any I had ever

seen, were doing acrobatic feats among the dried vines. The gophers

scurried up and down the ploughed ground. There in the sheltered

draw-bottom the wind did not blow very hard, but I could hear it singing

its humming tune up on the level, and I could see the tall grasses wave.

The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers.

Queer little red bugs came out and moved in slow squadrons around me.

Their backs were polished vermilion, with black spots. I kept as still as

I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was

something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did

not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like

that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun

and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be

dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it

comes as naturally as sleep.

III

ON Sunday morning Otto Fuchs was to drive us over to make the acquaintance

of our new Bohemian neighbors. We were taking them some provisions, as

they had come to live on a wild place where there was no garden or

chicken-house, and very little broken land. Fuchs brought up a sack of

potatoes and a piece of cured pork from the cellar, and grandmother packed

some loaves of Saturday’s bread, a jar of butter, and several pumpkin pies

in the straw of the wagon-box. We clambered up to the front seat and

jolted off past the little pond and along the road that climbed to the big

cornfield.

I could hardly wait to see what lay beyond that cornfield; but there was

only red grass like ours, and nothing else, though from the high

wagon-seat one could look off a long way. The road ran about like a wild

thing, avoiding the deep draws, crossing them where they were wide and

shallow. And all along it, wherever it looped or ran, the sunflowers grew;

some of them were as big as little trees, with great rough leaves and many

branches which bore dozens of blossoms. They made a gold ribbon across the

prairie. Occasionally one of the horses would tear off with his teeth a

plant full of blossoms, and walk along munching it, the flowers nodding in

time to his bites as he ate down toward them.

The Bohemian family, grandmother told me as we drove along, had bought the

homestead of a fellow-countryman, Peter Krajiek, and had paid him more

than it was worth. Their agreement with him was made before they left the

old country, through a cousin of his, who was also a relative of Mrs.

Shimerda. The Shimerdas were the first Bohemian family to come to this

part of the county. Krajiek was their only interpreter, and could tell

them anything he chose. They could not speak enough English to ask for

advice, or even to make their most pressing wants known. One son, Fuchs

said, was well-grown, and strong enough to work the land; but the father

was old and frail and knew nothing about farming. He was a weaver by

trade; had been a skilled workman on tapestries and upholstery materials.

He had brought his fiddle with him, which would n’t be of much use here,

though he used to pick up money by it at home.

“If they’re nice people, I hate to think of them spending the winter in

that cave of Krajiek’s,” said grandmother. “It’s no better than a badger

hole; no proper dugout at all. And I hear he’s made them pay twenty

dollars for his old cookstove that ain’t worth ten.”

“Yes’m,” said Otto; “and he’s sold ’em his oxen and his two bony old

horses for the price of good work-teams. I’d have interfered about the

horses—the old man can understand some German—if I’d ’a’ thought it would

do any good. But Bohemians has a natural distrust of Austrians.”

Grandmother looked interested. “Now, why is that, Otto?”

Fuchs wrinkled his brow and nose. “Well, ma’m, it’s politics. It would

take me a long while to explain.”

The land was growing rougher; I was told that we were approaching Squaw

Creek, which cut up the west half of the Shimerdas’ place and made the

land of little value for farming. Soon we could see the broken, grassy

clay cliffs which indicated the windings of the stream, and the glittering

tops of the cottonwoods and ash trees that grew down in the ravine. Some

of the cottonwoods had already turned, and the yellow leaves and shining

white bark made them look like the gold and silver trees in fairy tales.

As we approached the Shimerdas’ dwelling, I could still see nothing but

rough red hillocks, and draws with shelving banks and long roots hanging

out where the earth had crumbled away. Presently, against one of those

banks, I saw a sort of shed, thatched with the same wine-colored grass

that grew everywhere. Near it tilted a shattered windmill-frame, that had

no wheel. We drove up to this skeleton to tie our horses, and then I saw a

door and window sunk deep in the draw-bank. The door stood open, and a

woman and a girl of fourteen ran out and looked up at us hopefully. A

little girl trailed along behind them. The woman had on her head the same

embroidered shawl with silk fringes that she wore when she had alighted

from the train at Black Hawk. She was not old, but she was certainly not

young. Her face was alert and lively, with a sharp chin and shrewd little

eyes. She shook grandmother’s hand energetically.

“Very glad, very glad!” she ejaculated. Immediately she pointed to the

bank out of which she had emerged and said, “House no good, house no

good!”

Grandmother nodded consolingly. “You’ll get fixed up comfortable after

while, Mrs. Shimerda; make good house.”

My grandmother always spoke in a very loud tone to foreigners, as if they

were deaf. She made Mrs. Shimerda understand the friendly intention of our

visit, and the Bohemian woman handled the loaves of bread and even smelled

them, and examined the pies with lively curiosity, exclaiming, “Much good,

much thank!”—and again she wrung grandmother’s hand.

The oldest son, Ambrož,—they called it Ambrosch,—came out of the cave and

stood beside his mother. He was nineteen years old, short and

broad-backed, with a close-cropped, flat head, and a wide, flat face. His

hazel eyes were little and shrewd, like his mother’s, but more sly and

suspicious; they fairly snapped at the food. The family had been living on

corncakes and sorghum molasses for three days.

The little girl was pretty, but Án-tonia— they accented the name thus,

strongly, when they spoke to her—was still prettier. I remembered what the

conductor had said about her eyes. They were big and warm and full of

light, like the sun shining on brown pools in the wood. Her skin was

brown, too, and in her cheeks she had a glow of rich, dark color. Her

brown hair was curly and wild-looking. The little sister, whom they called

Yulka (Julka), was fair, and seemed mild and obedient. While I stood

awkwardly confronting the two girls, Krajiek came up from the barn to see

what was going on. With him was another Shimerda son. Even from a distance

one could see that there was something strange about this boy. As he

approached us, he began to make uncouth noises, and held up his hands to

show us his fingers, which were webbed to the first knuckle, like a duck’s

foot. When he saw me draw back, he began to crow delightedly, “Hoo,

hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo!” like a rooster. His mother scowled and said sternly,

“Marek!” then spoke rapidly to Krajiek in Bohemian.

“She wants me to tell you he won’t hurt nobody, Mrs. Burden. He was born

like that. The others are smart. Ambrosch, he make good farmer.” He struck

Ambrosch on the back, and the boy smiled knowingly.

At that moment the father came out of the hole in the bank. He wore no

hat, and his thick, iron-gray hair was brushed straight back from his

forehead. It was so long that it bushed out behind his ears, and made him

look like the old portraits I remembered in Virginia. He was tall and

slender, and his thin shoulders stooped. He looked at us understandingly,

then took grandmother’s hand and bent over it. I noticed how white and

well-shaped his own hands were. They looked calm, somehow, and skilled.

