feeling of grief succeeded her surprise and wonder. But instantly the
thought came that it was here, in happy ignorance of the meaning of the
pile, that every spring and summer she had sat to watch the big brothers
at work in the fields, the gophers, the birds, the herd in the slough
below; to think over her baby problems and sorrows; or to build castles
from a beloved book. She read the chiseled word again, softly and
reverently, then backed the sorrel away and once more rode on rapidly,
making for the railroad and sitting her horse with the tense erectness
of a trooper on parade.
All at once, a little way out on the prairie, a terror seized her, and
she began to lash the sorrel with all her might. The black hillock
behind, with its graven head-mark, had borne to her heart a new fear
that perhaps her mother, too, would soon sleep upon the hillside. She
put the thought of her father away, and centered her efforts on reaching
the station and the doctor. As she galloped at breakneck speed, the damp
wind swept her face, cutting it sharply, and whipped out her horse's
mane and tail till they fluttered on a level with the saddle.
At the track she ceased striking the sorrel and let him fall into a
slow, steady canter. The downpour was near now, sweeping south in the
strong grasp of a squall to cross her path. She could see that its front
was a sheet not of rain, but of driving hail that rebounded high from
the dry grass. She crouched in her seat and pulled her hat far down to
shield her face.
Before the sorrel made another quarter of a mile, the hailstones had
passed the ties and were kicking up the soft dirt of the embankment like
a volley of shrapnel. When they moved their fire forward to the
wagon-road, they almost hurled the little girl from her saddle. She
cried out in agony as the icy bullets cleft the air and pounded her
cruelly on head and shoulders. A stone the size of a wild duck's egg
split the skin of her rein-hand, and she dropped the bridle and let the
sorrel go at random. Squealing shrilly whenever a missile reached his
tender ears, he stayed in the road, but stopped running, and whirled in
a circle to avoid his punishment. The little girl, though she flinched
under the shower, remained on his back grittily and waited until the
fall thinned and suddenly ended.
Wounded from head to foot, she continued her journey over a road deep
with hail. When the station came in sight, she stopped to wipe the blood
from a hurt on her cheek and to wind her handkerchief around her injured
hand. Then she raced through town and left her message at the doctor's
door.
The doctor hitched up his buggy and, accompanied by his wife, set off
for the farm behind the little girl, who at times rode anxiously far in
the lead, and, again, drew up and trotted beside the vehicle to ask him
to travel faster. But when the farm-house was neared, she could not bear
to lag any longer, and gave the sorrel the bit. As she passed the
carnelian bluff, she skirted it well, though she could not see the mound
or the cross. It had grown dark and they were shrouded in stormy
shadows. But she kept her eyes continually in that direction, and talked
to the horse to quiet a nervous throbbing in her breast that she did not
admit to herself. At the barn she unbuckled the saddle and the bridle
outside the door, let the sorrel trot in alone, and ran toward the
kitchen.
When the doctor completed his diagnosis that night, he told the little
girl's mother only what she had long known: that she might live to see
her daughter a grown woman and her sons old men; that she might pass
away before the end of another week, or another day. The little girl was
not in the room to hear him, and on returning later to the canopied bed,
neither her mother nor the neighbor woman repeated his words. He was
gone again, leaving only a few pellets to check a possible
sinking-spell. For there was nothing else that could be done at the
farm-house--except wait and hope.
But, as if she divined by instinct what there was to fear, the little
girl stoutly refused to leave her mother that night and seek rest.
After prevailing upon the neighbor woman to lie down on the lounge close
by, she sat on the carpet beside the bed, weary but unswerving, and
reached up every little while to touch a hand, or rose to listen to the
spasmodic beating of the tortured heart.
At midnight her mother awoke and asked for nourishment. Having eaten and
drunk, she motioned the little girl to a seat on the edge of the bed and
began to talk, slowly at the beginning but more hurriedly toward the
last, as if she were freeing herself of something long ago thought out
and long delayed in the saying.
"I've been thinking of the fields and hedges of dear old England," she
whispered. "I can see them so plainly to-night. I have just been there
in my dreams, I think; and I have come back to tell you how beautiful
they are. Of course the plains are beautiful, too,--beautiful but
lonely. England is dotted with homes, and there are trees everywhere,
and flowers so many months of the year. Oh, one never could feel lonely
there."
