arrival, when the family entered the kitchen, she dropped her package
beside the stove and began to take off her coat and cap. Her mother and
the biggest and the youngest brothers looked at her in amazement.
"Why, pet lamb," her mother said at last, "aren't you going to look at
your presents?" She picked up the package and carried it to the table.
The little girl slowly shook her head. The biggest brother saw that all
the bravado and indifference shown at the school-house were gone. In
their place was a look of keen pain. He lifted her and held her on his
lap, guessing, all at once, the secret of the seven gifts. "My baby
sister!" he said, and trusted himself to speak no further. She
understood, and put her head against his breast.
The youngest brother, spurred by curiosity, was opening the package. His
mother stood beside him. As the brown paper fell away at the severing of
the white string, he sprang back with an exclamation of surprise. The
biggest brother put the little girl to one side, got up, and stepped
across to look down at the contents thus disclosed.
He was reminded of the rear half of the attic, where for years had been
gathering odds and ends. There was a bit of torn and faded
mosquito-netting, an old mouth-organ, a broken domino, a pair of
half-worn mittens, a ten-penny nail, a dog-eared copy of "Alice in
Wonderland," and a slate-pencil.
"My daughter!" said the little girl's mother, light breaking in upon the
situation; "my brave little daughter!" She turned to breathe a mother's
comfort.
But the little girl, her cap and coat resumed, was disappearing into the
chill shadows of the sitting-room.
XV
THE FATE OF A CROWING HEN
"SASSY" was all that her name implied. From the very beginning, when, as
a small white egg, innocent enough in appearance, she left the hand of
the little girl's mother and joined nine companions under a fat cochin,
it was with something of an impudent roll that she gained her place in
the nest. Three weeks later, after having been faithfully sat upon, and
as faithfully turned each day by the cochin's beak, she gave another
pert stir, very slight, and tapped a hole through her cracking shell.
The next morning she swaggered forth, a round, fluffy, cheeping morsel.
She was not Sassy yet, however. It was later, when she lost her yellow
down and grew a scant coat of white feathers, through which her skin
showed in pimpled, pinkish spots, that she displayed the characteristics
that christened her, and, by her precocity and brazenness, distinguished
herself from among her leghorn brothers and sisters.
At this period of her life, a pullet in both months and experience, she
should have conducted herself with becoming modesty. Instead, she
developed a habit of taking her meals, morning, noon, and night, from
the kitchen table, to which the little girl did not usually go until
long after the big brothers had finished and withdrawn. Sassy made her
entrance either by way of the hall or through the window nearest the
stove. Once inside, she hopped to a bench, and thence to the oil-cloth.
Her progress from one end of the board to the other was always attended
by serious damage to the butter, of which she was inordinately fond.
When, having fared well, she at last descended, she paraded up and down,
with many sharp, inquiring cries of "C-a-w-k? c-a-w-k? c-a-w-k?" and
wherever her claws chanced to touch left little, buttery fleurs-de-lis
on the floor. She escaped the disastrous fire, not, like a dozen other
fowls, by seeking refuge in the wind-break, but because she was in the
coal-shed carrying on a hand-to-hand conflict with the tortoise-shell
cat, who had five new babies.
By Thanksgiving day, having developed into a juicy frier, more prone
than ever to snoop, family opinion turned against her, so that when it
came to the question which chickens, in view of the shortage of feed,
should occupy the oven in place of the usual sizzling turkey, the big
brothers and the little girl voted for the heads of Sassy and of a
certain mysterious young rooster who, though disturbing, had never been
definitely singled out, since, on hearing his falsetto crow and looking
about for him, the family invariably came upon the insolent pullet,
alone and unconcerned.
The day before Thanksgiving the little girl was directed to capture both
the rooster and Sassy. For the first, she selected a young leghorn that
she believed to be the guilty trumpeter and poked him into a box-coop
beside the smoke-house. Then she set about jailing the culpable pullet.