His eyes were melancholy, and were set back deep under his brow. His face

was ruggedly formed, but it looked like ashes—like something from which

all the warmth and light had died out. Everything about this old man was

in keeping with his dignified manner. He was neatly dressed. Under his

coat he wore a knitted gray vest, and, instead of a collar, a silk scarf

of a dark bronze-green, carefully crossed and held together by a red coral

pin. While Krajiek was translating for Mr. Shimerda, Ántonia came up to me

and held out her hand coaxingly. In a moment we were running up the steep

drawside together, Yulka trotting after us.

When we reached the level and could see the gold tree-tops, I pointed

toward them, and Ántonia laughed and squeezed my hand as if to tell me how

glad she was I had come. We raced off toward Squaw Creek and did not stop

until the ground itself stopped—fell away before us so abruptly that the

next step would have been out into the tree-tops. We stood panting on the

edge of the ravine, looking down at the trees and bushes that grew below

us. The wind was so strong that I had to hold my hat on, and the girls’

skirts were blown out before them. Ántonia seemed to like it; she held her

little sister by the hand and chattered away in that language which seemed

to me spoken so much more rapidly than mine. She looked at me, her eyes

fairly blazing with things she could not say.

“Name? What name?” she asked, touching me on the shoulder. I told her my

name, and she repeated it after me and made Yulka say it. She pointed into

the gold cottonwood tree behind whose top we stood and said again, “What

name?”

We sat down and made a nest in the long red grass. Yulka curled up like a

baby rabbit and played with a grasshopper. Ántonia pointed up to the sky

and questioned me with her glance. I gave her the word, but she was not

satisfied and pointed to my eyes. I told her, and she repeated the word,

making it sound like “ice.” She pointed up to the sky, then to my eyes,

then back to the sky, with movements so quick and impulsive that she

distracted me, and I had no idea what she wanted. She got up on her knees

and wrung her hands. She pointed to her own eyes and shook her head, then

to mine and to the sky, nodding violently.

“Oh,” I exclaimed, “blue; blue sky.”

She clapped her hands and murmured, “Blue sky, blue eyes,” as if it amused

her. While we snuggled down there out of the wind she learned a score of

words. She was quick, and very eager. We were so deep in the grass that we

could see nothing but the blue sky over us and the gold tree in front of

us. It was wonderfully pleasant. After Ántonia had said the new words over

and over, she wanted to give me a little chased silver ring she wore on

her middle finger. When she coaxed and insisted, I repulsed her quite

sternly. I did n’t want her ring, and I felt there was something reckless

and extravagant about her wishing to give it away to a boy she had never

seen before. No wonder Krajiek got the better of these people, if this was

how they behaved.

While we were disputing about the ring, I heard a mournful voice calling,

“Án-tonia, Án-tonia!” She sprang up like a hare. “Tatinek, Tatinek!” she

shouted, and we ran to meet the old man who was coming toward us. Ántonia

reached him first, took his hand and kissed it. When I came up, he touched

my shoulder and looked searchingly down into my face for several seconds.

I became somewhat embarrassed, for I was used to being taken for granted

by my elders.

We went with Mr. Shimerda back to the dugout, where grandmother was

waiting for me. Before I got into the wagon, he took a book out of his

pocket, opened it, and showed me a page with two alphabets, one English

and the other Bohemian. He placed this book in my grandmother’s hands,

looked at her entreatingly, and said with an earnestness which I shall

never forget, “Te-e-ach, te-e-ach my Án-tonia!”

IV

ON the afternoon of that same Sunday I took my first long ride on my pony,

under Otto’s direction. After that Dude and I went twice a week to the

post-office, six miles east of us, and I saved the men a good deal of time

by riding on errands to our neighbors. When we had to borrow anything, or

to send about word that there would be preaching at the sod schoolhouse, I

was always the messenger. Formerly Fuchs attended to such things after

working hours.

All the years that have passed have not dimmed my memory of that first

glorious autumn. The new country lay open before me: there were no fences

in those days, and I could choose my own way over the grass uplands,

trusting the pony to get me home again. Sometimes I followed the

sunflower-bordered roads. Fuchs told me that the sunflowers were

introduced into that country by the Mormons; that at the time of the

persecution, when they left Missouri and struck out into the wilderness to

find a place where they could worship God in their own way, the members of

the first exploring party, crossing the plains to Utah, scattered

sunflower seed as they went. The next summer, when the long trains of

wagons came through with all the women and children, they had the

sunflower trail to follow. I believe that botanists do not confirm Jake’s

story, but insist that the sunflower was native to those plains.

Nevertheless, that legend has stuck in my mind, and sunflower-bordered

roads always seem to me the roads to freedom.

I used to love to drift along the pale yellow cornfields, looking for the

damp spots one sometimes found at their edges, where the smartweed soon

turned a rich copper color and the narrow brown leaves hung curled like

cocoons about the swollen joints of the stem. Sometimes I went south to

visit our German neighbors and to admire their catalpa grove, or to see

the big elm tree that grew up out of a deep crack in the earth and had a

hawk’s nest in its branches. Trees were so rare in that country, and they

had to make such a hard fight to grow, that we used to feel anxious about

them, and visit them as if they were persons. It must have been the

scarcity of detail in that tawny landscape that made detail so precious.

Sometimes I rode north to the big prairie-dog town to watch the brown,

earth-owls fly home in the late afternoon and go down to their nests

underground with the dogs. Ántonia Shimerda liked to go with me, and we

used to wonder a great deal about these birds of subterranean habit. We

had to be on our guard there, for rattlesnakes were always lurking about.

They came to pick up an easy living among the dogs and owls, which were

quite defenseless against them; took possession of their comfortable

houses and ate the eggs and puppies. We felt sorry for the owls. It was

always mournful to see them come flying home at sunset and disappear under

the earth. But, after all, we felt, winged things who would live like that

must be rather degraded creatures. The dog-town was a long way from any

pond or creek. Otto Fuchs said he had seen populous dog-towns in the

desert where there was no surface water for fifty miles; he insisted that

some of the holes must go down to water—nearly two hundred feet,

hereabouts. Ántonia said she did n’t believe it; that the dogs probably

lapped up the dew in the early morning, like the rabbits.

Ántonia had opinions about everything, and she was soon able to make them

known. Almost every day she came running across the prairie to have her

reading lesson with me. Mrs. Shimerda grumbled, but realized it was

important that one member of the family should learn English. When the

lesson was over, we used to go up to the watermelon patch behind the

garden. I split the melons with an old corn-knife, and we lifted out the

hearts and ate them with the juice trickling through our fingers. The

white Christmas melons we did not touch, but we watched them with

curiosity. They were to be picked late, when the hard frosts had set in,

and put away for winter use. After weeks on the ocean, the Shimerdas were

famished for fruit. The two girls would wander for miles along the edge of

the cornfields, hunting for ground-cherries.

Ántonia loved to help grandmother in the kitchen and to learn about

cooking and housekeeping. She would stand beside her, watching her every

movement. We were willing to believe that Mrs. Shimerda was a good

housewife in her own country, but she managed poorly under new conditions:

the conditions were bad enough, certainly!