She turned her face away and seemed to be asleep. But presently she came
back to the little girl and took her hand with a smile.
"Years ago," she went on, "when I was a hearty, happy girl, only two or
three years older than you are now, pet lamb, your father and I came
West and took up this farm. Hardly anybody lived here in those days.
They were a few squatters; but they either trapped in the winter and
went away during the summer, or hunted and farmed in the summer and left
in the fall. So life was very quiet, quieter even than it is now, except
that there were Indians here by the hundreds. They stole from us by
night and shot our stock, and would have murdered us only that they
could get more out of us by letting us live. They came by in
processions, put up their wigwams in our very yard, and ate up
everything we had in the house. We dared not see the wrong they did. I
was often alone when they came, and I always wondered if that would not
be the last of me and my little boys.
"But, though here and there men and women and even little babies were
tomahawked, we were never harmed, for some reason; and, as the years
went by, people began to come and settle near us. Then the post was
established, and we could go to church once a summer. I went with the
boys, because some one always had to remain home to watch the farm. That
is why I never visited a town the first ten years after we settled here.
Then you came,--just a few days--before--we lost--your--father."
The little girl smoothed back her mother's hair lovingly. The time had
come to tell of her discovery on the bluff. "I've seen it," she said in
a low voice.
Her mother understood. "We wanted you to find it out by yourself," she
answered. "The boys took away the stones and put up the cross the night
before they left." She sighed and then went on:
"I have been thinking about you to-night--about your future--in
recalling my years here on the plains. I am no longer young, pet lamb; I
was never very strong. I may not always be with you." Her voice broke a
little. She tightened her grasp of the little girl's fingers.
"I do not worry about the boys. They will marry and settle down among
our good neighbors. But you, my little girl, what will you do? Not stay,
I hope, hoeing and herding and working your life out in the kitchen,
with nothing to brighten the days. I cannot bear to think of that. I
lived on here after your father was taken because I feared the
responsibility of raising my boys in a great, strange city; and I
dreaded the thought of leaving your father's grave. But now I often
wonder if I have acted for the best. Selfish in my grief and loss, have
I not deprived the boys of the advantages they should have had? For you,
it is not yet too late.
"Whether I am taken from you or not, I want you to leave the prairie and
spend the rest of your life where you can enjoy the best things that
life offers--music and pictures and travel, and the friendship of
cultivated people. In twenty years--perhaps less, for the plains are
changing swiftly--all these level, fertile miles will be covered with
homes. Every quarter-section will hold a house, and there will be
chimneys in sight in every direction. Churches and better schools will
follow. The roads will be planted with trees. There will be fences about
the fields, and no Indians to thieve and kill. And this valley, the
'Jim,' or the Missouri, will not be the edge of civilization, for the
frontier will have moved far to the west.
"And yet, though I can see it all coming, I am not willing for you to
wait for it and spend your young womanhood here. One woman in a family
is enough to sacrifice to the suffering and drudgery of frontier life.
So I want you to go East, to go where the sweetest and best influences
can reach you. The prairie has given you health. It has never given you
happiness. Your life, like that of every other child on the plains, has
had few joys and many little tragedies. They say the city child ages
fast; but do they ever think of the wearing sameness and starving of
heart that puts years on the country child? Ah! those who are born and
bred on the edge of things give more than the work of their hands to the
country's building."
They sat in silence a long time, their hands clasped. Then the little
girl kissed her mother softly. "I want to go, mother," she said, with
shining eyes. "I want to go away to school, and you must go with me."
Her mother did not answer for a moment.
"'I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee,'" she breathed at last. And
not till long afterward, when tears had worn the first keen edge from
her grief, did the little girl know the full meaning of the promise.
"Pull back the curtains from the eastern windows," said her mother; "I
want to see the sky. Is the night clear?"
"The stars are out, mother."
"Ah, I love the stars!"
"Are they the same ones that I'll see when--when--I'm away from here?"
"The very same, pet lamb."