She was aided by Godfrey, the biggest brother's pet pointer, who scented
Sassy in the vegetable patch, where she was scratching around the tomato
vines. Together they pursued her at top speed, Godfrey keeping close to
his bird, but, in true sportsmanlike fashion, refraining from seizing
her. Through the tomatoes they ran, till the little girl sat down from
sheer exhaustion, with Godfrey panting beside her and the pullet perched
near by on a pile of seed onions.
After a ten minutes' rest, the little girl and the pointer renewed their
chase. This time Sassy left the tomato patch (foolishly enough, for the
vines tripped the little girl), and fled, with hackles spread, toward
the well, where a flock was dipping water. When they saw her coming, the
chickens, among which were several young leghorns, fled in terror
toward the sorghum patch and lost themselves in its woody lanes. Godfrey
and the little girl charged this western jungle with zest, thrashing
about until the pullet--supposedly--emerged and flitted toward the sod
barn. But when for the second time, and after a lengthy hunt that
brought up at the new stacks, they paused for breath, the little girl
discovered, to the mystification of the pointer, who did not know one
leghorn from another, and to her own disgust, that since their threading
of the sorghum they had been after the wrong chicken!
The little girl sprawled on the sunny side of a stack for an hour or two
after that, and chewed straws. She pulled off her shoes to rest her
stockingless feet, and put her head on Godfrey's damp side. For she had
resolved to postpone the catching of Sassy till evening, when the
elusive pullet would be sleepily seated on a two-by-four in the empty
cow-stall that now served for a coop.
When the early November twilight fell upon the farm-yard, the little
girl roused Godfrey by gently pulling his tail and skipped round to the
barn door. Under ordinary circumstances, the task of creeping upon an
unsuspecting chicken and seizing it for the block would have been
unpleasant. But, influenced by her long dislike of the pullet, and
recalling her tiresome experience of the afternoon, she chuckled to
think that she would soon have her hands clasped tightly about Sassy's
yellow legs. "I'll not make a mistake _this_ time," she said to herself.
She entered the barn slyly and stole down behind the stalls until she
came opposite the perches. The chickens were settling themselves for the
night, moving and murmuring drowsily. As she peeped among them, her
glance fell upon Sassy, outlined against the small square window beyond
and roosted comfortably with her beak toward the manger, all unconscious
of her nearing doom. The little girl was certain that it was she, for
there was no mistaking the rakish lop of the serrated comb, or the once
white under-feathers soiled to a bluish cast.
The little girl waited, restraining the excited pointer, until the light
had faded from the square window. It was then so dark that the chickens
could not see the malevolent fingers that, thrust softly up among them,
grabbed a leghorn's shanks; and there was only a mildly concerned
"k-r-r-r!" from an old, watchful hen as the little girl retreated, one
hand doing almost fatal duty around an ill-starred neck.
By the time that the little girl, triumphantly bearing both her prey,
heads down, reached the mounting-log at the front door of the house,
where the eldest brother awaited her with the hatchet, it was nearly as
dark outside as it had been in the barn. So the eldest brother--for the
little girl had hurried away after giving him the chickens--could not
tell which leghorn suffered the guillotine first. His sanguinary work
being done, the little girl returned and carried the dead fowls into the
coal-shed, where she tied their toes together and hung them over a nail.
Early next morning the eldest brother was awakened by a prolonged
falsetto crow,--the familiar disturbing salute of the chanticleer he had
beheaded the night before! Puzzled and wondering, he got up, ran to the
eastern window of the attic, and looked down upon the yard. An amazing
discovery repaid his promptness. For, as the chicken once more raised
its voice, he saw that the mysterious rooster was still alive! So was
Sassy! They were combined in one and the same bird! Two innocent
chickens had been sacrificed!
So, until the next spring,--the spring following the fire, and one ever
memorable for its wonderful grass and flowers, its gentle rains and
windless, sunny days,--Sassy continued to exasperate the family, winning
only censure. But when the depleted flock could not furnish half the
eggs the family needed, she took it upon herself to lay one daily, and
was considerate ate enough to render it unnecessary for the little girl
to go out and bring it in, by depositing it in the hay-twist box behind
the kitchen stove, in the linen-barrel in the entry, or on the canopied
bed. Then she found an appreciative friend in the little girl's mother,
who, whenever she heard a proud, discordant announcement, half crow,
half cackle, blessed the little white hen as she hurried to secure the
offering.