I remember how horrified we were at the sour, ashy-gray bread she gave her

family to eat. She mixed her dough, we discovered, in an old tin

peck-measure that Krajiek had used about the barn. When she took the paste

out to bake it, she left smears of dough sticking to the sides of the

measure, put the measure on the shelf behind the stove, and let this

residue ferment. The next time she made bread, she scraped this sour stuff

down into the fresh dough to serve as yeast.

During those first months the Shimerdas never went to town. Krajiek

encouraged them in the belief that in Black Hawk they would somehow be

mysteriously separated from their money. They hated Krajiek, but they

clung to him because he was the only human being with whom they could talk

or from whom they could get information. He slept with the old man and the

two boys in the dugout barn, along with the oxen. They kept him in their

hole and fed him for the same reason that the prairie dogs and the brown

owls housed the rattlesnakes—because they did not know how to get rid of

him.

V

WE knew that things were hard for our Bohemian neighbors, but the two

girls were light-hearted and never complained. They were always ready to

forget their troubles at home, and to run away with me over the prairie,

scaring rabbits or starting up flocks of quail.

I remember Ántonia’s excitement when she came into our kitchen one

afternoon and announced: “My papa find friends up north, with Russian

mans. Last night he take me for see, and I can understand very much talk.

Nice mans, Mrs. Burden. One is fat and all the time laugh. Everybody

laugh. The first time I see my papa laugh in this kawn-tree. Oh, very

nice!”

I asked her if she meant the two Russians who lived up by the big

dog-town. I had often been tempted to go to see them when I was riding in

that direction, but one of them was a wild-looking fellow and I was a

little afraid of him. Russia seemed to me more remote than any other

country—farther away than China, almost as far as the North Pole. Of all

the strange, uprooted people among the first settlers, those two men were

the strangest and the most aloof. Their last names were unpronounceable,

so they were called Pavel and Peter. They went about making signs to

people, and until the Shimerdas came they had no friends. Krajiek could

understand them a little, but he had cheated them in a trade, so they

avoided him. Pavel, the tall one, was said to be an anarchist; since he

had no means of imparting his opinions, probably his wild gesticulations

and his generally excited and rebellious manner gave rise to this

supposition. He must once have been a very strong man, but now his great

frame, with big, knotty joints, had a wasted look, and the skin was drawn

tight over his high cheek-bones. His breathing was hoarse, and he always

had a cough.

Peter, his companion, was a very different sort of fellow; short,

bow-legged, and as fat as butter. He always seemed pleased when he met

people on the road, smiled and took off his cap to every one, men as well

as women. At a distance, on his wagon, he looked like an old man; his hair

and beard were of such a pale flaxen color that they seemed white in the

sun. They were as thick and curly as carded wool. His rosy face, with its

snub nose, set in this fleece, was like a melon among its leaves. He was

usually called “Curly Peter,” or “Rooshian Peter.”

The two Russians made good farmhands, and in summer they worked out

together. I had heard our neighbors laughing when they told how Peter

always had to go home at night to milk his cow. Other bachelor

homesteaders used canned milk, to save trouble. Sometimes Peter came to

church at the sod schoolhouse. It was there I first saw him, sitting on a

low bench by the door, his plush cap in his hands, his bare feet tucked

apologetically under the seat.

After Mr. Shimerda discovered the Russians, he went to see them almost

every evening, and sometimes took Ántonia with him. She said they came

from a part of Russia where the language was not very different from

Bohemian, and if I wanted to go to their place, she could talk to them for

me. One afternoon, before the heavy frosts began, we rode up there

together on my pony.

The Russians had a neat log house built on a grassy slope, with a windlass

well beside the door. As we rode up the draw we skirted a big melon patch,

and a garden where squashes and yellow cucumbers lay about on the sod. We

found Peter out behind his kitchen, bending over a washtub. He was working

so hard that he did not hear us coming. His whole body moved up and down

as he rubbed, and he was a funny sight from the rear, with his shaggy head

and bandy legs. When he straightened himself up to greet us, drops of

perspiration were rolling from his thick nose down on to his curly beard.

Peter dried his hands and seemed glad to leave his washing. He took us

down to see his chickens, and his cow that was grazing on the hillside. He

told Ántonia that in his country only rich people had cows, but here any

man could have one who would take care of her. The milk was good for

Pavel, who was often sick, and he could make butter by beating sour cream

with a wooden spoon. Peter was very fond of his cow. He patted her flanks

and talked to her in Russian while he pulled up her lariat pin and set it

in a new place.

After he had shown us his garden, Peter trundled a load of watermelons up

the hill in his wheelbarrow. Pavel was not at home. He was off somewhere

helping to dig a well. The house I thought very comfortable for two men

who were “batching.” Besides the kitchen, there was a living-room, with a

wide double bed built against the wall, properly made up with blue gingham

sheets and pillows. There was a little storeroom, too, with a window,

where they kept guns and saddles and tools, and old coats and boots. That

day the floor was covered with garden things, drying for winter; corn and

beans and fat yellow cucumbers. There were no screens or window-blinds in

the house, and all the doors and windows stood wide open, letting in flies

and sunshine alike.

Peter put the melons in a row on the oilcloth-covered table and stood over

them, brandishing a butcher knife. Before the blade got fairly into them,

they split of their own ripeness, with a delicious sound. He gave us

knives, but no plates, and the top of the table was soon swimming with

juice and seeds. I had never seen any one eat so many melons as Peter ate.

He assured us that they were good for one—better than medicine; in his

country people lived on them at this time of year. He was very hospitable

and jolly. Once, while he was looking at Ántonia, he sighed and told us

that if he had stayed at home in Russia perhaps by this time he would have

had a pretty daughter of his own to cook and keep house for him. He said

he had left his country because of a “great trouble.”

When we got up to go, Peter looked about in perplexity for something that

would entertain us. He ran into the storeroom and brought out a gaudily

painted harmonica, sat down on a bench, and spreading his fat legs apart

began to play like a whole band. The tunes were either very lively or very

doleful, and he sang words to some of them.

Before we left, Peter put ripe cucumbers into a sack for Mrs. Shimerda and

gave us a lard-pail full of milk to cook them in. I had never heard of

cooking cucumbers, but Ántonia assured me they were very good. We had to

walk the pony all the way home to keep from spilling the milk.

VI

ONE afternoon we were having our reading lesson on the warm, grassy bank

where the badger lived. It was a day of amber sunlight, but there was a

shiver of coming winter in the air. I had seen ice on the little

horse-pond that morning, and as we went through the garden we found the

tall asparagus, with its red berries, lying on the ground, a mass of slimy

green.

Tony was barefooted, and she shivered in her cotton dress and was

comfortable only when we were tucked down on the baked earth, in the full

blaze of the sun. She could talk to me about almost anything by this time.

That afternoon she was telling me how highly esteemed our friend the

badger was in her part of the world, and how men kept a special kind of

dog, with very short legs, to hunt him. Those dogs, she said, went down

into the hole after the badger and killed him there in a terrific struggle

underground; you could hear the barks and yelps outside. Then the dog

dragged himself back, covered with bites and scratches, to be rewarded and

petted by his master. She knew a dog who had a star on his collar for

every badger he had killed.