"You and I will watch them and think of that, mother."
The neighbor woman turned on the lounge, and they fell into silence
again. The little girl remained standing at a window, her face pressed
close to the glass.
As she waited there, the whole east began gradually to spring into
flame. The sky blazed as ruddily as if a great fire were just beyond the
horizon and racing to leap it and sweep across upon the farm. A broad
fan of light, roseate at its pivot and radiating in shafts of yellow
and red, was rising and paling the stars with its shining edge. Wider
and wider it grew, until from north to south, and almost as far up as
the zenith, were thrust its shining sticks. Then out of the cold mist
floating over the distant Sioux showed a copper segment of the moon,
which rose into sight and careened slowly heavenward, lighting up the
wide plains, glimmering on the placid water of the sloughs, and shining
full into the face of the dreaming little girl.
* * * * *
ONLY the neighbor woman was at the farm-house next day to comfort the
little girl and help her through the sad hours. There was no sign of the
pig-wagon all morning, and as the afternoon passed slowly away the
little girl ceased to strain her eyes along the road leading to the
school-house, and never left her mother's side. It was the neighbor
woman who, not daring to leave the room even to do the chores about the
barn and coops, looked south every few moments with the hope that the
biggest brother would return before it was too late.
As the day drew toward its close the sun, which had been lurking sulkily
behind the clouds, came out brightly and shone into the sitting-room,
where its beams lay across the foot of the canopied bed like a warm
coverlet. The room was robbed of its gloom, and the little girl's
mother opened her eyes and looked about her, long and thoughtfully, as
one gazes upon a loved scene that is drifting from sight.
The walls were hung with spatter-work that the biggest brother had done,
and with photographs and magazine pictures in splint frames. Over the
front door was tacked the first yarn motto that the little girl had ever
worked. It was faded, but her mother, though her eyes were dimming,
could read the uneven line: "God Bless Our Home." The new cane-seated
chairs were set about against the walls, and a bright blue cover hid the
round, oak center-table. The eldest brother's violin lay in its case on
the organ that had come into the house the month before when the wheat
was sold. Up on the clock-shelf was a Dresden shepherd in stately pose
before his dainty shepherdess. The curtains on the windows hung white
and soft to the carpet.
Presently the mother asked to be raised on her pillow, and the neighbor
woman and the little girl turned the bed so that she could look out of
the windows at the setting sun.
The western heavens rioted in a fuller beauty that afternoon than had
the eastern half at moon-rise the night before. As the sun sank behind
the clouds piled high upon the horizon, it colored them in gorgeous
array and threw them out in wonderful shapes and sharp relief against a
clearing sky. Castles towered on one side, vast turrets standing forth
above their walls; on the other, banks of tinted vapor formed a huge
cloud-seat.
The little girl, calm, though her heart was torn with pain, looked out
with her mother upon the dying glories. She had often before in her life
seen that changing panorama which, thrown up one moment, melted into
nothingness the next. At night she had learned to kneel with her face
that way,--to the great billows that always seemed to her a seat in the
sky, that were always something more than mere vapor. She could pray
better when, long after sundown, they hung above the horizon, robbed of
their colors but still glorious. And there had grown up in her mind the
comforting thought that on those very billows was God's throne, and from
them, at sunset, He looked down upon that part of the earth that was
sinking into the night, and blessed it and told it farewell. She even
thought she could see His face in the heavens sometimes,--His flowing
white robes, and the amethyst stool upon which He rested his feet.
As the sun dropped behind the prairie, the cloud-throne loomed forth
against the blue more vividly than ever. The little girl kept her eyes
dumbly upon it, watching the crimson and gold slowly fade to royal
purple where the King sat.
"Remember what I said, pet lamb," her mother whispered. She could not
see, yet she was still holding the little girl's hands firmly. "Remember
what I told you to do."
The little girl could not answer; she could only bow her head in reply.
Tearless, she waited beside the bed, where, for the second time, Life
was striving with Death,--and was to lose. There was no sound in the
room until there came a last whisper, "Pray."
The little girl slipped down from the edge of the bed to the carpet and
knelt toward the west. A collie trotted up to her and licked her cheek.
