which I had gambled the paper, was on. It kept one person busy with the
clerical work on them. While the Strip was yet a no-man's land, I had
pledged the printing equipment company 400 proofs as collateral. That
was a low estimate. As a matter of fact _The Wand_ won an all-time
record, publishing in one week 88 proofs, the highest number ever to be
published in any issue of a newspaper of which the government had
record. From the Department of the Interior, from the Land Office, from
other newspapers congratulations poured in. It seems to me that some
sort of medal was awarded to us for that.
It wasn't the record which mattered, of course. To us the publication of
these notices signified that the settlers had stuck it out with parched
throats to get their deeds; that some 14,000 acres of wasteland had
passed into private units in one week's time.
It meant endless work. Type, numbers, checking, straining eyes and
nerves beyond endurance. But it also meant (for that one lot) over $400
income for the newspaper. Proof money had been coming in for several
weeks. Every mail brought long heavy envelopes from the Land Office,
containing proof applications made there. From among the homesteaders we
hired amateur typesetters to help out, and anybody who happened to be
handy turned the press; on occasion we resorted to old Indian warriors,
and once to a notorious cattle rustler.
And all this time we watched the sky for rain and skimmed the green scum
from the dam water to drink. Looking up from the type one morning, I saw
an old Indian standing before me, old Porcupine Bear. Slipping in on
moccasined feet, an Indian would appear before one without warning. At
first this sudden materializing at my elbow had alarmed me, but I had
long grown accustomed to it.
Old Porcupine Bear was a savage-looking character--one of the very old
warriors who seldom left camp. One never knew how old some of these aged
Indians were, and many of them did not know themselves how many seasons
they had lived. This old man, we figured, must be a hundred years old.
"Will there be rain, Porcupine?" I asked him. "Will you hold your Rain
Dance soon?"
The deep wrinkles in his leathery face were hard set as if from pain.
His coal-black hair, streaked with gray and hanging loose over his
shoulders, looked as if it had not been combed for days.
"_To-wea_," he wailed. "_My to-wea_ (my woman). Him sick. The fever.
Goin' die." He dropped his face into the palm of his hard hand and let
it lie there motionless in demonstration of her passing. He wanted to
get a box like white squaws had, the boxes in which they went to the
Happy Hunting Ground.
He was on the road to Pierre for a coffin. Others of the tribe, we
gathered, had put in money to help buy it. He opened a beaded sack and
showed us. There was enough to buy a pretty good one. In broken Sioux
and signs we advised him to wait--mebbe-no-die. Mebbe-walk-some-more. He
shook his head stubbornly. His herbs--he was a medicine man who had
healed many sick ones--had not worked. Even his _pazunta_ had failed.
The Indian's _pazunta_ was his shield against disease--against all evil.
It drives the Evil Spirit away. It may be anything he selects--an herb,
a stone, a rabbit's foot--so long as he selects it secretly and divulges
to no one what it is. The _pazunta_ is invested with divine curative
power, according to the Indians.
When he got back to his wigwam with the satin-lined "last-sleep-box,"
Porcupine Bear found his _to-wea_ cooking supper; so the old brave, it
was said, slept in the good soft bed himself. "Why not?" said Ida Mary.
He had slept on the ground and fought many hard battles; let him have
his cushioned resting place while he could enjoy it; but I shuddered at
the thought.
A week or so later he came again. It was a day when I was at the
breaking point. He stood looking at me, shaking his head as he had done
over his _to-wea_. I must have looked like a ghost, for in a gesture of
friendship he said:
"You want my last-sleep-box?"
The prairie fire had not got me down, but at the thought of that box I
went to bed and stayed there three days.
[Illustration]
XV
UP IN SMOKE
There was almost $750 in the tin box down in the trunk ready to be
deposited. At breakfast we exulted over it. The Ammons sisters were
always draining the bank dry. Sedgwick would open his eyes when we
walked into the bank with that bag of money.
We planned to go to Presho that day. It was hardly safe to have so much
money in the shack, and we were eager to put it in a safe place. It
represented months of planning and effort and hard work. But the labor
didn't seem bad to look back on that morning, not with the reward at
hand. It had been worth while, because the end of the road was in sight
and we had accomplished much that we had hoped to do--more, in some
respects.