The rabbits were unusually spry that afternoon. They kept starting up all

about us, and dashing off down the draw as if they were playing a game of

some kind. But the little buzzing things that lived in the grass were all

dead—all but one. While we were lying there against the warm bank, a

little insect of the palest, frailest green hopped painfully out of the

buffalo grass and tried to leap into a bunch of bluestem. He missed it,

fell back, and sat with his head sunk between his long legs, his antennæ

quivering, as if he were waiting for something to come and finish him.

Tony made a warm nest for him in her hands; talked to him gayly and

indulgently in Bohemian. Presently he began to sing for us—a thin, rusty

little chirp. She held him close to her ear and laughed, but a moment

afterward I saw there were tears in her eyes. She told me that in her

village at home there was an old beggar woman who went about selling herbs

and roots she had dug up in the forest. If you took her in and gave her a

warm place by the fire, she sang old songs to the children in a cracked

voice, like this. Old Hata, she was called, and the children loved to see

her coming and saved their cakes and sweets for her.

When the bank on the other side of the draw began to throw a narrow shelf

of shadow, we knew we ought to be starting homeward; the chill came on

quickly when the sun got low, and Ántonia’s dress was thin. What were we

to do with the frail little creature we had lured back to life by false

pretenses? I offered my pockets, but Tony shook her head and carefully put

the green insect in her hair, tying her big handkerchief down loosely over

her curls. I said I would go with her until we could see Squaw Creek, and

then turn and run home. We drifted along lazily, very happy, through the

magical light of the late afternoon.

All those fall afternoons were the same, but I never got used to them. As

far as we could see, the miles of copper-red grass were drenched in

sunlight that was stronger and fiercer than at any other time of the day.

The blond cornfields were red gold, the haystacks turned rosy and threw

long shadows. The whole prairie was like the bush that burned with fire

and was not consumed. That hour always had the exultation of victory, of

triumphant ending, like a hero’s death—heroes who died young and

gloriously. It was a sudden transfiguration, a lifting-up of day.

How many an afternoon Ántonia and I have trailed along the prairie under

that magnificence! And always two long black shadows flitted before us or

followed after, dark spots on the ruddy grass.

We had been silent a long time, and the edge of the sun sank nearer and

nearer the prairie floor, when we saw a figure moving on the edge of the

upland, a gun over his shoulder. He was walking slowly, dragging his feet

along as if he had no purpose. We broke into a run to overtake him.

“My papa sick all the time,” Tony panted as we flew. “He not look good,

Jim.”

As we neared Mr. Shimerda she shouted, and he lifted his head and peered

about. Tony ran up to him, caught his hand and pressed it against her

cheek. She was the only one of his family who could rouse the old man from

the torpor in which he seemed to live. He took the bag from his belt and

showed us three rabbits he had shot, looked at Ántonia with a wintry

flicker of a smile and began to tell her something. She turned to me.

“My tatinek make me little hat with the skins, little hat for win-ter!”

she exclaimed joyfully. “Meat for eat, skin for hat,”—she told off these

benefits on her fingers.

Her father put his hand on her hair, but she caught his wrist and lifted

it carefully away, talking to him rapidly. I heard the name of old Hata.

He untied the handkerchief, separated her hair with his fingers, and stood

looking down at the green insect. When it began to chirp faintly, he

listened as if it were a beautiful sound.

I picked up the gun he had dropped; a queer piece from the old country,

short and heavy, with a stag’s head on the cock. When he saw me examining

it, he turned to me with his far-away look that always made me feel as if

I were down at the bottom of a well. He spoke kindly and gravely, and

Ántonia translated:—

“My tatinek say when you are big boy, he give you his gun. Very fine, from

Bohemie. It was belong to a great man, very rich, like what you not got

here; many fields, many forests, many big house. My papa play for his

wedding, and he give my papa fine gun, and my papa give you.”

[Illustration: Mr. Shimerda walking on the upland prairie with a gun over

his shoulder]

I was glad that this project was one of futurity. There never were such

people as the Shimerdas for wanting to give away everything they had. Even

the mother was always offering me things, though I knew she expected

substantial presents in return. We stood there in friendly silence, while

the feeble minstrel sheltered in Ántonia’s hair went on with its scratchy

chirp. The old man’s smile, as he listened, was so full of sadness, of

pity for things, that I never afterward forgot it. As the sun sank there

came a sudden coolness and the strong smell of earth and drying grass.

Ántonia and her father went off hand in hand, and I buttoned up my jacket

and raced my shadow home.

VII

MUCH as I liked Ántonia, I hated a superior tone that she sometimes took

with me. She was four years older than I, to be sure, and had seen more of

the world; but I was a boy and she was a girl, and I resented her

protecting manner. Before the autumn was over she began to treat me more

like an equal and to defer to me in other things than reading lessons.

This change came about from an adventure we had together.

One day when I rode over to the Shimerdas’ I found Ántonia starting off on

foot for Russian Peter’s house, to borrow a spade Ambrosch needed. I

offered to take her on the pony, and she got up behind me. There had been

another black frost the night before, and the air was clear and heady as

wine. Within a week all the blooming roads had been despoiled—hundreds of

miles of yellow sunflowers had been transformed into brown, rattling,

burry stalks.

We found Russian Peter digging his potatoes. We were glad to go in and get

warm by his kitchen stove and to see his squashes and Christmas melons,

heaped in the storeroom for winter. As we rode away with the spade,

Ántonia suggested that we stop at the prairie-dog town and dig into one of

the holes. We could find out whether they ran straight down, or were

horizontal, like mole-holes; whether they had underground connections;

whether the owls had nests down there, lined with feathers. We might get

some puppies, or owl eggs, or snake-skins.

The dog-town was spread out over perhaps ten acres. The grass had been

nibbled short and even, so this stretch was not shaggy and red like the

surrounding country, but gray and velvety. The holes were several yards

apart, and were disposed with a good deal of regularity, almost as if the

town had been laid out in streets and avenues. One always felt that an

orderly and very sociable kind of life was going on there. I picketed Dude

down in a draw, and we went wandering about, looking for a hole that would

be easy to dig. The dogs were out, as usual, dozens of them, sitting up on

their hind legs over the doors of their houses. As we approached, they

barked, shook their tails at us, and scurried underground. Before the

mouths of the holes were little patches of sand and gravel, scratched up,

we supposed, from a long way below the surface. Here and there, in the

town, we came on larger gravel patches, several yards away from any hole.

If the dogs had scratched the sand up in excavating, how had they carried

it so far? It was on one of these gravel beds that I met my adventure.