She put him gently aside. She was trying to think of something to say in
behalf of her mother to Him who, even now, was taking His farewell look.
At last a thought came to her, and her lips moved to speak aloud the
only petition she could think of:
"O God," she pleaded, raising her eyes to where the seat, marvelous in
purple and burning gold, loomed high over the prairie against the sky,
"please be good to my mother."
And as she knelt there, strong in her faith and brave in her grief, a
messenger came down from the western cloud-throne--a messenger of peace
from the God of the little girl.
XVIII
THE LITTLE TEACHER
WITH one of the biggest brother's checked jumpers pinned across her
breast, and with suds spattered up her bare arms to her shoulders, the
little girl was valiantly attacking the weekly wash. A clothes-basket at
her feet was piled with white garments awaiting the bluing. The tub was
full of colored things that were receiving a second rub. Out of doors,
on a line stretched between the corner of the kitchen and the high seat
of the big farm wagon, flapped the drying sheets and pillow-cases.
Breakfast was cleared away, the beds were made, the sitting-room was
tidied, and it was not eight o'clock, yet she was nearly done. And while
she worked steadily to finish, the boiler on the stove behind her kept
time with its clanking cover to the grating tune of her washboard.
The little girl no longer had to make use of a three-legged
milking-stool in order to reach the tub. Instead, she stood square on
the floor. For she was tall for her scant fifteen years, having grown so
rapidly in the last twelve months that she now came up to the youngest
brother's chin, and required fully ten yards of cloth for a dress. But
she still wore her hair down her back, and, as she bobbed over the
clothes to give them their added drubbing, shiny strands shook
themselves loose from their curly, captive neighbors and waved damply
against her flushing cheeks, till she looked like a gay yellow dandelion
a-sway in a gusty wind.
When the last red shirt was wrung from the water, she began to dip
bucketfuls and empty them on the sloping ground at the farther side of
the storm-cellar, singing blithely as she hurried back and forth. She
was so intent on her carrying that she did not see a horseman who was
turning in at the ash lane, his face eagerly lifted to the windows of
the farm-house. Even when, having tied his mount at the block in front,
he rapped on the sitting-room door, she did not hear him. Finally, when,
receiving no answer, he walked around the corner to the entry, she
stepped out with her last pail and came face to face with him.
Joy leaped into his eyes as he dropped his whip and lifted his hat;
something more than surprise lighted hers as she let her suds fall and
spill over the stone step. Then, stammering a welcome, she surrendered
her hands to the glad grasp of the colonel's son.
"My! it's good to see you!" he cried, looking at her with the old
frankness. He stepped back a little to measure her from top to toe. "And
_haven't_ you shot up!"
"Like a ragweed," she laughed, taking him into the kitchen, where she
brought him a chair from the sitting-room.
"You're a full-fledged housekeeper, too," he declared. "How do you like
the change from herding?"
"Oh, I haven't herded much for a long while," she replied proudly, as
she refilled her tub from a barrel in the corner that had been drawn by
the biggest brother; "I helped mother in the house all last summer." She
grew sober suddenly, and the colonel's son hastened to change the
subject.
"You're looking awfully well," he assured her.
"I've worn off some of my tan," she explained.
"Well, that's partly it," he said, and his glance was boyishly eloquent.
She fell to rubbing again, and he watched her admiringly, noticing how
trim was her black dress, and how spotless were the lace at her throat
and the ribbon that bound back her hair.
"I don't believe you can guess where I'm started for," he said, after a
moment of silence.
She straightened up to rest her back and looked out through an open
window. "I thought you were just coming here."
"No." He watched her for a sign of pleased astonishment when he
continued, "I'm on my way to St. Paul."
She turned swiftly, her eyes open wide. "College?" she questioned in a
low, strained voice.
"Nearly that; I shall prepare for West Point. The bishop has chosen a
school for me."
Her eyes went back to the window, but a mist was over them now, and she
could not see the square of cottonwoods and barley framed by the sash.
"I left the Wyoming post a week ago," he went on. "Father's orderly
brought my trunk to Chamberlain, and I rode down from there to the
reservation--and then came here. I shall take the train at the station.