It was unbearably hot that morning, and we decided against the trip to
Presho. After all, one more day wouldn't matter, and the sun was so
scorching we quailed at the thought of that long ride. There was an
ominous oppression in the air, and heat waves made the ground appear to
waver before our eyes. Here and there flames flared up without any
explainable origin, as though from the heat of the grass itself.
The day crept on to mid-afternoon, and the hot wind came up from the
ground, blistering our faces. There was no one near the print shop,
where the metal was hot to the touch, no movement over the plains. We
sent our helpers home, while Ma, Ida Mary and I moved about languidly,
doing only what was absolutely necessary.
There was a curious, acrid smell in the air. As though a bolt of
lightning had struck, I stopped my work on the paper and cried out,
"What's that?"
"Fire," screamed Ida Mary; "fire!"
Smoke enveloped us. There was a deafening crackle. Blinding red flame.
We ran to the door, and there, not ten feet away, our shack was burning
to the ground. The little lean-to kitchen, covered with tar paper, was
sending its flames high into the air. Frantically we ran to the front
door, shouting above the crackling and roar of flame, "The trunk! The
money! The settlers' money!"
The print shop would go, too--and the notices had several weeks to
run--but the essential thing was to get the money back. We must do that,
must! Oh, for a rolling bank on wheels!
At the front door black smoke came rolling out, choking us. Ida Mary
threw a sack over her head and started into the shack. Ma Wagor and I
dragged her back into the open air. The building was burning as though
it had been made of paper, a torch of orange flames. We watched it go,
home, money, clothes, a few valuable keepsakes, furniture--everything we
possessed licked up by the flames. The piano, too--I was glad it had
brought so much pleasure to the settlers.
The wind! Now the fire was spreading. The print shop was burning, its
inflammable tar paper and dry boards blazing like powder. "Hurry,
hurry!" we called frantically to each other. From the print shop I
grabbed the most valuable papers while Ida Mary snatched what she could
from the post office. Stoical, silent, making every move count, Ma Wagor
was busy in the store, her store, in which she had taken such pride and
such infinite pleasure. Ma was getting more "confusement" now than she
had bargained for.
Blinded with smoke, we caught up the sacks into which we had stuffed the
papers and threw them into the cave, the only shelter left on the whole
claim.
In less than thirty minutes the post office, the store with its supply
of food, the print shop were gone. The harvest of long months of labor
and storm, thirst and fire, vanished as though it had never been--gone
up in clouds of heavy, black smoke.
If the wind would only go down, we groaned; but the sparks had already
caught the grass around us. A prairie fire! If it ever jumped those
breaks, the Strip would be devastated with the wind sweeping the plain
as it was doing. What irony that we who had printed our precautions and
warnings for others, should burn up the Strip! We who had labored so to
save it! And there was no chance for us. We could not outrun a prairie
fire. The horses, which were untied, had gone full speed across the
prairie at the first smell and sight of fire.
Now the oilhouse had caught, and we turned, panic-stricken, running
headlong across the plains, our feet burning, not knowing where we were
going so long as we could escape the explosion of the oil. Inside the
firebreaks the grass was burning. Listening for the explosion of the oil
was like waiting for the crack of doom. Then we remembered. Pa Wagor had
sunk the barrels underground, using siphons, "just in case of fire."
Sparks leaping up, flying across the breaks--the prairie was on fire! We
checked our flight, sanity returning with the emergency. We had to go
back--simply had to go back and fight that first outbreak of flame. The
Strip was at stake. Life and property were at stake. Falling, rising,
running, falling again, dragging each other up, we went back. "Help!" we
called to the empty prairie, "Help!"
There was nothing to smother the fast-spreading blaze. Not a thing. Not
even a sack or a hat. We tore off parts of the clothes from our scantily
clad bodies. Ma took off her petticoat. There was a sack in the barn
which we wet in a keg set in the yard, wet the canvas which covered the
keg. With that, with our feet we trampled down the sparks as they fell,
the flames as they rose--shoes hot and charred, holes burning through.
Across the prairie a team was coming at a dead run. "Bless the Lord," Ma
Wagor panted, "it's Sam Frye!"
A bright red flare shot up from behind and around me. My dress was on
fire. Ida Mary clawed dirt from the hard-baked ground, and with it in
her hands twisted my burning smock into knots to keep the flames from
spreading. With almost animal instinct I threw myself down in the
firebreak, pressing hard against the ground to extinguish any smoldering
sparks on my clothing, and lay panting, cooling in the dirt.