We were examining a big hole with two entrances. The burrow sloped into

the ground at a gentle angle, so that we could see where the two corridors

united, and the floor was dusty from use, like a little highway over which

much travel went. I was walking backward, in a crouching position, when I

heard Ántonia scream. She was standing opposite me, pointing behind me and

shouting something in Bohemian. I whirled round, and there, on one of

those dry gravel beds, was the biggest snake I had ever seen. He was

sunning himself, after the cold night, and he must have been asleep when

Ántonia screamed. When I turned he was lying in long loose waves, like a

letter “W.” He twitched and began to coil slowly. He was not merely a big

snake, I thought—he was a circus monstrosity. His abominable muscularity,

his loathsome, fluid motion, somehow made me sick. He was as thick as my

leg, and looked as if millstones could n’t crush the disgusting vitality

out of him. He lifted his hideous little head, and rattled. I did n’t run

because I did n’t think of it—if my back had been against a stone wall I

could n’t have felt more cornered. I saw his coils tighten—now he would

spring, spring his length, I remembered. I ran up and drove at his head

with my spade, struck him fairly across the neck, and in a minute he was

all about my feet in wavy loops. I struck now from hate. Ántonia,

barefooted as she was, ran up behind me. Even after I had pounded his ugly

head flat, his body kept on coiling and winding, doubling and falling back

on itself. I walked away and turned my back. I felt seasick. Ántonia came

after me, crying, “O Jimmy, he not bite you? You sure? Why you not run

when I say?”

“What did you jabber Bohunk for? You might have told me there was a snake

behind me!” I said petulantly.

“I know I am just awful, Jim, I was so scared.” She took my handkerchief

from my pocket and tried to wipe my face with it, but I snatched it away

from her. I suppose I looked as sick as I felt.

“I never know you was so brave, Jim,” she went on comfortingly. “You is

just like big mans; you wait for him lift his head and then you go for

him. Ain’t you feel scared a bit? Now we take that snake home and show

everybody. Nobody ain’t seen in this kawn-tree so big snake like you

kill.”

She went on in this strain until I began to think that I had longed for

this opportunity, and had hailed it with joy. Cautiously we went back to

the snake; he was still groping with his tail, turning up his ugly belly

in the light. A faint, fetid smell came from him, and a thread of green

liquid oozed from his crushed head.

“Look, Tony, that’s his poison,” I said.

I took a long piece of string from my pocket, and she lifted his head with

the spade while I tied a noose around it. We pulled him out straight and

measured him by my riding-quirt; he was about five and a half feet long.

He had twelve rattles, but they were broken off before they began to

taper, so I insisted that he must once have had twenty-four. I explained

to Ántonia how this meant that he was twenty-four years old, that he must

have been there when white men first came, left on from buffalo and Indian

times. As I turned him over I began to feel proud of him, to have a kind

of respect for his age and size. He seemed like the ancient, eldest Evil.

Certainly his kind have left horrible unconscious memories in all

warm-blooded life. When we dragged him down into the draw, Dude sprang off

to the end of his tether and shivered all over—would n’t let us come near

him.

We decided that Ántonia should ride Dude home, and I would walk. As she

rode along slowly, her bare legs swinging against the pony’s sides, she

kept shouting back to me about how astonished everybody would be. I

followed with the spade over my shoulder, dragging my snake. Her

exultation was contagious. The great land had never looked to me so big

and free. If the red grass were full of rattlers, I was equal to them all.

Nevertheless, I stole furtive glances behind me now and then to see that

no avenging mate, older and bigger than my quarry, was racing up from the

rear.

The sun had set when we reached our garden and went down the draw toward

the house. Otto Fuchs was the first one we met. He was sitting on the edge

of the cattle-pond, having a quiet pipe before supper. Ántonia called him

to come quick and look. He did not say anything for a minute, but

scratched his head and turned the snake over with his boot.

“Where did you run onto that beauty, Jim?”

“Up at the dog-town,” I answered laconically.

“Kill him yourself? How come you to have a weepon?”

“We’d been up to Russian Peter’s, to borrow a spade for Ambrosch.”

Otto shook the ashes out of his pipe and squatted down to count the

rattles. “It was just luck you had a tool,” he said cautiously. “Gosh! I

would n’t want to do any business with that fellow myself, unless I had a

fence-post along. Your grandmother’s snake-cane would n’t more than tickle

him. He could stand right up and talk to you, he could. Did he fight

hard?”

Ántonia broke in: “He fight something awful! He is all over Jimmy’s boots.

I scream for him to run, but he just hit and hit that snake like he was

crazy.”

Otto winked at me. After Ántonia rode on he said: “Got him in the head

first crack, did n’t you? That was just as well.”

We hung him up to the windmill, and when I went down to the kitchen I

found Ántonia standing in the middle of the floor, telling the story with

a great deal of color.

Subsequent experiences with rattlesnakes taught me that my first encounter

was fortunate in circumstance. My big rattler was old, and had led too

easy a life; there was not much fight in him. He had probably lived there

for years, with a fat prairie dog for breakfast whenever he felt like it,

a sheltered home, even an owl-feather bed, perhaps, and he had forgot that

the world does n’t owe rattlers a living. A snake of his size, in fighting

trim, would be more than any boy could handle. So in reality it was a mock

adventure; the game was fixed for me by chance, as it probably was for

many a dragon-slayer. I had been adequately armed by Russian Peter; the

snake was old and lazy; and I had Ántonia beside me, to appreciate and

admire.

That snake hung on our corral fence for several days; some of the

neighbors came to see it and agreed that it was the biggest rattler ever

killed in those parts. This was enough for Ántonia. She liked me better

from that time on, and she never took a supercilious air with me again. I

had killed a big snake—I was now a big fellow.

VIII

WHILE the autumn color was growing pale on the grass and cornfields,

things went badly with our friends the Russians. Peter told his troubles

to Mr. Shimerda: he was unable to meet a note which fell due on the first

of November; had to pay an exorbitant bonus on renewing it, and to give a

mortgage on his pigs and horses and even his milk cow. His creditor was

Wick Cutter, the merciless Black Hawk money-lender, a man of evil name

throughout the county, of whom I shall have more to say later. Peter could

give no very clear account of his transactions with Cutter. He only knew

that he had first borrowed two hundred dollars, then another hundred, then

fifty—that each time a bonus was added to the principal, and the debt grew

faster than any crop he planted. Now everything was plastered with

mortgages.

Soon after Peter renewed his note, Pavel strained himself lifting timbers

for a new barn, and fell over among the shavings with such a gush of blood

from the lungs that his fellow-workmen thought he would die on the spot.

They hauled him home and put him into his bed, and there he lay, very ill

indeed. Misfortune seemed to settle like an evil bird on the roof of the

log house, and to flap its wings there, warning human beings away. The

Russians had such bad luck that people were afraid of them and liked to

put them out of mind.

One afternoon Ántonia and her father came over to our house to get

buttermilk, and lingered, as they usually did, until the sun was low. Just

as they were leaving, Russian Peter drove up. Pavel was very bad, he said,

and wanted to talk to Mr. Shimerda and his daughter; he had come to fetch

them. When Ántonia and her father got into the wagon, I entreated

grandmother to let me go with them: I would gladly go without my supper, I

would sleep in the Shimerdas’ barn and run home in the morning. My plan

must have seemed very foolish to her, but she was often large-minded about

humoring the desires of other people. She asked Peter to wait a moment,

and when she came back from the kitchen she brought a bag of sandwiches

and doughnuts for us.