It's changed to morning time, I believe, and goes by about 10:30."
She seemed not to hear him. Her face was still turned away, and she was
murmuring to herself. "The bishop!" she repeated; "the bishop!" All at
once she ran out of the room. When she returned, she held a tin
spice-box in her hand. She took a letter from it and held it toward the
colonel's son. "Read this," she said. "It's from the bishop to mother."
He spread out the written sheet, which was dated two years back, and
read it aloud.
"'Whenever that spirited little maid of yours is ready to take up the
studies she cannot enjoy where you are, send her to me. I will get her
ready for the college she dreams about, and, if God takes you from her
soon, as you fear, and as I pray not (though His will be done!), I will
watch over her like a father.'"
When he finished, he looked up at her, his face fairly sparkling. "Of
course you'll go," he said.
"No," she answered sadly, shaking her head; "I can't go. I haven't any
money. The boys have just bought some land that joins ours. If I left,
they'd have to pay my expenses and then hire some one to take my place.
So they wouldn't be able to pay for the land. I shall have to wait till
I can earn something myself."
"It's a shame!" declared the colonel's son. "Because if you work here,
how can you earn anything?"
She shook her head again. "I don't know. Only I _shall_ go some day.
I'm--I'm glad _you're_ going, though."
"But it's been more your hope than mine. I'm sorry it isn't
different--that we aren't just changed around. I don't care to study
much, anyway. I want to be a soldier, like father. I don't see why I
should study so much for that. I've been everywhere with him after
Indians. I wish I could go on at it without stopping to study."
"I don't know what _I_ want to be. I only know that I love to read and
study. If I could read and study I wouldn't mind living on the plains."
"You wouldn't?" cried the colonel's son. "Why, maybe I shall always have
to live here, and--" He stopped in confusion, and got up hastily, hat in
hand. "Good-by," he said. He stepped toward her, his head lowered
bashfully. She wiped her hands on the jumper.
"Do you have to go?" she asked. "Can't you stay and have dinner? My
brothers would love to see you. And I'd cook you something nice."
"No," he replied, a little agitated. "I won't more than catch my train."
He shook hands and started out. At the door he glanced back, and was
startled at her colorless face. "What is it?" he pleaded, coming back to
her side.
She sat down on a bench by the window, the jumper crushed in her
fingers. "Oh, I want to go! I want to go!" she said, her voice deep with
pain and longing. "I'm lonesome here. I miss mother terribly. I'm always
listening for her; I'm always getting up and going into the next room as
if she were there. And then I remember--" She broke down and wept, all
her pride gone.
"Don't, don't," whispered the colonel's son, tenderly. "It'll all come
out right. Next year, when I'm on my way back, I'll stop, and we'll talk
it over again. That won't be long. Maybe something will turn up, too,
between now and then."
"Maybe," she said hopelessly. But she checked her tears and rose to
follow him out. At the mounting-block they shook hands again. Then he
sprang into the saddle and galloped through the yard toward the north.
"A year isn't long," she whispered to herself, as she watched him
disappear in the corn, and she went bravely back to her tub.
* * * * *
A MONTH went by,--a month of dull routine that was enlivened only by the
harvesters. Day after day she plodded through a heavy program of
breakfast, dinner, supper, bed-making, sweeping, and the care of the
chickens and pigs; her calendar was the added duties that each morning
entailed of washing, ironing, mending, scrubbing, and baking. The
promise of the colonel's son came to cheer her sometimes; but it was a
peep into the tin spice-box each evening that heartened her most. For to
her the bishop's letter was the single link between the prairie and the
longed-for campus.
Then one afternoon, as she sat churning, the dasher in one hand, in the
other a spoon that busily returned the cream frothing from the hole of
the cover, there came a second tap at the front door. This time she
heard, and ran through the sitting-room, still grasping the spoon, to
invite the new settler to enter.
He tramped in with a jocund greeting, sat down on the kitchen floor in a
path of sunlight, and leaned against the wall, smoking. "Go right on--go
right on," he urged. "Like to see you trouncing the cream. And what I've
got to say won't sour it."
She went on with her butter-making, the tall, wooden vessel firmly held
between her feet.