Sam Frye, the mail-carrier, was there, taking charge. All at once a
crowd had gathered, attracted by the leaping flames on what had been the
settlement of Ammons, running to fight the threatening prairie fire. Men
went to work, fighting fresh outbursts of flames and putting out fire on
the ruins. Women hovered about us in sympathy, some with tears streaming
down their sunburned cheeks under the straw hats and bonnets. Neither
Sister nor I could shed a tear.
Dazed and dizzy, we stumbled back across the breaks to the charred ashes
of our labors. Apart from the tangible losses that lay in coals, the
newspaper, the voice of the Brulé, was gone. "Down into frontier
history," Senator Phillips said. Into it had gone the ambitions, the
heartbreaking labor, the vision of two girls.
Half-naked, our scanty clothing burned and torn, hair singed, faces and
parts of our bodies scorched and black with smoke--tar paper makes
black, smudgy smoke--eyes red and burning, we stood there in the middle
of the open spaces that had dealt us their blow. Our _pazuntas_ hadn't
worked, that was all. But at least we had checked the prairie fire. We
had won that much from the Brulé, the "Burned" land.
We clung to each other wordlessly. There was nothing to say. Everything
that made up our daily life and our plans for the future had been wiped
out in thirty minutes.
"We still have the claim," Ida Mary murmured at last; "nothing can
destroy the land."
"But all our bright hopes--"
How the fire got such a start before we detected it was a mystery. With
the shack walls already burning hot and the strong wind, it had been
like spontaneous combustion. Ma Wagor was baking bread on an old oil
stove. Perhaps a draft from the open window had fanned the fire. But the
origin didn't matter now.
Ma Wagor had worked heroically, helping us to save the important
records, the mail, and the prairie from being swept by fire. When it was
all over she did not whimper about her loss.
When I saw Pa coming, I ran to her. "Ma, here comes Pa. This will kill
him. You had better go meet him." He had not wanted her to buy the store
in the first place; now there were debts piled up, and only the
homestead to pay them.
She sat on the ground, burying her face in her hands. "Let him come to
me," she replied. "It's his place to comfort me in time of trouble."
True to her feminine intuition, he went to her and put his arm around
her shoulders. "Elizabeth," he said. No response. "Elizabeth," he
entreated. "Don't give way like this. We will pull through somehow."
I felt a hand on my arm, and Alex Van Leshout's voice hoarse in my ear.
"The latchkey of the Circle V is on the outside. If you girls will come
over, I'll move out. If you need me or Hop-Along, all I have is at your
service. You're a good Indian, Edith."
Sometimes I envy the women who are able, during a catastrophe, to stop
and grieve over it. I never seem to have had the time. There was always
something that demanded to be done, whatever the circumstances.
The fire had no sooner been put out, the claim bare as the day I first
saw it--save for charred grass, and a great mound of ashes, and the
smell of smoke--when Sam Frye opened the mail sacks. Sitting bedraggled
in his old buggy, Ida Mary distributed the mail to the patrons who had
gathered. Even though the post office was gone, the mail must go on. We
were never destined to be back-trailers.
The sultry, tragic day came to a close, with the plains light long after
the sun had gone down, and the Ammons settlement gone, and a devastating
sense of emptiness. Ida Mary and I realized that we had no place to go.
With typical frontier hospitality, every home on the reservation was
open to us; but that night we longed to be alone. It wasn't
commiseration we needed, but quiet in which to grasp what had happened
to us. We decided on Margaret's shack, left vacant when she had proved
up. She had left a few household essentials there.
There some of the frontier women followed us, to bathe and salve the
burns we had forgotten, bandaging those which were the worst. I had
suffered most when my clothing caught fire, but miraculously there were
no serious burns.
They left us alone as night came, Ma and Pa Wagor, Ida Mary and me. It
was Ma who roused first from the general lethargy in which we were all
steeped. She began bustling around. "Guess we'd better have something to
eat," she said briskly.
"There's nothing left to eat," Ida Mary reminded her.
Triumphantly, Ma brought forth a big bundle tied up in her old gingham
apron. In it were cans of salmon, tomatoes and other essential foods.
And a can of pineapple, Ma's panacea for all ills! "I knew we'd be
hungry after all that, so I jerked up a little stuff while you were
getting the papers out."