One afternoon during Sassy's career of prolificacy, the little girl
remembered that her best thick dress was so threadbare that she would
need a brand-new one for the next winter. She found, too, that if she
was to have one she must devise a way to swell the small amount in the
tin savings-bank; for the big brothers declared they would be able only
to pay the heavy debt upon the farm and victual the house for the stormy
months to follow. So she hit upon the idea of raising chickens, and
broached it to her mother. The latter, remembering the sorry Christmas
just past, at once presented her with Sassy, promising that all the eggs
the leghorn laid should be credited to the little girl at the general
merchandise store at the station, and that all the chicks hatched out by
Sassy should go the same way.
The little girl was jubilant over the plan, and each morning answered
the "cut-cut-c't-a-a-ah-cut" of her hen with a gift of crumbs, and then
took possession of the new-laid egg, placing it carefully in a
cracker-box. When, at the end of as many days, a dozen eggs lay side by
side, she took them out, wrapped each one in paper, packed them all in a
lard-bucket full of shorts, and, mounting the blue mare, rode to the
station, where she had the satisfaction of seeing eleven cents put
opposite her name in the egg-book at the general merchandise store.
This was repeated four times, and, the price of eggs having gone up a
few cents in each interval, the little girl had sixty cents to put in
her bank, which raised her total to one dollar fifty-nine. On her June
birthday the family presented her with four dimes; the week after she
sold a wooden squirt-gun to the neighbor woman's son for five cents. It
was then plain that, if Sassy should continue to furnish eggs
faithfully, the dress was assured.
But at this happy juncture, and, womanlike, without a single cluck of
warning, the leghorn ceased her diurnal laying, and, after a spasmodic
week, during which she scattered three or four eggs on the little girl's
bed, gave no further sign of justifying her existence.
The little girl was in despair, and at once confided Sassy's delinquency
to the eldest brother, who knew a great deal about chickens. He said
that a leghorn was an all-year-round layer, and that when a hen of the
breed failed to uphold the standard of her kind she was fit only for
broiling. The youngest brother, overhearing the account of Sassy's
conduct and the eldest brother's comments, volunteered the opinion that
nothing ailed the chicken but the pip, and advised fat and pepper. But
when three days had gone by and the leghorn, with generous doses of
axle-grease and cayenne, ailed rather than recovered, the little girl
ceased her administrations.
It occurred to her, in the midst of her worry, that perhaps Sassy wanted
to set. Accordingly she got ten eggs together, arranged them in a nest,
caught the hen, and put her upon them. But here a new and unlooked-for
thing happened. Sassy would not stay on the nest. Not at all daunted,
the little girl procured a broad strip of calico and tied the hen down.
But in her struggles to get free, Sassy broke nearly all of the eggs
under her, and finally hied herself out of the new coop and over the
smoke-house to liberty.
Unhappy that her leghorn thus spurned to mother a brood, the little girl
sought the biggest brother. "Oh, no wonder the mean thing crows," she
said to him, as she told her story.
The biggest brother conferred long and solemnly on the question. When it
was settled, the little girl came out of the sitting-room with a look of
hopeful determination upon her face and hunted up Sassy. The latter had
grown so bold since the Thanksgiving before that any one could pick her
up without running after her. So the little girl, in two winks, had her
under one arm and was on her way to the carnelian bluff.
It was a hot, sultry day in midsummer, and not a breath of wind was
blowing over the farm. The grain-fields were still. The blades of the
corn drooped limply. The creamy sap of the milkweed growing in the
timothy meadow was drying up in the stem. Below the bluff the herd
stood, belly deep, lashing about them with wet tails, and the pigs
wallowed among the wilting bulrushes in damp security.
Yet, with all its heat and quiet, the afternoon was destined to be a
stormy one. The swallows were flying low across the farm-yard; the
colts, pestered by busy flies, were moving restlessly about the wire
pen; the Maltese cat was trying her claws on a table leg in the kitchen;
and, behind the wind-break, a collie had given over a beef-bone and was
industriously eating grass. But all these signs, which should have
foretold to her what was coming, were unnoticed by the little girl as
she hurried along.