Mr. Shimerda and Peter were on the front seat; Ántonia and I sat in the

straw behind and ate our lunch as we bumped along. After the sun sank, a

cold wind sprang up and moaned over the prairie. If this turn in the

weather had come sooner, I should not have got away. We burrowed down in

the straw and curled up close together, watching the angry red die out of

the west and the stars begin to shine in the clear, windy sky. Peter kept

sighing and groaning. Tony whispered to me that he was afraid Pavel would

never get well. We lay still and did not talk. Up there the stars grew

magnificently bright. Though we had come from such different parts of the

world, in both of us there was some dusky superstition that those shining

groups have their influence upon what is and what is not to be. Perhaps

Russian Peter, come from farther away than any of us, had brought from his

land, too, some such belief.

The little house on the hillside was so much the color of the night that

we could not see it as we came up the draw. The ruddy windows guided

us—the light from the kitchen stove, for there was no lamp burning.

We entered softly. The man in the wide bed seemed to be asleep. Tony and I

sat down on the bench by the wall and leaned our arms on the table in

front of us. The firelight flickered on the hewn logs that supported the

thatch overhead. Pavel made a rasping sound when he breathed, and he kept

moaning. We waited. The wind shook the doors and windows impatiently, then

swept on again, singing through the big spaces. Each gust, as it bore

down, rattled the panes, and swelled off like the others. They made me

think of defeated armies, retreating; or of ghosts who were trying

desperately to get in for shelter, and then went moaning on. Presently, in

one of those sobbing intervals between the blasts, the coyotes tuned up

with their whining howl; one, two, three, then all together—to tell us

that winter was coming. This sound brought an answer from the bed,—a long

complaining cry,—as if Pavel were having bad dreams or were waking to some

old misery. Peter listened, but did not stir. He was sitting on the floor

by the kitchen stove. The coyotes broke out again; yap, yap, yap—then the

high whine. Pavel called for something and struggled up on his elbow.

“He is scared of the wolves,” Ántonia whispered to me. “In his country

there are very many, and they eat men and women.” We slid closer together

along the bench.

I could not take my eyes off the man in the bed. His shirt was hanging

open, and his emaciated chest, covered with yellow bristle, rose and fell

horribly. He began to cough. Peter shuffled to his feet, caught up the

tea-kettle and mixed him some hot water and whiskey. The sharp smell of

spirits went through the room.

Pavel snatched the cup and drank, then made Peter give him the bottle and

slipped it under his pillow, grinning disagreeably, as if he had outwitted

some one. His eyes followed Peter about the room with a contemptuous,

unfriendly expression. It seemed to me that he despised him for being so

simple and docile.

Presently Pavel began to talk to Mr. Shimerda, scarcely above a whisper.

He was telling a long story, and as he went on, Ántonia took my hand under

the table and held it tight. She leaned forward and strained her ears to

hear him. He grew more and more excited, and kept pointing all around his

bed, as if there were things there and he wanted Mr. Shimerda to see them.

“It’s wolves, Jimmy,” Ántonia whispered. “It’s awful, what he says!”

The sick man raged and shook his fist. He seemed to be cursing people who

had wronged him. Mr. Shimerda caught him by the shoulders, but could

hardly hold him in bed. At last he was shut off by a coughing fit which

fairly choked him. He pulled a cloth from under his pillow and held it to

his mouth. Quickly it was covered with bright red spots—I thought I had

never seen any blood so bright. When he lay down and turned his face to

the wall, all the rage had gone out of him. He lay patiently fighting for

breath, like a child with croup. Ántonia’s father uncovered one of his

long bony legs and rubbed it rhythmically. From our bench we could see

what a hollow case his body was. His spine and shoulder-blades stood out

like the bones under the hide of a dead steer left in the fields. That

sharp backbone must have hurt him when he lay on it.

Gradually, relief came to all of us. Whatever it was, the worst was over.

Mr. Shimerda signed to us that Pavel was asleep. Without a word Peter got

up and lit his lantern. He was going out to get his team to drive us home.

Mr. Shimerda went with him. We sat and watched the long bowed back under

the blue sheet, scarcely daring to breathe.

On the way home, when we were lying in the straw, under the jolting and

rattling Ántonia told me as much of the story as she could. What she did

not tell me then, she told later; we talked of nothing else for days

afterward.

When Pavel and Peter were young men, living at home in Russia, they were

asked to be groomsmen for a friend who was to marry the belle of another

village. It was in the dead of winter and the groom’s party went over to

the wedding in sledges. Peter and Pavel drove in the groom’s sledge, and

six sledges followed with all his relatives and friends.

After the ceremony at the church, the party went to a dinner given by the

parents of the bride. The dinner lasted all afternoon; then it became a

supper and continued far into the night. There was much dancing and

drinking. At midnight the parents of the bride said good-bye to her and

blessed her. The groom took her up in his arms and carried her out to his

sledge and tucked her under the blankets. He sprang in beside her, and

Pavel and Peter (our Pavel and Peter!) took the front seat. Pavel drove.

The party set out with singing and the jingle of sleigh-bells, the groom’s

sledge going first. All the drivers were more or less the worse for

merry-making, and the groom was absorbed in his bride.

The wolves were bad that winter, and every one knew it, yet when they

heard the first wolf-cry, the drivers were not much alarmed. They had too

much good food and drink inside them. The first howls were taken up and

echoed and with quickening repetitions. The wolves were coming together.

There was no moon, but the starlight was clear on the snow. A black drove

came up over the hill behind the wedding party. The wolves ran like

streaks of shadow; they looked no bigger than dogs, but there were

hundreds of them.

Something happened to the hindmost sledge: the driver lost control,—he was

probably very drunk,—the horses left the road, the sledge was caught in a

clump of trees, and overturned. The occupants rolled out over the snow,

and the fleetest of the wolves sprang upon them. The shrieks that followed

made everybody sober. The drivers stood up and lashed their horses. The

groom had the best team and his sledge was lightest—all the others carried

from six to a dozen people.

Another driver lost control. The screams of the horses were more terrible

to hear than the cries of the men and women. Nothing seemed to check the

wolves. It was hard to tell what was happening in the rear; the people who

were falling behind shrieked as piteously as those who were already lost.

The little bride hid her face on the groom’s shoulder and sobbed. Pavel

sat still and watched his horses. The road was clear and white, and the

groom’s three blacks went like the wind. It was only necessary to be calm

and to guide them carefully.

At length, as they breasted a long hill, Peter rose cautiously and looked

back. “There are only three sledges left,” he whispered.

“And the wolves?” Pavel asked.

“Enough! Enough for all of us.”

Pavel reached the brow of the hill, but only two sledges followed him down

the other side. In that moment on the hilltop, they saw behind them a

whirling black group on the snow. Presently the groom screamed. He saw his

father’s sledge overturned, with his mother and sisters. He sprang up as

if he meant to jump, but the girl shrieked and held him back. It was even

then too late. The black ground-shadows were already crowding over the

heap in the road, and one horse ran out across the fields, his harness

hanging to him, wolves at his heels. But the groom’s movement had given

Pavel an idea.