She brought in an armful of prairie hay, built a fire in the cookstove
and made strong tea. She was no longer the clinging vine of an hour
before.
And there in the little shack down the draw, penniless, almost naked,
all our belongings and our plans for the future in charred ashes on the
claim, we slept from exhaustion.
No matter with what finality things seem to end, there is always a next
day and a next. During those first few hours the extent of our disaster
had dazed us. Then, the odds seemed so overwhelmingly against us that
there was no use in going on. The only trouble was that we couldn't
stop. Post office or no post office, there was the mail. Print shop or
no print shop, there were the proof notices.
We were like the cowboy who, hanging to a running steer's tail, was
dragged against the hard ground and through brush until he was cut,
battered and bruised.
Fearing he would be killed, the other cowboys, who watched, shouted
wildly to him, "Let go! Let go!"
"Let go, hell!" he yelled back. "It's all I can do to hold on!"
Then there was Great-uncle Jack Ammons, back in the earlier days of
Illinois, who had become critically ill from some lingering disease of
long standing. One day the doctor called Aunt Jane aside and said,
"Jane, if Jack has any business matters to attend to, it had better be
done at once. I don't think he can last another forty-eight hours."
From the bedroom came a weak, irritable voice, "Jane! Jane! Where's my
boots?"
Uncle Jack got up, fought the disease, and lived and prospered for many
a year. We came of a family who died with their boots on.
I don't know whether it was a streak of Great-uncle Jack or whether,
like the cowboy, we held on because we could not let go. The latter,
perhaps, for we saw no way of escape. Many times, I think, people get
too much credit for hanging on to things as a virtue when they are
simply following the line of least resistance. We saw no means of
escape, and were too stunned to plan.
Of one thing we were sure. We would not go back home for help. There
would have to be some way of telling our father of the misfortune so as
to soften the blow as much as possible, but we were determined not to
add to his burdens, which were already too heavy for him.
"If the railroad company takes us to the state line," declared Ida
Mary, "it will have to take us crated--or furnish us covering." In the
garish morning light, indeed, we felt rather naked in those flimsy, torn
clothes, the only garments we now owned.
"We can't go back, anyhow," I reminded her. "We can't leave things
unfinished. The proof notices have to finish running, and Sam Frye will
be throwing the mail sack in at the door." It was easier to get into
things than to get out.
The settlers came that day with their widow's mite of food and clothes;
the women's clothing too large, the children's too small. But it covered
us--after a fashion. The store at Presho sent out a box of supplies.
Coyote Cal and Sourdough rode up.
"Beats tarnation, now don't it," Coyote Cal consoled us.
"I told you this country wasn't fit for nothin' but cowhands," growled
Sourdough. "Here, the punchers rounded up a little chicken feed." He
fairly threw at us a dirty tobacco pouch, filled with coins. "Coming
before pay day like this, tain't much," he grumbled, as though the
catastrophe might have waited for pay day--things couldn't be done to
suit Sourdough.
A wagonload of Indians drove up, men and squaws and papooses. They
climbed out, unhitched, turned the team loose to graze. They came in
mumbling in a sort of long wail, "No-print-paper, hu-uh, hu-uh," but
gleeful as children over the gifts they carried. A bright-hued shawl,
thick hot blankets, beaded moccasins. There was a sack of "corn in the
milk" (roasting ears) which had been raised over by the river, and
stripped (dried) meat. We did not know whether it was cow, horse or dog,
but we knew it had been black with flies as it hung on the lines
drying--we had seen them drying meat. However, parboiling should make it
clean.
And early that morning we saw Imbert coming from Presho, hurrying to Ida
Mary, his face drawn and haggard. They went into each other's arms
without a word, and at last Ida Mary was able to cry, tears of sorrow
and relief, with her face against his breast.
I lay weak and ill, wasting from a slow fever. I slept fitfully, while
streams of cool water went gurgling by, and cool lemonade, barrels of
it. But every time I stooped to take a drink the barrels went rattling
across the plain into a prairie fire.
"Maybe you've got typhoid," Ma would say as she bathed my hot head and
hands with towels wrung out of vinegar and warm water, fanning them to
coolness. "You'll be all right, Sis," Ida Mary would say; "just hold
on--" We did not call a doctor. There was no money left for doctors.
