The glow of success at having gained the victory over Joyce in such an
unexpected way, the realization of being herself a homesteader, with
all the responsibilities and opportunities which that title conferred
gave Harry a new interest in the hard work of the succeeding months.
Winter came early and stayed late up there in the foothills and before
the snow began to fall in November a great deal must be done.
Most important of all was the building of the house. Within six months
after filing on land each homesteader must, in the language of the law,
"establish a residence." Fortunately the section line between Harry's
hundred and sixty and Rob's ran just east of the stream and so, by
placing the two fourteen-foot cabins together with this line between
them, a very fair-sized house would result.
Rob had figured that, with Harry's help, he could get the house up in
a month. He had planned to build it during October between harvesting
and threshing. He had already engaged to work for the ranchers down on
the flat with their hay and grain, and furthermore he had taken a job
feeding stock for the winter at Stone Bridge, a new settlement up the
river.
But now Harry must be included in the winter's plans. A few months
earlier this would have been a serious consideration, as the only
thing she could do by which she could earn her living sufficiently well
was teaching, and, as has been said, she had had to give up that work
because of eyestrain. But six months of desert life had, in addition to
broadening her ideas, restored the natural vigor of her eyesight. The
complete rest from school work, the change from living in close rooms,
from narrow, close-built streets, and moving crowds, to working out of
doors with the wide horizon and silent spaces of the hills around her
had, in fact, given her more vigor than she had ever had and she felt
more fit than ever to teach.
Here, of course, another difficulty arose. Teachers would have been
engaged for all district schools by the time Rob and Harry should be
ready to leave the ranch. They talked the situation over and decided
that an advertisement in the _Prairie Despatch_ would reach the most
remote hamlets; those where lay the probable chances of finding a
vacancy. If this failed, Harry could go out with Rob to cook for the
threshing crews and, when that work ended, board in Stone Bridge
through the winter.
Having settled this, Rob went down to help Robinson put up his second
cutting of alfalfa and Harry spent the week irrigating their alfalfa
and the garden. They had put in a quarter of an acre of potatoes with
the intention of having enough both for their own use the following
spring and summer and for selling to the ranchers down on the flat
where late frosts usually nipped the garden patches.
Harry's advertisement was to appear in that Saturday's _Despatch_,
so naturally there was no report from it when Rob came up to spend
Sunday. But the following week he brought a letter from the trustees
of a mountain hamlet and, more important, word from Mrs. Robinson that
her husband's sister living up at Stone Bridge, had written that their
teacher was going to be married and they were wondering where to find
another.
Harry, of course, rode out with Rob on Monday, taking her diploma and a
letter of recommendation from the principal of the school in the East
where she had taught. She was obliged to pass an examination before
being allowed to teach in Idaho, but she did that satisfactorily and
it was not difficult for the school board to believe in her general
fitness for the work--if "work" it could be called--she reflected after
seeing the textbooks and the fifteen children who were to be her pupils.
The winter's work being thus happily settled for them, Harry and Rob
gave their attention to the new house. He hauled the lumber at odd
times between haying and harvesting and on the first of October came
home with a last load of nails, shingles, windows and building paper,
ready to begin work.
The building of that "prove-up shack," as Rob would call it, was,
next to Harry's coming into Idaho, the most significant event in her
life. All her traditions had built the conviction that a home must be
something more than a weatherproof box containing the number of cubic
feet required by the homestead law and lighted by one window two and a
half feet square.
"I can't, I won't live in a--a shack like some I've seen," she
protested; "board walls so full of splinters you could curry a horse
against them and nothing but a row of nails for a closet. Why isn't it
just as cheap to make a pretty cottage of the same amount of wood?"
"Why, isn't it just as cheap to make a lace veil as a flour sack?
They're both made of cotton thread. I've figured on spending one
month's time and about two hundred dollars cash on this dwelling. Now
if you can show me where any style can be worked in for that sum of
money and labor--don't forget the labor--go ahead and make your plan."
