(E. Henderson: For Short Stories.)
A bleak afternoon in Dakota ... a sledge containing two women and
several men is driven rapidly across the prairie.
Alighting at a “shanty,” the women and one of the men enter. The rest
of the men immediately begin digging, or rather “chopping” a grave in
the frozen ground. They work silently and unceasingly, by turns, for
the short winter afternoon already shows signs of merging into night.
The three that entered the house are standing, nervously looking on the
scene before them. A fireless stove, unmade beds, everything desolate
and untidy. In the middle of the room, a table; on it a motionless
form, covered with a coarse gray blanket; on the bed a much smaller,
shrouded, form.
One of the women advances to the table, and summoning all her
fortitude, throws aside the blanket, and looks on the face of the
frozen woman ... frozen solid as a block of ice, the clenched hands,
filled with fine, dry snow, fine as sand, sifted into every tress of
hair, into her eyes, her ears, down into her bosom, that lay bare,
showing how she had tried to nourish her babe, in the face of that
pitiless storm ... what availed the warmest mother love, against that
relentless cold ... frozen with the blood still in her cheeks and lips
... no time for the crimson stream of life to leave the face.
Bare and comfortless as their home was, no one knows what tempted them
to leave it that terrible day. They were bound for a neighbor’s house
half a mile distant but had not gone quarter the way when they turned
in the wrong direction. They struggled on, husband and wife, carrying
the babe less than a year old, until the woman could go no further, and
throwing up her hands, fell down. Laying the now stiffening form of the
child beside its mother, the bewildered father wandered on, on, until
he reached by chance, miles distant, a place to incoherently tell his
story and--perish.
The family belonged to the poor “dumb driven cattle” class of Russian
Jews. Their own kind had left them to their fate. So the settlers had
turned out to give them Christian burial. When the desolate funeral
was over the party drove rapidly home again, with the picture before
them, of what might be their own fate, if night overtook them on the
prairies.