Rest, sleep, and nourishment were what I needed, but conditions were far
from favorable for such a cure. The deserted shack was baking hot. It
was not the cheerful place it had seemed while Margaret lived in it,
with the bare floor, the old kitchen stove, the sagging wire couch and a
couple of kitchen chairs. We had scanty, sticky food, and warm,
sickening water. We didn't even bother to keep it clean. The routine of
our life had been burned away. The handful of dishes went dirty, the
floor went unswept. But Ma brought milk and custards that she had made
at home, I drank the juice of dried fruits, and Imbert brought us water
from the Millers' well. We sank jars of it deep into the ground to keep
cool.
Heine broke a new trail across the plains and a few days after the fire
the horses came home. They had wandered back to the old site, snorted at
the black ruins, and gone thundering across the prairie led by Lakota
with the wild horse's fear of fire. We never expected to see them again.
But one day they saw Sam Frye coming with the mail. They followed him
down the draw, and when he stopped and threw out the mail sack Lakota
gave a loud neigh and walked straight into Margaret's old barn. Where
the mail sacks went was home to Lakota.
Moving the post office around the prairie, piling the mail in an open
box in the corner, may have been criminally illegal, but we gave it no
thought.
The mail, in a haphazard fashion, was being handled. Our next problem
was the proof notices. They must go on. It was vital to the settlers.
Many of them could not live without the money they were borrowing on the
final proofs. Without the press there seemed no solution to that
problem.
On the sixth day after the fire Ida Mary got up early, while I slept in
the cool of the morning; she made a blast from the dry grass under one
cap of the stove, boiled coffee, ate her lean breakfast, and put food on
a chair beside my bed. Then she darkened the room, slipped out, saddled
Lakota, rode up to the cave, and brought out the mail sack of legal
papers we had saved from the fire. She took out the notices--those in
course of publication and others due to be published. Then she rode on
to McClure, made arrangements with the printer of the McClure _Press_,
and began setting up the notices.
When the stage came in that noon with the Ammons mail, there was a
letter from E. L. Senn, the proof king, offering us the use of the shop
and part-time service of his printer to meet the emergency. Although we
had cornered the great proof business on the Lower Brulé, he was coming
to our rescue to save it for us.
That night Ida Mary came home, hot, weary, with lines of fatigue in her
youthful face and about her blue eyes. But there was a resolute look,
too, marking her strong will; and in her voice a tone of satisfaction.
It was a long, arduous task, setting up again all those notices in small
type. The type of the McClure shop would not set half of the notices. We
sent the balance of them to be set, some in Presho, some in Pierre, got
them back by stage, and _The Wand_, despite fire and all other
obstacles, went on with its work--a few days late, strictly a proof
sheet, but without lapse of publication.
And Ida Mary kept things going, conserving her strength as well as she
could, with Imbert and Ma Wagor helping. Ma said, "I'd 'a' died if I
hadn't found something to do."
It was mid-August, with no sign of the drought breaking. In the shack
down the draw we sat during spare hours sorting type at Margaret's
kitchen table, picking, separating six-point, eight-point, ten-point
letters and spaces, leads, slugs. Ma Wagor and other neighbors helped at
odd times; Heine separated the type into piles of like sizes. Sorting
that type-pi was a job to which no one in the world but a printer can
give the deserved sympathy.
Heine, raking around in the cooling embers on my claim, had found
several cases of pied type and a few odds and ends of printing equipment
down under a piece of heavy tin roofing, the only thing salvaged from
the wreckage.
A committee of settlers came, emptied a little sack on the table. In a
little heap there lay pennies, dimes, quarters, a few silver
dollars--precious coins that had been put aside to keep the wolf from
the door--and a separate roll of bills. The offering of the Lower Brulé
settlers! "To build a new shack and print shop," they said simply. "The
homesteaders will do the building."
Of course, we must build another shack and reestablish residence or
there would be no deed to the land. The money represented not only the
hard-earned savings but the loyal support of the settlers. When we
protested, they laughed. "But _The Wand_ has always been telling us to
share," they said. Some of the business men of the towns added to the
contribution to establish the newspaper.
One sweltering day, with everyone seeking escape from the broiling sun,
all movement over the Strip was suspended. As I lay on the couch
recuperating, there came a great explosion that roared through the dead
hush like all the cannons of war gone off at once. Ida Mary, resting in
the shade of the shack, came running in. It could not be thunder, for
there was not a cloud in the sky. It had come from over Cedar Fork way.