Day by day the plain thickened with life. Each noon a crowd of
land-seekers swarmed about the Moggason Ranch asking for food and
shelter, and Blanche, responding to Rivers' entreaties, went down to
cook, returning each night to her bed. Rivers professed to be very
grateful for her aid.
All ages and sexes came to take claims. Old men, alone and feeble,
school teachers from the East, young girls from the towns of the older
counties, boys not yet of age--everywhere incoming claimants were
setting stakes upon the green and beautiful sod.
Each day the grass grew more velvety green. Each day the sky waxed
warmer. The snow disappeared from the ravines. The ice broke up on the
Moggason. The ponds disappeared. Plover flew over with wailing cry.
Buffalo birds, prairie pigeons, larks, blackbirds, sparrows, joined
their voices to those of the cranes and geese and ducks, and the prairie
piped and twittered and clacked and chuckled with life. The gophers
emerged from their winter-quarters, the foxes barked on the hills, the
skunk hobbled along the ravines, and the badger raised mounds of fresh
soil as if to aid the boomer by showing how deep the black loam was.
Everybody was in holiday mood. Men whistled and sang and shouted and
toiled--toiled terribly--and yet it did not seem like toil! They sank
wells and ploughed gardens and built barns and planted seeds, and yet
the whole settlement continued to present the care-free manners of a
great pleasure party. It seemed as if no one needed to work, and,
therefore, those first months were months of gay and swift progress.
It was the most beautiful spring Blanche and Willard Burke had spent
since their marriage nine years before. Blanche forgot to be petulant or
moody. She was in superb health, and carried herself like a girl of
eighteen. She appeared to have lost all her regrets.
She laughed heartily when Rivers came over one afternoon and boldly
declared:
"Burke, I've c'me to borrow your wife. We've got a lot o' tenderfoots
over there to-night, and I'm a little shy of Bailey's biscuits. I'm
going to carry your cook away."
"All right; only bring her back."
Blanche was a little embarrassed when Rivers replied: "I don't like to
agree to do that. Mebbe you'd better come over to make sure I do."
"All right. I'll come over in time for supper." Burke's simple, good
face glowed with enjoyment of the fun. He smilingly went back to beating
his plough-share with hammer and wedge as Rivers drove away with
Blanche. The clink of his steel rang through the golden light that
flooded the prairie, keeping time to his whistled song.
In the months of April and May the world sent a skirmish-line into this
echoless land to take possession of a belt of territory six hundred
miles long and one hundred miles broad. The settlers came like locusts;
they sang like larks. From Alsace and Lorraine, from the North Sea, from
Russia, from the Alps, they came, and their faces shone as if they had
happened upon the spring-time of the world. Tyranny was behind them, the
majesty of God's wilderness before them, a mystic joy within them.
Under their hands the straddle-bug multiplied. He is short-lived, this
prairie insect. He usually dies in thirty days--by courtesy alone he
lives. He expresses the settlers' hope and sense of justice. In these
spring days of good cheer he lived at times to sixty days--but only on
stony ground or fire-scarred, peaty lowlands.
He withered--this strange, three-legged, voiceless insect--but in his
stead arose a beetle. This beetle sheltered human beings, and was called
a shack.
They were all alike, these shacks. They had roofs of one slant. They
were built of rough lumber, and roofed with tarred paper, which made all
food taste of tar.
They were dens but little higher than a man's head, and yet they
sheltered the most joyous people that ever set foot to earth. In one
cabin lived a girl and a canary-bird, all alone. In the next a man who
cooked his own food when he did not share his rations with the girl, all
in frank and honorable companionship. On the next claim were two
school-teachers, busy as magpies, using the saw and hammer with deft
accuracy. In the next was a bank-clerk out for his health--and these
clean and self-contained people lived in free intercourse without
slander and without fear. Only the Alsatians settled in groups, alien
and unapproachable. All others met at odd times and places, breathing
in the promiseful air of the clean sod, resolute to put the world of
hopeless failure behind them.
Spring merged magnificently into summer. The grass upthrust. The
waterfowl passed on to the northern lake-region. The morning symphony of
the prairie-chickens died out, but the whistle of the larks, the chatter
of the sparrows, and the wailing cry of the nesting plover came to take
its place.
The gophers whistled and trilled, the foxes barked from the hills, and
an occasional startled antelope or curious wolf passed through the line
of settlement as if to see what lay behind this strange phalanx of
ploughmen guarding their yellow shanties.
Week after week passed away, and the government surveyors did not
appear. The Boomtown _Spike_ told in each issue how the men of the
chain and compass were pushing westward; but still they did not come,
and the settlers' hopes of getting their claims filed before winter grew
fainter. The mass of them had planned to take claims in the spring, live
on them the required six months, "prove up," and return East for the
winter.
In spite of these disappointments, all continued to be merry. No one
took any part of it very seriously. The young men went out and ploughed
when they pleased, and came in and sat on the door-step and talked with
the women when they were weary. The shanties were hot and crowded, but
no one minded that; by-and-by they were to build bigger.
And, then, all was so new and beautiful, and the sky was so clear. Oh,
that marvellous, lofty sky with just clouds enough to make the blue more
intense! Oh, the wonder of the wind from the wild, mysterious green sea
to the west! With the change and sheen of the prairie, incessant and
magical life was made marvellous and the winter put far away.
Merry parties drove here and there visiting. Formalities counted for
little, and yet with all this freedom of intercourse, this close
companionship, no one pointed the finger of gossip toward any woman. The
girls in their one-room huts received calls from their bachelor
neighbors with the confidence that comes from purity of purpose, both
felt and understood. Life was strangely idyllic during these spring
days. Envy and hate and suspicion seemed exorcised from the world.