A Breath of Prairie and other stories Part 1

A Breath of Prairie and other stories.

by Will Lillibridge.

A TRIBUTE

It is an accepted truth, I believe, that every novelist embodies in the personalities of his heroes some of his own traits of character.

Those who were intimately acquainted with William Otis Lillibridge could not fail to recognize this in a marked degree. To a casual reader, the heroes of his five novels might perhaps suggest five totally different personalities, but one who knows them well will inevitably recognize beneath the various disguises the same dominant characteristics in them all. Whether it be Ben Blair the st.u.r.dy plainsman, Bob McLeod the cripple, Dr. Watson, Darley Roberts, or even How Landor the Indian, one finds the same foundation stones of character,--repression, virility, firmness of purpose, an abhorrence of artificiality or affectation,--love of Nature and of Nature's works rather than things man-made. And these were unquestionably the p.r.o.nounced traits of Will Lillibridge's personality. Markedly reserved, silent, forceful, he was seldom found in the places where men congregate, but loved rather the company of books and of the great out-doors. Living practically his entire life on the prairies it is undoubtedly true that he was greatly influenced by his environment.

And certain it is that he could never have so successfully painted the various phases of prairie-life without a sympathetic, personal knowledge.

The story of his life is characteristically told in this brief autobiographical sketch, written at the request of an interested magazine.

"I was born on a farm in Union County, Iowa, near the boundary of the then Dakota Territory. Like most boys bred and raised in an atmosphere of eighteen hours of work out of twenty-four, I matured early. At twelve I was a useful citizen, at fifteen I was to all practical purposes a man,--did a man's work whatever the need. In this capacity I was alternately farmer, rancher, cattleman. Something prompted me to explore a university and I went to Iowa, where for six years I vibrated between the collegiate, dental, and medical departments.

After graduating from the dental in 1898 I drifted to Sioux Falls and began to practise my profession. As the years pa.s.sed the roots sank deeper and I am still here.

"Work? My writing is done entirely at night. The waiting-room,--the plum-tree,--requires vigorous shaking in the daytime. After dinner,--I have a den, telephone-proof, piano-proof, friend-proof. What transpires therein no one knows because no one has ever seen.

"Recreation? I have a mania, by no means always gratified,--to be out of doors. Once each summer 'the Lady' and I go somewhere for a time,--and forget it absolutely. In this way we've been able to travel a bit. We,--again 'the Lady' and I,--steal an hour when we can, and drive a gasoline car, keeping within the speed laws when necessary.

Once each Fall, when the first frost shrivels the corn-stalk and when, if you chance to be out of doors after dark you hear, away up overhead, invisible, the accelerating, throbbing, diminishing purr of wings that drives the sportsman mad,--the town knows me no more."

Every novel may have a happy close, but a real life's story has but one inevitable ending,--Death.

And to "the Lady" has been left the sorrowful task of writing "Finis"

across the final page.

January 29, 1909, he died at his home in Sioux Falls after a brief illness. But thirty-one years of age, he had won a place in literature so gratifying that one might well rest content with a recital of his accomplishments. But his youth suggests a tale that is only partly told and the conjecture naturally arises,--"What success might he not have won?" Five novels, "Ben Blair," "Where the Trail Divides," "The Dissolving Circle," "The Quest Eternal," and "The Dominant Dollar,"

besides magazine articles, and a number of short stories (many of them appearing in this volume) were all written in the s.p.a.ce of eight years' time, and, as he said, were entirely produced after nightfall.

While interested naturally in the many phases of his life,--as a professional man, as an author, as the chief factor in the domestic drama,--yet most of all it pleases me to remember him as he appeared when under the spell of the prairies he loved so well. Tramping the fields in search of prairie-chicken or quail, a patient watcher in the rushes of a duck-pond, or merely lying flat on his back in the sunshine,--he was a being transformed. For he had in him much of the primitive man and his whole nature responded to the "call of the wild." But you who know his prairie-tales must have read between the lines,--for who, unless he loved the "honk" of the wild geese, could write, "to those who have heard it year by year it is the sweetest, most insistent of music. It is the spirit of the wild, of magnificent distances, of freedom impersonate"?

To the late Mrs. Wilbur Teeters I am indebted for the following tribute, which appeared in the "Iowa Alumnus."

"Dr. Lillibridge's field of romance was his own. Others have told of the Western mountains and pictured the great desert of the Southwest, but none has painted with so masterful a hand the great prairies of the Northwest, shown the lavish hand with which Nature pours out her gifts upon the pioneer, and again the calm cruelty with which she effaces him. In the midst of these scenes his actors played their parts and there he played his own part, clean in life and thought, a man to the last, slipping away upon the wings of the great storm which had just swept over his much-loved land, wrapped in the snowy mantle of his own prairies."