They were within a few miles of their village now. The only sledge left

out of six was not very far behind them, and Pavel’s middle horse was

failing. Beside a frozen pond something happened to the other sledge;

Peter saw it plainly. Three big wolves got abreast of the horses, and the

horses went crazy. They tried to jump over each other, got tangled up in

the harness, and overturned the sledge.

When the shrieking behind them died away, Pavel realized that he was alone

upon the familiar road. “They still come?” he asked Peter.

“Yes.”

“How many?”

“Twenty, thirty—enough.”

Now his middle horse was being almost dragged by the other two. Pavel gave

Peter the reins and stepped carefully into the back of the sledge. He

called to the groom that they must lighten—and pointed to the bride. The

young man cursed him and held her tighter. Pavel tried to drag her away.

In the struggle, the groom rose. Pavel knocked him over the side of the

sledge and threw the girl after him. He said he never remembered exactly

how he did it, or what happened afterward. Peter, crouching in the front

seat, saw nothing. The first thing either of them noticed was a new sound

that broke into the clear air, louder than they had ever heard it

before—the bell of the monastery of their own village, ringing for early

prayers.

Pavel and Peter drove into the village alone, and they had been alone ever

since. They were run out of their village. Pavel’s own mother would not

look at him. They went away to strange towns, but when people learned

where they came from, they were always asked if they knew the two men who

had fed the bride to the wolves. Wherever they went, the story followed

them. It took them five years to save money enough to come to America.

They worked in Chicago, Des Moines, Fort Wayne, but they were always

unfortunate. When Pavel’s health grew so bad, they decided to try farming.

Pavel died a few days after he unburdened his mind to Mr. Shimerda, and

was buried in the Norwegian graveyard. Peter sold off everything, and left

the country—went to be cook in a railway construction camp where gangs of

Russians were employed.

At his sale we bought Peter’s wheelbarrow and some of his harness. During

the auction he went about with his head down, and never lifted his eyes.

He seemed not to care about anything. The Black Hawk money-lender who held

mortgages on Peter’s live-stock was there, and he bought in the sale notes

at about fifty cents on the dollar. Every one said Peter kissed the cow

before she was led away by her new owner. I did not see him do it, but

this I know: after all his furniture and his cook-stove and pots and pans

had been hauled off by the purchasers, when his house was stripped and

bare, he sat down on the floor with his clasp-knife and ate all the melons

that he had put away for winter. When Mr. Shimerda and Krajiek drove up in

their wagon to take Peter to the train, they found him with a dripping

beard, surrounded by heaps of melon rinds.

The loss of his two friends had a depressing effect upon old Mr. Shimerda.

When he was out hunting, he used to go into the empty log house and sit

there, brooding. This cabin was his hermitage until the winter snows

penned him in his cave. For Ántonia and me, the story of the wedding party

was never at an end. We did not tell Pavel’s secret to any one, but

guarded it jealously—as if the wolves of the Ukraine had gathered that

night long ago, and the wedding party been sacrificed, to give us a

painful and peculiar pleasure. At night, before I went to sleep, I often

found myself in a sledge drawn by three horses, dashing through a country

that looked something like Nebraska and something like Virginia.

IX

THE first snowfall came early in December. I remember how the world looked

from our sitting-room window as I dressed behind the stove that morning:

the low sky was like a sheet of metal; the blond cornfields had faded out

into ghostliness at last; the little pond was frozen under its stiff

willow bushes. Big white flakes were whirling over everything and

disappearing in the red grass.

Beyond the pond, on the slope that climbed to the cornfield, there was,

faintly marked in the grass, a great circle where the Indians used to

ride. Jake and Otto were sure that when they galloped round that ring the

Indians tortured prisoners, bound to a stake in the center; but

grandfather thought they merely ran races or trained horses there.

Whenever one looked at this slope against the setting sun, the circle

showed like a pattern in the grass; and this morning, when the first light

spray of snow lay over it, it came out with wonderful distinctness, like

strokes of Chinese white on canvas. The old figure stirred me as it had

never done before and seemed a good omen for the winter.

As soon as the snow had packed hard I began to drive about the country in

a clumsy sleigh that Otto Fuchs made for me by fastening a wooden

goods-box on bobs. Fuchs had been apprenticed to a cabinet-maker in the

old country and was very handy with tools. He would have done a better job

if I had n’t hurried him. My first trip was to the post-office, and the

next day I went over to take Yulka and Ántonia for a sleigh-ride.

It was a bright, cold day. I piled straw and buffalo robes into the box,

and took two hot bricks wrapped in old blankets. When I got to the

Shimerdas’ I did not go up to the house, but sat in my sleigh at the

bottom of the draw and called. Ántonia and Yulka came running out, wearing

little rabbit-skin hats their father had made for them. They had heard

about my sledge from Ambrosch and knew why I had come. They tumbled in

beside me and we set off toward the north, along a road that happened to

be broken.

The sky was brilliantly blue, and the sunlight on the glittering white

stretches of prairie was almost blinding. As Ántonia said, the whole world

was changed by the snow; we kept looking in vain for familiar landmarks.

The deep arroyo through which Squaw Creek wound was now only a cleft

between snow-drifts—very blue when one looked down into it. The tree-tops

that had been gold all the autumn were dwarfed and twisted, as if they

would never have any life in them again. The few little cedars, which were

so dull and dingy before, now stood out a strong, dusky green. The wind

had the burning taste of fresh snow; my throat and nostrils smarted as if

some one had opened a hartshorn bottle. The cold stung, and at the same

time delighted one. My horse’s breath rose like steam, and whenever we

stopped he smoked all over. The cornfields got back a little of their

color under the dazzling light, and stood the palest possible gold in the

sun and snow. All about us the snow was crusted in shallow terraces, with

tracings like ripple-marks at the edges, curly waves that were the actual

impression of the stinging lash in the wind.

The girls had on cotton dresses under their shawls; they kept shivering

beneath the buffalo robes and hugging each other for warmth. But they were

so glad to get away from their ugly cave and their mother’s scolding that

they begged me to go on and on, as far as Russian Peter’s house. The great

fresh open, after the stupefying warmth indoors, made them behave like

wild things. They laughed and shouted, and said they never wanted to go

home again. Could n’t we settle down and live in Russian Peter’s house,

Yulka asked, and could n’t I go to town and buy things for us to keep

house with?

All the way to Russian Peter’s we were extravagantly happy, but when we

turned back,—it must have been about four o’clock,—the east wind grew

stronger and began to howl; the sun lost its heartening power and the sky

became gray and somber. I took off my long woolen comforter and wound it

around Yulka’s throat. She got so cold that we made her hide her head

under the buffalo robe. Ántonia and I sat erect, but I held the reins

clumsily, and my eyes were blinded by the wind a good deal of the time. It

was growing dark when we got to their house, but I refused to go in with

them and get warm. I knew my hands would ache terribly if I went near a

fire. Yulka forgot to give me back my comforter, and I had to drive home

directly against the wind. The next day I came down with an attack of

quinsy, which kept me in the house for nearly two weeks.