This somewhat discouraging permission was quite enough for Harry. A
flood of sketches including dormer windows, pergolas, verandas and
colonial chimneys was the result offered for Rob's consideration.
"Now if I were an architect and you had a million dollars to spend we'd
show these old timers, wouldn't we?" he laughed. But nevertheless, he
did try to adapt his material to the spirit of Harry's wishes.
The eaves of the steep, gabled roof hung low; there were windows
wherever a free wall space allowed--big windows that gave the plain
rooms a set of ever-changing pictures of prairie and mountains. There
was even a little porch before the door--that door built of planks,
studded with nail-heads and twice the width of the ordinary mill-work
door, "so that when we get our piano, it will be easy to bring it
inside," explained Harry.
"You must be figuring on making money, real money," Rob teased.
Harry could not tell him how the slow raising of that house had lifted
her to the sight of still wider horizons. But every board she helped
to lay in place, every nail she drove fastened her more firmly to this
new land, strengthened her will to succeed. As she and Rob worked
they talked, planning endless improvements to be made as they should
prosper. The desire for those things stirred them to toil happier than
many pleasures.
Rob did not finish the house, there was too much else to be done; a
horse shed to be run up, firewood to be cut and hauled in readiness for
the following spring, the channel of the stream that ran close to the
house to be deepened and widened with the slip, so that when the snow
water came down in the spring break-up it would not overflow into their
new cellar, or swirl a pile of stones from the hillside into the garden.
They left the gathering of the stove wood to the last; freezing ground
would not make sagebrush any harder to cut and haul. They were getting
the wood in a coulee about a mile east of Harry's hundred and sixty
where there were plenty of willows and the sagebrush grew big and thick.
It was a cold November afternoon when, as they were loading the last
wagonful, they saw coming in along the trail a team hauling lumber and
a mountain wagon.
"Well! What do you know about that," Rob exclaimed; "looks like some
one's filed here. I'd better go over and see."
Harry watched in a stir of eager curiosity. Homesteaders! That would
mean neighbors. A procession of possibilities swept through her mind.
The three men talked for five minutes or so, then Rob came back.
"Homesteaders all right," he announced, "an old man named Eldredge and
his wife. The young fellow is a real estate man from Shoshone who's
locating them. Eldredge is only going to put up his shack this fall and
then go back east--he's from Missouri--and came out in the spring with
his wife."
"How jolly to have neighbors," Harry beamed. "I hope they've some
children?"
"Nary one. Just Darby and Joan. But she'll be another woman for you to
exchange flower seeds with and have a tryout as to which can make the
best cake. Isn't that what you've been wanting?"
"You seem to be pleased yourself. It'll give you fresh material to
tease me with."
"Fine! I didn't expect you'd see that so quickly. Too bad we'll have to
wait until next spring to start the fun."
"Oh, I don't know. By the time you've helped feed a hundred head of
cattle and cleaned the corral for a month you'll forget there is such
a thing as a joke or me to be tormented."
Harry's prediction hit the mark.
All through the winter she and Rob did not talk together once a week.
He was at work in the morning before she left for school and in the
evening after nodding a few moments over the paper he rolled off to bed.
Harry, herself, gave little thought to anything beyond her work. As
soon as she began teaching, all the interest and pleasure which she had
taken in it before revived with an ardor to kindle the most indifferent
child. She had been cut off so abruptly from her companionship with
girls that her heart was still a little bit sore from the tearing
loose of old bonds. Also, she had been in her new environment just
long enough to feel, beneath the material interests and excitement of
new work and prospects, the ache of loneliness for friends. In her
six months of wilderness life she had made the acquaintance of enough
people to realize with startling emphasis how frankly dishonest and
also what crudely and unassumingly good pioneers men and women are.
With senses alert for such things she saw what school life--all too
short for these sturdy workers--might be made to mean.
That flow of warm good will helped to carry her far over the difficult
beginning, for it was hard at the start. Her pupils were of all ages
from six to fifteen and of as many dispositions. All, of course, were
suspicious of the new teacher who had supplanted the one they knew.