Edith Keller-Lillibridge

CONTENTS

I A BREATH OF PRAIRIE 13 II THE DOMINANT IMPULSE 61 III THE STUFF OF HEROES 87 IV ARCADIA IN AVERNUS 109 Chapter I Prelude Chapter II The Leap Chapter III The Wonder of Prairie Chapter IV A Revelation Chapter V The Dominance of the Evolved Chapter VI By a Candle's Flame Chapter VII The Price of the Leap V JOURNEY'S END 239 VI A PRAIRIE IDYL 265 VII THE MADNESS OF WHISTLING WINGS 279 Chapter I Sandford the Exemplary Chapter II The Presage of the Wings Chapter III The Other Man Chapter IV Capitulation Chapter V Antic.i.p.ation Chapter VI "Mark the Right, Sandford!"

Chapter VII The Bacon What Am!

Chapter VIII Feathered Bullets Chapter IX Oblivion Chapter X Upon "Wiping the Eye"

Chapter XI The Cold Gray Dawn VIII A FRONTIER ROMANCE: A TALE OF JUMEL MANSION 309 IX THE CUP THAT O'ERFLOWED: AN OUTLINE 339 X UNJUDGED 347 XI THE TOUCH HUMAN 367 XII A DARK HORSE 373 XIII THE WORTH OF THE PRICE 393

ILl.u.s.tRATIONS

She wheeled swiftly round, confronting him. Frontispiece They saw the hands which had gone to hips flash up and forward like pistons, and two puffs of smoke like escaping steam. 74 "You'll apologize." 190 The two men went East together. 326 He heard a voice ... and glanced back. 388

A BREATH OF PRAIRIE

AND OTHER STORIES

A BREATH OF PRAIRIE

I

Dense darkness of early morning wrapped all things within and without a square, story-and-a-half prairie farm-house. Silence, all-pervading, dense as the darkness, its companion, needed but a human ear to become painfully noticeable.

Up-stairs in the half-story attic was Life. From one corner of the room deep, regular breathing marked the unvarying time of healthy physical life asleep. Nearby a clock beat loud automatic time, with a bra.s.sy resonance--healthy mechanical life awake. Man and machine, side by side, punctuated the pa.s.sage of time.

Alone in the darkness the mechanical mind of the clock conceived a bit of fiendish pleasantry. With violent, shocking clamor, its deafening alarm suddenly shattered the stillness.

The two victims of the outrage sat up in bed and blinked sleepily at the dark. The younger, in a voice of wrath, relieved his feelings with a vigorously expressed opinion of the applied uses of things in general, and of alarm-clocks and milk pans in particular. He thereupon yawned prodigiously, and promptly began snoring away again, as though nothing had interrupted.

The other man made one final effort, and came down hard upon the middle of the floor. Rough it was, uncarpeted, cold with the damp chill of early morning. He groped for a match, and dressed rapidly in the dim light, his teeth chattering a diminishing accompaniment until the last piece was on.

Deep, regular breathing still came from the bed. The man listened a moment, irresolutely; then with a smile on his face he drew a feather from a pillow, and, rolling back the bed-clothes, he applied the feather's tip to the sleeper's bare soles, where experience had demonstrated it to be the most effective. Dodging the ensuing kick, he remarked simply, "I'll leave the light, Jim. Better hurry--this is going to be a busy day."

Outside, a reddish light in the sky marked east, but over all else there lay only starlight, as, lantern in hand, he swung down the frozen path. With the opening barn door there came a puff of warm animal breath. As the first rays of light entered, the stock stood up with many a sleepy groan, and bright eyes shining in the half-light swayed back and forth in the narrow stalls, while their owners waited patiently for the feed they knew was coming.

Jim, still sleepy, appeared presently; together the two went through the routine of ch.o.r.es, as they had done hundreds of times before. They worked mechanically, being still stiff and sore from the previous day's work, but swiftly, in the way mechanical work is sometimes done.

Side by side, with singing milk pails between their knees, Jim stopped long enough to ask, "Made up your mind yet what you'll do, Guy?"

The older brother answered without a break in the swish of milk through foam:

"No, I haven't, Jim. If it wasn't for you and father and mother and--"

he diverted with a redoubled clatter of milk on tin.

"Be honest, Guy," was the reproachful caution.

"--and Faith," added the older brother simply.

The reddish glow in the east had spread and lit up the earth; so they put out the lantern, and, bending under the weight of steaming milk pails, walked single file toward the house and breakfast. Far in the distance a thin jet of steam spreading broadly in the frosty air marked the location of a threshing crew. The whistle,--thin, bra.s.sy,--spoke the one word "Come!" over miles of level prairie, to the scattered neighbors.