At the southern base of the bluff she halted and put Sassy on the ground
with her head pointing up the hill. Then, with apron held wide, she
began to shoo the hen gently toward the summit. For the biggest brother
had said very emphatically that the only way to make a chicken lay is to
drive her up a hill.
Sassy did not pay any attention to the apron, but shook her wattles
crossly, "k-r-r-red," and held her head so that one white ear lobe lay
questioningly uppermost.
"Now you go up," commanded the little girl; "go right straight up, or
I'll just _give_ it to you. _I'll_ make you lay, you lazy thing!"
Sassy tilted her head so that the opposite ear lobe showed, and lifted
one foot against her breast. Otherwise she did not indicate that she had
even heard her orders. Her disobedience angered the little girl.
"Shoo! shoo! shoo!" she cried; "do you think I'm going to carry you? No,
siree! You'll walk,--every step of it, too. _I'll_ teach you." She
seized Sassy by the tail and rudely shoved her forward.
It availed no more than the shooing. The hen not only refused to
advance, but turned and flew into the corn. When, after chasing her
around a dozen hills, the little girl once more had the leghorn held
tightly in her hands, she gave her a good shaking. But no matter how
hard the little girl jerked her body from side to side, Sassy, by
bending her neck, kept her head defiantly in one place.
The little girl was at her wits' end. The biggest brother had specified
that Sassy should be driven; but the leghorn would not drive. The little
girl had tried her best to carry out her instructions, and had only
discovered the truth of the old adage about leading a horse to water.
She could bring Sassy to the very spot where a cure could be
effected--and the hen would refuse treatment. Chagrined, warm, and
discouraged, she resolved to carry the chicken bodily to the stone-pile,
a bare half way, and there think over her failure. So, with Sassy under
her arm once more, she toiled up the grassy slope.
While she was lying beside the pile, worried and distraught, with the
leghorn at close quarters throwing up dirt and pebbles, the air became
so ominously and deathly still that the little girl and Sassy fairly
gasped for breath. Over the grass tops the heat halted and lay in long,
faintly visible waves, like a ghostly sea. And in the west there began
to arise, silently and swiftly, a vast mountain of peculiar, dense
arched clouds.
It bulged upward until its top seemed half way to the sun. Then, with
lightning rapidity, it closed in at its middle and assumed the shape of
a monster toad-stool, and traveled forward toward the Vermillion with a
mighty roar.
The little girl neither saw nor heard it as it came on. She was
thinking, with the hopefulness of youth, over Sassy's future
possibilities. "She'll surely start laying again some time," she mused,
"and I'll borrow a hen from mother to set on the eggs. So I'll have all
those chickens, and when they grow up I'll have all their eggs, and some
of them will set, and--" She lost herself in an endless chain of
computation.
The toad-stool, topped with angry, boiling clouds, was now but five or
six miles away. It swayed like the trunk of an elephant as it darted
forward, one second touching the ground, the next lifting itself into
the air, shifting and lowering as if it were picking spots upon which to
alight. A breeze sprang up and hurried to meet it, and all the grass and
corn-stalks bowed that way.
Suddenly the rustling about her made the little girl look up. The bright
sunshine had changed to threatening gloom, the sultry quiet was broken
by whispers of tempest and rain. She saw the nearing cloud-column, now
an hour-glass in form, and realized her awful danger. Calling to Sassy,
she got up on her knees with the thought of flight.
Sassy answered with little joyous cries. She was gratefully welcoming
the forerunning breeze of the cyclone by raising her wings, and was
walking sidewise down the hill.
The next moment, a torrent of water struck the little girl as she
attempted to get to her feet, and rolled Sassy farther away from the
pile. Then, with a horrid growl, the cyclone crossed the river, skipped
over the swaying wheat, and, alighting on the edge of the corn, dragged
its ravaging base across the field with a terrific whirling of stalks
and a rending and grinding that bespoke the very end of things. Its
center was midway between the bluff and the farm-house. And, as its
farther edge braided the cottonwoods in the wind-break and uprooted the
stunted apple-trees, its near edge came close to the stone-pile with a
mighty sucking breath.