"They look at me," Harry reflected, inwardly amused, "as I might view
a boa constrictor coiled in a college professor's chair. If they only
knew how much that is interesting a boa constrictor could tell them!
Well, I'll show them how I'm not like one--Attention, please!"
She smiled at them as they turned, surprised, on their way to the door.
(It was Friday afternoon and they were in a hurry to be off.) "You
are all invited to meet me here to-morrow evening at seven o'clock,"
she went on, "girls please wear aprons as we are going to make candy.
That'll show them I'm half human," she added to herself, watching the
faint start of surprise that went through them, followed by smiles and
murmured thanks.
That was a good beginning even though between beginning and finishing
may be a hilly road. But it was Harry's belief that every one loved
adventure, every one dreamed of romantic deeds with himself the hero.
From this she had decided that every one would work and study with
gusto if the task were skillfully presented to the imagination as a
living, pulsing part of the great romance--life. But the theories which
she had evolved while teaching carefully reared girls from well-to-do
families was not certain to fit all cases. The first month at Stone
Bridge district school was destructive to all theories and nearly
baffled her.
Such unexpected work she had: to make children wash their faces and
hands; to make and enforce the rule that handkerchiefs were to be
universally carried; to watch those who came in thin shoes through the
snow and rain and make them dry their feet; to see that certain big
boys did not filch the lunches from certain small, timid ones; and to
watch that pencils, erasers, colored crayons and other small belongings
were not carried off by those to whom they did not belong. Also, she
bought mittens and scarfs for two small children of a hard-drinking
sawyer at the lumber mill, and acquired the habit of carrying something
extra with her lunch every day for the little girl who never had enough.
"And all the time I'm learning a lot from them," she realized when she
saw them settle things for themselves. When red-headed Katie Riordan
jumped out and slapped "Portagee Joe" Biane, the worst boy in school,
for sticking his foot out and tripping little Lon Fisher, it took
Harry's breath away. She hadn't been intended to see it because she was
working at the board. Not knowing what to do, she waited to think it
over. In the meanwhile, Joe let Lon alone and Katie was as sweet as new
milk to every one.
Every day she saw things which made her bubble with laughter, ache with
pity and burn with indignation: the blacksmith's three children who
came to school on one horse, their feet tied up in sacks full of straw
to keep them from freezing; Knute Sundstron, who wore neither socks
nor undershirt and swallowed a spoonful of sand to cure indigestion,
asking to sit by the door where his feet might not get warm and make
his chilblains itch; Charlie Martin, an only child who loved books with
a ruling passion but was not allowed to carry them home from the school
library because they "littered up the house," slipping them inside the
lining of his overcoat in order to smuggle them into his room; and
Isita Biane, the sister of "Portagee Joe," pretending that she didn't
want to go out to play at noontime, when the reason was that she had no
jacket and couldn't run or play in the man's overcoat in which she rode
to school.
Of all these, amongst all the children in school Isita most appealed
to Harry. She was a puzzle, too. She said she was fourteen but looked
small for her age and was far behind the class she should have been in.
She stumbled hopelessly over her arithmetic, could scarcely write her
name legibly and yet spoke good English and could read remarkably well.
She studied earnestly, but at times Harry would look up and find the
girl's gentle, black eyes on her with a timid steadfastness that stayed
with her after school. "I wonder if she isn't badly treated at home,"
she pondered. "I'm sure I've seen bruises on her face and she seems to
be utterly submissive to that hulking brother of hers. I must try to
make friends with her."
But oddly enough this was something which she could not quite bring
about. She knew Isita liked her; the faint flush which brightened her
face when Harry spoke to her, the shy answering smile, were not to be
mistaken. But there was a reserve which met Harry's attempts at active
friendliness and which she was too well bred to force. "I'm a stranger
and she isn't quite sure of me," she decided. "If I wait she'll come
round." And then, the very next day she yielded to a kindly impulse
which had strange consequences.
