Elia Wilkinson Peattie

“ But somehow, the Western type did not appear. Commonplace women with worn faces—browned and seamed, though not aged—were at the stations, waiting for something or some one. Men with a hurried, nervous air were everywhere. Kate looked in vain for the gayety and heartiness which she had always associated with the West.
After they got beyond the timber country and rode hour after hour on a tract smooth as a becalmed ocean, she gave herself up to the feeling of immeasurable vastness which took possession of her. The sun rolled out of the sky into oblivion with a frantic, headlong haste. ”

“ For a moment, even amid the smoke of the car, he seemed to scent clover, and hear the stiff swishing of the corn and the dull burring of the bees.
“I wish sometimes,” he said, leaning forward to look at his bride, “that I had been born something else than a farmer. But I can no more help farming, Annie, than a bird can help singing, or a bee making honey. I didn't take to farming. I was simply born with a hoe in my hand.”
“I don't know a blessed thing about it,” Annie confessed. “But I made up my mind that a farm with you was better than a town without you. ”

“ And she plays a waltz, and what with the music and the warmth of the room and the perfume of the roses, a something nameless and mystical steals over the poor clerk, and swathes him about like the fumes of opium. They are alone. The silence is made deeper by that rhythmic unswelling of sound. As the painter flushes the bare wall into splendor, these emotions illuminated his soul, and gave to it that high courage that comes when men or women suddenly realize that each life has its significance,-their own lives no less than the lives of others. ”

“ For there in the solitude an understanding of deep things came to him. He who thought never to have a wife grew to know what the joy of it must be. He perceived all the subtle rapture of wedded souls. He learned what the love of children was, the pride of home, the unselfish ambition for success that spurs men on. All the emotions passed in procession at night before him, tricked out in palpable forms.
A burst of girlish tears would dissipate whatever lingering pity Zoe felt for him. How often he said that! With her sensitiveness she would be sure to hate a man who had mortified her. ”

“ Kate yielded herself to the almost absurd luxury of the place with ease and complacency. She took kindly to the great verandas. She adapted herself to the elaborate and ill-assorted meals. She bathed in the marvellous pool, warm with the heat of eternal fires in mid-earth. This pool was covered with a picturesque Moorish structure, and at one end a cascade tumbled, over which the sun, coming through colored windows, made a mimic prism in the white spray. The life was not unendurable. The major was seldom with her, being obliged to go about his business ”

“ Besides, when you are young, it is much easier to act than to pray. When the children cried for food, Father de Smet took down the rifle from the wall and went out with it, coming back only when he could feed the hungry. There were places where the prairie was black with buffalo, and the shy deer showed their delicate heads among the leafless willows of the Papillion. When they—the children—were cold, this young man brought in baskets of buffalo chips from the prairie and built them a fire, or he hung more skins up at the entrance to the tepees. ”

“ Another blast came, hotter this time, and fifteen minutes later that wind was sweeping straight across the plain, burning and blasting. Annie went in the house to finish her ironing, and was working there, when she heard Jim's footstep on the door-sill. He could not pale because of the tan, but there was a look of agony and of anger-almost brutish anger—in his eyes. Then he looked, for a moment, at Annie standing there working patiently, and rocking the little crib with one foot, and he sat down on the door-step and buried his face in his brown arms. ”

“ Their boisterous good-fellowship was as intoxicating to this poor young recluse as the liquor.
It was the revulsion from this feeling, when he came to a consciousness that the men were laughing at him and not with him, that wrecked his life. He had gone from beer to whiskey, and from whiskey to brandy, by this time, at the suggestion of the men, and was making awkward lunges with a billiard cue, spurred on by the mocking applause of the others. One young fellow was particularly hilarious at his expense. His jokes became insults, or so they seemed to David. ”

“ Ninon had a genius for home-making. Her cabin, in which she cooked, slept, ate, lived, had become a boudoir.
The walls were hung with rare and beautiful skins; the very floor made rich with huge bear robes, their permeating odors subdued by heavy perfumes brought, like the spices, from St. Louis. The bed, in daytime, was a couch of beaver-skins; the fireplace had branching antlers above it, on which were hung some of the evidences of the fair Ninon's coquetry, such as silken scarves, of the sort the voyageurs from the far north wore ”

“ Every laborer is patient at his task because he cherishes a hope that some day he will be a millionnaire. There is hospitality, and cordiality and good fellowship, and an undeniable democracy. There is wealth and luxurious living. There is even culture,—but it is obtruded as a sort of novelty; it is not accepted as a matter of course.
Kate and the major were driven over two or three miles of dusty, hard road to a distant hotel, which stands in the midst of greenness,—in an oasis. Immediately above the green sward that surrounds it the brown hills rise, the grass scorched by the sun. ”

“ Cattle are timorous under the stars. The vastness of the plains, the sweep of the wind under the unbroken arch, frighten them; they are made for the close comforts of the barn-yard; and the apprehension is contagious, as every ranchman knows. Waite realized the need of becoming good friends with his animals. Night after night, riding up and down in the twilight of the stars, or dozing, rolled in his blanket, in the shelter of a knoll, he would hear a low roar; it was the cry of the alarmist. ”

