IN THE DRIFTED SLEIGH.
The Nixon sleigh stood in the drifts, tilted end up in the attitude of a
sinking boat. There were no billows to rock it, and the place where it
stuck was solid enough. There was no danger of the sleigh being covered
by submersion, either sudden or gradual; but the prairie winter tempest
has another way of achieving burial of derelict craft and spent crews,
when the travelling foot slows to a halt and the numbed brain yields to
the coaxing of sleep.
There are beautiful things done between October and April by the
northwest frost and sun--pattern on pane, transformation of twig,
fashion of flake, aurora, twin "dogs" of the spectral sun-bow--but
nothing more marvellous and swift than the building, over fallen body or
stopped vehicle, of the white and wonderful sepulchre of the snow.
Out from the back of the sleigh as it stood, there tailed an
indescribable drift, geometrically proportioned, beautiful beyond words.
Fifteen full feet it extended, from the high sleigh-box windward, to the
low drift-surface a-lee. In shape it was like the back of a saurian--one
of those ruder, hardier things generationed before the earth was
tempered by the Creator to the habitation of man. Within the sleigh-box
another drift had formed, extending similarly from the wind-breaking
frontboard along the floor to the back end. On the high seat above the
central point of this latter drift, her feet buried in it, her upper
body mummied in sacks and every loose thing the sleigh had held, froze
and mumbled Lovina Nixon. Out alongside the bob-sleigh, a kinetic but
uni-colored piece of the vast and volatile snow-swirl, John Nixon
stamped up and down in the trodden hollow he had made on the leeward
side of the drift, thrashed his long arms about his torso with a
vigorous smack of leather mitt on shoulder-blade, and at intervals
paused to lean over the side of the sleigh-box and shout encouragement
to the immovable and helpless Lovina, cowled and cloaked in
horse-blankets and gunny-sacks.
"How's them feet, Lovina-girl?" would come the question--raised to a
whoop in order to out-crow the hurricane and penetrate the hempen
coccoon. After due pause, the response would come, querulous, monotoned
and faint as a voice heard through a wall:
"Ain't I said it often, that you'd--be the death of me--Jack Nixon.
Why-for did you--let them team go? Just to save your tony
friends--that's all. O-o-oh!"
And John Nixon--though, with his own feet aching and his finger-ends
tingling, he would be tempted to retort, "How about me?"--would
respond, bracingly, "Never mind, girl--there, I think I hear Jim
a-comin' now. Listen!"
But the moments passed; the half-hours grew to hours; and out of the
quivering white, with its perpetual hiss and whistle, its under-roar of
distant wind-shaken groves, came no companionable jangle of bells. It
was not until the hot bricks under Lovina's toes had lost their heat and
she had commenced to cry and to labor against the creeping ache of cold
by beating her feet with a dismal weak "tap-tap" against the bottom of
the sleigh-box--not until stout John Nixon, aching from shoulder to
waist with flailing his arms about his body, felt a cold doubt begin to
rise even in the face of his confidence in hardy Jim Burns--that the
shape and the sound of deliverance bulged and tinkled out through the
texture of the storm-curtain, just ahead of the sleigh.
"Now, see here, you Mary," the voice was that of Lovina Nixon as,
something over three-quarters of an hour later, she sat, feet in oven
and tea-cup and saucer in lap, in the centre of the reassembled family
group of the Nixon farmhouse; "I don't mind you helpin' yourself to
Nixon's socks, when people is in need--but why don't you give 'em
something to put on over the top of them, so's they won't walk the heels
through," the reference was to Ware who, after an unconscious habit,
developed by the usage of almost a lifetime, was pacing thoughtfully up
and down the creaky floor overhead, where the spare bed was; "I got to
darn them socks, not you."
"Jim," said John Nixon, as he propped a piece of pine board on the
stove-pan and commenced to whittle kindlings for the morning fire,
"don't forget to remind me, tomorrow, that we got to sharpen up the
corks (caulks) of all them horses' shoes. I noticed yon Prince-horse
kind of gruntin' as I led him into the stable, there, to-night. You
ain't been loadin' them team too heavy while I been away?"
Jim Burns paused in the winding of a heavy nickel watch and glanced at
his employer.
"Aw, now, Jack," he remonstrated, "don't you know no better than for to
ask me a question like that? You'd think I was some green Englishman, or
somethin'."
Ware, to whom this dialogue came up freely through the cracks between
the warped floor-boards, smiled to himself as he sat down on the edge of
the spare bed and slipped off the enormous gray socks borrowed from the
wardrobe of his host.
"We do so like to be each other's critics," he murmured, with a half-sad
cadence; "but I suppose it's the same, the world over.... If we could
only get away from that, we children of this planet might win back what
we lost at Bab-el."