It was one of those cloudless days in January when the sun, so hot
at midday in that altitude, shone with a terrible brilliance over
the snow-draped mountains and the white valley. But a freezing wind
contested the sun's warmth and Harry was walking up and down during the
noon recess in the shelter of the building while the schoolroom aired.
Most of the children were playing shadow-tag, shouting and laughing,
their faces scarlet with their exertions and the bite of the air. Harry
paused, smiling at them, and suddenly noticed Isita, standing alone in
her clumsy sheepskin coat, watching the others.
As at a hand on her wrist Harry stiffened. "Isita," she called lightly.
"Oh, Isita. Come here a minute."
The girl had started at the sound of her name, and seeing Harry's eyes
on her, a little flush passed over her thin olive cheeks. She came
toward her teacher, moving awkwardly in the heavy coat.
"Don't you want to do something for me," Harry began in her quick,
easy-going way. "There's a book, a new book just come from New York
that I want to read to you this afternoon. It's up in my room over at
Mrs. McCullon's. I want you to go over and get it for me. Will you,
dear? I can't leave these children and go myself. You'll find the book
on the table beside the bed. It's blue with gold letters. Tell Mrs.
'Mac' I sent you. Here! Put on my sweater. You don't need that heavy
jacket to run up the street."
While she talked Harry had unbuttoned her sweater, slipped it off,
then, still smiling into Isita's wondering eyes, she unfastened with
quick, sure hands the sheepskin coat and drew it easily from the girl's
shoulders. Isita had made a weak effort of resistance, drawing back a
little, an odd look of fear in her face; but Harry was so quick, so
sure of herself, that the change was made before there was time to
remonstrate. She had the thick, warm sweater on and buttoned round
Isita's chin and was walking with her to the road. "You've plenty of
time," she encouraged. "Don't run."
With the girl's coat on her arm she stood a moment watching Isita hurry
away, skip a few steps, then abruptly break into running.
"Of course!" Harry said. "She likes to run as much as anybody. No
wonder she can't play with this thing on." She looked disapprovingly at
the heavy, much-worn canvas "sourdough" coat on her arm. "She's going
to keep my sweater! No reason on earth why I shouldn't wear my new one
every day. What queer people the Bianes must be to let their child
wear such clothes. It's not because they're poor, either. Biane's a
sheep shearer and makes good wages. I must get up the creek to see Mrs.
Biane. Teaching children satisfactorily without knowing their parents
is like trying to furnish a house by guessing at it from the outside."
It was getting near one o'clock and she went in, shut the windows,
stirred up the fire and came out to look up the road for Isita before
ringing the hell. Isita was almost at the gate, the book under her arm
and a real rose-color in her cheeks. Harry watched her, not noticing
that Joe Biane was coming from the opposite direction. He had been with
the other boys to skate on the river and he, too, had seen his sister
coming. He reached the gate before her and stood waiting.
Harry, standing in the porch, saw him speak to his sister, saw the girl
draw back, warding him off--"Why what is he doing!" Harry exclaimed,
and ran sharply down the steps just as he snatched the book from Isita,
threw it on the ground and began pulling off the jacket she was wearing.
"Stop! Joe Biane--" Quick as thought the remembrance of what Katie
Riordan had done to this bully flashed back to Harry. She caught him by
the shoulder, gave him a shake and pushed him back. Her face was white,
her eyes sparkled. Taken utterly by surprise Joe made no attempt to
resist. "Pick up that book," Harry ordered, her eyes steadily on his.
His scowl deepened. "My sister ain't here to work for you, nor nobody,"
he growled. "She ain't wearing nobody's rags, neither. You take that
off, 'Sita, d'you hear?"
"Pick up that book or stay after school for an hour every day this
month," Harry interrupted. "Isita, leave that sweater on. I am in
charge here, Joe Biane. If your sister goes on an errand for me, that
is my affair and hers. Go inside and take your seat and don't say
another word. Thank you, Isita, for going after this. That little run
did you good. I'll have to think up excuses to get you out every day."