The basement kitchen seemed heavenly safe and warm in those days—like a

tight little boat in a winter sea. The men were out in the fields all day,

husking corn, and when they came in at noon, with long caps pulled down

over their ears and their feet in red-lined overshoes, I used to think

they were like Arctic explorers.

In the afternoons, when grandmother sat upstairs darning, or making

husking-gloves, I read “The Swiss Family Robinson” aloud to her, and I

felt that the Swiss family had no advantages over us in the way of an

adventurous life. I was convinced that man’s strongest antagonist is the

cold. I admired the cheerful zest with which grandmother went about

keeping us warm and comfortable and well-fed. She often reminded me, when

she was preparing for the return of the hungry men, that this country was

not like Virginia, and that here a cook had, as she said, “very little to

do with.” On Sundays she gave us as much chicken as we could eat, and on

other days we had ham or bacon or sausage meat. She baked either pies or

cake for us every day, unless, for a change, she made my favorite pudding,

striped with currants and boiled in a bag.

Next to getting warm and keeping warm, dinner and supper were the most

interesting things we had to think about. Our lives centered around warmth

and food and the return of the men at nightfall. I used to wonder, when

they came in tired from the fields, their feet numb and their hands

cracked and sore, how they could do all the chores so conscientiously:

feed and water and bed the horses, milk the cows, and look after the pigs.

When supper was over, it took them a long while to get the cold out of

their bones. While grandmother and I washed the dishes and grandfather

read his paper upstairs, Jake and Otto sat on the long bench behind the

stove, “easing” their inside boots, or rubbing mutton tallow into their

cracked hands.

Every Saturday night we popped corn or made taffy, and Otto Fuchs used to

sing, “For I Am a Cowboy and Know I’ve Done Wrong,” or, “Bury Me Not on

the Lone Prairee.” He had a good baritone voice and always led the singing

when we went to church services at the sod schoolhouse.

I can still see those two men sitting on the bench; Otto’s close-clipped

head and Jake’s shaggy hair slicked flat in front by a wet comb. I can see

the sag of their tired shoulders against the whitewashed wall. What good

fellows they were, how much they knew, and how many things they had kept

faith with!

Fuchs had been a cowboy, a stage-driver, a bar-tender, a miner; had

wandered all over that great Western country and done hard work

everywhere, though, as grandmother said, he had nothing to show for it.

Jake was duller than Otto. He could scarcely read, wrote even his name

with difficulty, and he had a violent temper which sometimes made him

behave like a crazy man—tore him all to pieces and actually made him ill.

But he was so soft-hearted that any one could impose upon him. If he, as

he said, “forgot himself” and swore before grandmother, he went about

depressed and shamefaced all day. They were both of them jovial about the

cold in winter and the heat in summer, always ready to work overtime and

to meet emergencies. It was a matter of pride with them not to spare

themselves. Yet they were the sort of men who never get on, somehow, or do

anything but work hard for a dollar or two a day.

On those bitter, starlit nights, as we sat around the old stove that fed

us and warmed us and kept us cheerful, we could hear the coyotes howling

down by the corrals, and their hungry, wintry cry used to remind the boys

of wonderful animal stories; about gray wolves and bears in the Rockies,

wildcats and panthers in the Virginia mountains. Sometimes Fuchs could be

persuaded to talk about the outlaws and desperate characters he had known.

I remember one funny story about himself that made grandmother, who was

working her bread on the bread-board, laugh until she wiped her eyes with

her bare arm, her hands being floury. It was like this:—

When Otto left Austria to come to America, he was asked by one of his

relatives to look after a woman who was crossing on the same boat, to join

her husband in Chicago. The woman started off with two children, but it

was clear that her family might grow larger on the journey. Fuchs said he

“got on fine with the kids,” and liked the mother, though she played a

sorry trick on him. In mid-ocean she proceeded to have not one baby, but

three! This event made Fuchs the object of undeserved notoriety, since he

was traveling with her. The steerage stewardess was indignant with him,

the doctor regarded him with suspicion. The first-cabin passengers, who

made up a purse for the woman, took an embarrassing interest in Otto, and

often inquired of him about his charge. When the triplets were taken

ashore at New York, he had, as he said, “to carry some of them.” The trip

to Chicago was even worse than the ocean voyage. On the train it was very

difficult to get milk for the babies and to keep their bottles clean. The

mother did her best, but no woman, out of her natural resources, could

feed three babies. The husband, in Chicago, was working in a furniture

factory for modest wages, and when he met his family at the station he was

rather crushed by the size of it. He, too, seemed to consider Fuchs in

some fashion to blame. “I was sure glad,” Otto concluded, “that he did n’t

take his hard feeling out on that poor woman; but he had a sullen eye for

me, all right! Now, did you ever hear of a young feller’s having such hard

luck, Mrs. Burden?”

Grandmother told him she was sure the Lord had remembered these things to

his credit, and had helped him out of many a scrape when he did n’t

realize that he was being protected by Providence.

X

FOR several weeks after my sleigh-ride, we heard nothing from the

Shimerdas. My sore throat kept me indoors, and grandmother had a cold

which made the housework heavy for her. When Sunday came she was glad to

have a day of rest. One night at supper Fuchs told us he had seen Mr.

Shimerda out hunting.

“He’s made himself a rabbit-skin cap, Jim, and a rabbit-skin collar that

he buttons on outside his coat. They ain’t got but one overcoat among ’em

over there, and they take turns wearing it. They seem awful scared of

cold, and stick in that hole in the bank like badgers.”

“All but the crazy boy,” Jake put in. “He never wears the coat. Krajiek

says he’s turrible strong and can stand anything. I guess rabbits must be

getting scarce in this locality. Ambrosch come along by the cornfield

yesterday where I was at work and showed me three prairie dogs he’d shot.

He asked me if they was good to eat. I spit and made a face and took on,

to scare him, but he just looked like he was smarter’n me and put ’em back

in his sack and walked off.”

Grandmother looked up in alarm and spoke to grandfather. “Josiah, you

don’t suppose Krajiek would let them poor creatures eat prairie dogs, do

you?”

“You had better go over and see our neighbors to-morrow, Emmaline,” he

replied gravely.

Fuchs put in a cheerful word and said prairie dogs were clean beasts and

ought to be good for food, but their family connections were against them.

I asked what he meant, and he grinned and said they belonged to the rat

family.

When I went downstairs in the morning, I found grandmother and Jake

packing a hamper basket in the kitchen.

“Now, Jake,” grandmother was saying, “if you can find that old rooster

that got his comb froze, just give his neck a twist, and we’ll take him

along. There’s no good reason why Mrs. Shimerda could n’t have got hens

from her neighbors last fall and had a henhouse going by now. I reckon she

was confused and did n’t know where to begin. I’ve come strange to a new

country myself, but I never forgot hens are a good thing to have, no

matter what you don’t have.”

“Just as you say, mam,” said Jake, “but I hate to think of Krajiek getting

a leg of that old rooster.” He tramped out through the long cellar and

dropped the heavy door behind him.