“ Annie tried hard not to be depressed by the treeless stretches of the Nebraska plains.
“This is different from Illinois,” she ventured once, gently; “it is even different from Iowa.”
“Yes, yes,” cried Jim, enthusiastically, “it is different! It is the finest country in the world! You never feel shut in. You can always see off. I feel at home after I get in Nebraska. I'd choke back where you live, with all those little gullies and the trees everywhere. It's a mystery to me how farmers have patience to work there.” ”

“ But the baby cooing at her from its bunk, the low of the cattle from the corral begging her to relieve their heavy bags, the familiar call of one of her neighbors from without, even the burning sky of the summer dawns, broke the spell of this conjured sorrow, and in spite of herself she was again a very hearty and happy young woman. Besides, if one has a liking for comedy, it is impossible to be dull on a Nebraska prairie. The people are a merrier divertissement than the theatre with its hackneyed stories. ”

“ Kate's face shone with sympathy.
“How dreadful!” she cried. “I couldn't live without a baby about.”
“Like babies, do you? Well, well. Boys? Like boys?”
“Not a bit better than girls,” said Kate, stoutly.
“I like boys,” responded Roeder, with conviction. “My mother liked boys. She had three girls, but she liked me a damned sight the best.”
Kate laughed outright.
“Why do you swear?” she said. “I never heard a man swear before,—at least, not one with whom I was talking. That's one of your gulch habits. You must get over it.”
Roeder's blond face turned scarlet. ”

“ The wealth of a country is estimated by its power of production. And its power of production means work. It means there are so many men with so much capacity. Now the government owes it to these men to have money enough to pay them for their work; and if there is not enough money in circulation to pay to each man for his honest and necessary work, then I say that government is in league with crime. It is trying to make defaulters of us. It has a hundred ways of cheating us. When I bought this farm and put the mortgage on it, a day's work would bring twice the results it will now. ”

“ The echoes are so loud in the valley that sometimes, when the wind is rising, we can hardly hear a man talk unless he raises his voice. There are four cataracts near where I live, and they all have different voices, just as people do; and one of them is happy—a little white cataract—and it falls where the sun shines earliest, and till night it is shining. But the others only get the sun now and then, and they are more noisy and cruel. ”

“ They force us to stand every loss, even to the shortage that is made in transportation. The railroad companies own the elevators, and they have the cinch on us. Our grain is at their mercy. God knows how I'm going to raise that interest. As for the five hundred we were going to pay on the mortgage this year, Annie, we're not in it.”
Autumn was well set in by this time, and the brilliant cold sky hung over the prairies as young and fresh as if the world were not old and tired. Annie no longer could look as trim as when she first came to the little house. ”

“ A cry answered her,—a cry of dull pain from the baby. Henderson dropped on his knees beside her.
“They are all safe,” he said. “And we will never leave you again. I have been afraid to tell you how I love you. I thought I might offend you. I thought I ought to wait—you know why. But I will never let you run the risks of this awful life alone again. You must rename the baby. From this day his name is John. And we will have the three Johns again back at the old ranch. It doesn't matter whether you love me or not, Catherine, I am going to take care of you just the same. ”

“ I like mountains that go beyond the clouds, with terrible shadows in the hollows, and belts of snow lying in the gorges where the sun cannot reach, and the snow is blue in the sunshine, or shining till you think it is silver, and the mist so wonderful all about it, changing each moment and drifting up and down, that you cannot tell what name to give the colors. ”

“ Then from every direction the cattle would rise with trembling awkwardness on their knees, and answer, giving out sullen bellowings. Some of them would begin to move from place to place, spreading the baseless alarm, and then came the time for action, else over the plain in mere fruitless frenzy would go the whole frantic band, lashed to madness by their own fears, trampling each other, heedless of any obstacle, in pitiable, deadly rout. ”

“ Here was a rude pulpit, and back of it a much-disfigured virgin, dressed in turkey-red calico. Two cheap candles in their tin sticks guarded this figure, and beneath, on the floor, was spread an otter-skin of perfect beauty. The seats were of pine, without backs, and the wind whistled through the chinks between the logs. Moreover, the place was dirty. Lenten service had been out of the question. The living had neither time nor strength to come to worship; and the dead were not given the honor of a burial from church in these times of terror. ”

“ It was generally conceded that Waite had a genius for herding, and he could take the “mad” out of a fractious animal in a way that the others looked on as little less than superhuman. Thus it was that one day, when the clay had been well turned, and the seeds arranged on the kitchen table, and all things prepared for an afternoon of busy planting, that Waite and Henderson, who were needed out with the cattle, felt no little irritation at the inexplicable absence of Gillispie, who was to look after the garden. ”

“ But spring was near in spite of falling snow and the dirty ice in the river. There was not even a flushing of the willow twigs to tell it by, nor a clearing of the leaden sky,—only the almanac. Yet all men were looking forward to it. The trappers put in the feeble days of convalescence, making long rafts on which to pile the skins dried over winter,—a fine variety, worth all but their weight in gold. Money was easily got in those days; but there are circumstances under which money is valueless. ”