She smiled as she said it, gave a little pat to the girl's shoulder and
went back to the door to order the children who had all been watching
and listening to this interlude, back to work.
In no way did she refer again to what had happened. She kept them all
smartly at work during the afternoon session and read them the first
chapter of _Robin Hood and His Merry Men_ from the blue book with gold
letters. When she dismissed school at three o'clock she asked Isita and
Joe to stay.
"Now," she said when they were alone, she, in a chair before the stove,
the brother and sister facing her from the nearest bench. "Now, Joe,
I want first to know whether you are acting on the authority of your
parents to control Isita during school hours?"
Joe, his hands in his pockets, his feet stuck out in front of him, slid
a narrow half-glance at Harry and down again. "What's that to you?" he
demanded in a barely articulate grumble. "You're here to teach."
"Exactly. And one of my first duties is to see that you children learn
the lessons and advance in your classes. To do this you must obey the
rules--"
"Who's breaking your rules," Joe interrupted. "What rules give you the
claim on any of us to go your errands?"
"--Must obey the rules," Harry continued mildly, "and one of the rules
is that you must go out every fair day and exercise. If you don't get
the fresh air you can't study. You know as well as I do that Isita
can't play, or even walk well in that big heavy coat. And she is too
thinly dressed to go out without it. I sent her for that book just for
an excuse to make her run, and gave her my sweater so she could run.
It's a very nice jacket; fits her and is pretty and warm. It is my
privilege to give it to her if she will accept it, if her mother has no
objections. You don't think she would object, do you, Isita?"
With all the encouragement and kindness she could put into voice and
look Harry turned to the girl. To her surprise Isita, very pale, looked
down at her hands and said: "I guess I'd better not take it, Miss
Holliday. Thank you, just the same."
Harry felt her blood quicken indignantly at this, to her, unreasoning
suspicion of a friendly deed. "Just as you think best," she acquiesced;
"but you must wear something suitable to go out in during recess."
Joe laughed. "You needn't worry about her," he said. "She's used to a
whole lot you couldn't stand."
In thinking over the affair that night Harry wondered whether she
had not made a big mistake. Ought she not to have ignored everything
outside of Isita's actual school work? "Anyhow," she reminded herself,
"she knows that I want to help her. It may be that something will come
up later that will send her to me."
But such a hoped-for occasion was not to happen for a long time. Before
the spring term ended Isita and Joe both stopped coming to school, and
when the truant officer hunted for them the family had moved away.
Harry could get no news of them from the other pupils and went back to
the ranch for the summer without a prospect of seeing Isita again.
In the rush of summer work, concern for her school naturally waned.
Moreover, she soon began to look forward with interest to the arrival
of the Eldredges. Several times she went up to the little shack to see
if they had come. But there were no signs of any one having been there
and the summer passed without bringing them--Rob inquired at the land
office whether their filing had been withdrawn, but nothing of that
kind had happened.
"Too bad," said the clerk, "for somebody else'll sure file over them
if they let the time go over. Good land's getting mighty scarce around
here."
"I shouldn't wonder but what we'd better file on additional
homesteads," Rob said, as he was telling Harry what he had heard; "I
could take that long strip to the west and you could file on that swale
on top of the hills; you know that long meadow just back of those
buttes? With a fence around that we shouldn't be bothered so much with
cattle coming in to water here when it gets dry. As soon as I can
get time I believe I'll go over that land and look for section-line
corners."
"Are we going to have money enough for all that," Harry asked: "take up
more land before we've got this planted?"
"I shouldn't plant all of this anyway; haven't water enough to irrigate
it all. But I'll need more grazing some day for my stock. If nothing
happens we'll have money enough from this next winter's work to fence
it."
Rob had made several hundred dollars by his winter's work at Stone
Bridge and he had also gained valuable experience in handling and
feeding cattle. Harry, too, had saved more than half her salary and was
able to invest in a good cow, pony and saddle. It seemed to both of
them that they could not do better than go back to Stone Bridge for the
next two winters. They could do a lot of work on the place in the six
months of the dry season and the money they made working out would help
them to get ahead much faster than two or three extra months on the
ranch.