The little girl, seeing that escape was impossible, for the rain was
beating her down, flung herself in the lee of the pile and clutched at
the grass. "Sassy!" she shouted again; "Sassy!" But the cyclone drowned
her cry.
With starting eyes she saw the swirling currents draw Sassy,
maelstromlike, in and in. The hen lost her feet, was next tossed like a
white ball hither and thither, and then sped out of sight into the
vortex of the storm's wild mingling of matter, taking with her all the
little girl's hopes of future revenue--the unlaid eggs and the unhatched
chicks. As she disappeared, she gave a final frightened, crowing cluck.
It was her swan song.
* * * * *
WHEN the tornado had swept on, leaving in its wake a wide path of bare
ground fringed with wreckage, the little girl hurried home to assure
herself that her mother and the big brothers had gotten into the
storm-cellar, and that the blue mare was unhurt, and to gaze into the
sitting-room mirror to see if her hair had turned white. Satisfied upon
all points, she changed her clothes and started eastward on horseback,
following the streaked road of the cyclone. As she traveled, she kept
steadfastly on the lookout, and jogged along until the prairie was
wrapped in night. When, at last, she turned and started back, she
carried, as trophies of her search, her mother's wooden chopping-bowl,
dusty and unharmed, and, thrust in her hat-band, a solitary memento of
the vanished crowing hen, a broken, soiled white feather.
XVI
THE RESERVATION TRIP
A HUGE pen with V-shaped wings, patterned after those built by the
Indians to imprison antelope, thrust its long, high neck over the
railroad embankment and against the open doors of the cattle-cars as
they were rolled along the siding. Through the pen and up the jutting
neck into the stifling, wheeled boxes, lowing in fright and advancing
unwillingly, were driven the Dutchman's fat steers and the beeves
belonging to the cattleman. When a long train was filled with them, a
wildcat engine backed down from the station, coupled on to the waiting
freight, and went lumbering away with its hungry, thirsty load, bound
for a packing-house in a distant city.
The little girl watched the shipping of the stock, her heart sore with
the thought that only a short week stood between the home herd and the
shambles. Never before had she mourned the departure of the cattle, for,
spared the long ride in foul, torturing confinement, they had simply
disappeared across the prairie in the direction of Sioux Falls or
Yankton, contentedly feeding as they went, and with the three big
brothers riding slowly behind them. It had always been the same with the
sheep. But now there rang continually in her ears the piteous bleating
of the little flock she had learned to love through the summer months,
and that, lured by a treacherous bell-wether, had passed through the
pen, some days before, and crossed the long, high Bridge of Sighs.
But what she feared for the animals yet to be sold never came to pass.
The morning before the big brothers were to round-up, a trooper rode in
from the reservation with an urgent message from the new commandant,
asking that as many head of beeves as possible be sent to the post. The
letter stated that a stock-raiser, with whom negotiations had been all
but closed, had received an offer from a Kansas City buyer that advanced
the army terms by a fraction of a cent per pound on the hoof. The
commissary, therefore, was compelled to look elsewhere for meat.
A reply was at once sent back, promising a drove from the farm-house
within a week. And as the little girl saw the cavalry horse speeding
westward with the message, she flew into the kitchen with a happy song
on her lips and set about helping her mother prepare provisions for the
trip.
That afternoon, while the biggest and the youngest brothers divided the
cattle, putting those that were to be wintered into the wire pen, the
eldest shod four ponies, three for riding and one for a pack-horse. The
start was planned for the next day, and since the trip must be a
leisurely one in order that the animals should arrive in as good
condition as when they set out, a cow was included in the drove to
furnish milk during the two days or more that the big brothers would be
en route.
But the following morning all plans for the journey were upset. One of
the ponies tried its newly shod heels on the youngest brother with such
viciousness that he had to be carried into the house. The biggest
brother decided to remain at home and take care of him. So, while the
pack-horse was being loaded with blankets, food, and a coffee-pot, the
eldest brother and his mother discussed the situation and at last agreed
that the little girl would have to help in the drive.