Stone Bridge had, of course, grown during the summer absences. It was
good wheat land and settlers were flowing in. The school naturally
grew as well, and the third winter there were thirty pupils instead of
fifteen, and a second teacher.
As Harry sat listening to a class recite, as she watched the children
studying, she studied them: the white-headed Swedes, the olive-skinned
Indians, the Austrians, Swiss, Scotch, Americans, all so different,
all so worth while if one knew how to reach them. Teaching of this sort
was a bigger thing than ever it had seemed. The mere copiousness of the
so-called practical jokes that they played on each other was evidence
of the locked-up energy within them--energy so soon to be harnessed to
the plow, the mill, the mine, to follow the trail from ranch to forest
reserve, to go wherever the market called for workers. She had the
feeling of wanting to shut the doors and say: "Stay here! You haven't
begun to learn. Think of the books you ought to read--" She stopped
herself. "Literature! Why they're the stuff it's made of, aren't they?
and history, too. They've already had hold of life as they'd grab a
half-broken cayuse and no more afraid of it.
"There's just one child I would like to see go on studying, though:
that little Isita Biane. I could tell by the look in her eyes that
she wanted to learn. She loved it. I wish I knew where she is. If I
could find her father and mother I wouldn't rest until I'd made them
understand that Isita isn't the sort to do things with her muscles. She
could do more with her brains, if it's money they want her to earn."
This was to be her last winter teaching, at least for a time, as she
and Rob had decided to stay the next winter on the ranch and feed their
own cattle there. So she quite gave up hope of seeing Isita again. But
before school closed she asked the other teacher who was coming back
in the fall to look out for the girl, if she did turn up, and make an
effort to keep her in school through the grades at least.
And then, almost the first person she saw when they went back to the
ranch was Joe Biane. They met him coming across their land as they
drove in. He had a gun over his shoulder and was carrying several
grouse.
"Who's that?" Rob asked, as Harry nodded and Joe touched his hat and
grunted as he passed.
"That boy I told you gave me so much trouble in school. I wonder what
he's doing up here. Shooting on our land, too."
They looked after him as he went over the hill, the sunset light a
dusky red glow on his gun barrel.
"Nobody living out that way," Rob said. "He must be with some outfit
camping at those east springs for the night."
"I wonder where the family is--following the old man on his rounds to
the shearing pens. I suppose."
"More likely shacked up in these hills somewhere, so Biane can come
home easy when he gets through at the nearest shearing corral."
"I believe I'll ride up east in the morning and see if they're around
here," Harry decided.
There they were. As Harry rounded the rocky butte she saw smoke coming
from the Eldredge's abandoned cabin and a woman, gathering an armful of
sagebrush, retreated hastily into the house at sight of the stranger.
"Mrs. Eldredge!" Harry thought instantly. "But why haven't they let us
know they were here?" The smile of expectancy was on her face as she
got down from her saddle and knocked at the door. The smile stiffened
with surprise as the door opened narrowly and Joe Biane looked out at
her.
"Why, Joe! How--I thought--Don't the Eldredges live here?"
"Never heard of 'em." Joe was older, heavier, as lounging and covertly
impertinent as ever.
"Why, they are the people who filed on this land, built this house."
"Never been here, anyhow."
"How long have you been here, if I may ask? Is Isita here?"
involuntarily, she glanced behind him into the house.
"She ain't in now," Joe slowly began to close the door. "Her'n the old
lady's went off hunting greens."
"I see." Harry thought of the woman gathering wood. "Well, I wish you'd
tell Isita to come over and see me."
"Sure." There was an odd gleam in Joe's eye as he closed the door.
"I wonder what it is that makes them so unfriendly," Harry thought as
she rode home. "But if they think I'm going to give up Isita just for
the snubs of a surly creature like Joe they're mistaken."