The Biography of a Prairie Girl Part 19

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 Sa.s.sy! 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 gra.s.s and flowers, its gentle rains and windless, sunny days,--Sa.s.sy 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 Sa.s.sy'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 Sa.s.sy, 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 Sa.s.sy 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 Sa.s.sy should continue to furnish eggs faithfully, the dress was a.s.sured.

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 Sa.s.sy'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 Sa.s.sy'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 Sa.s.sy 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. Sa.s.sy 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, Sa.s.sy 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 Sa.s.sy. 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 gra.s.s. 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 Sa.s.sy on the ground with her head pointing up the hill. Then, with ap.r.o.n 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.

Sa.s.sy did not pay any attention to the ap.r.o.n, 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!"

Sa.s.sy 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 Sa.s.sy 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, Sa.s.sy, 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 Sa.s.sy 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 Sa.s.sy 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 Sa.s.sy under her arm once more, she toiled up the gra.s.sy 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 Sa.s.sy fairly gasped for breath. Over the gra.s.s 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 a.s.sumed 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 Sa.s.sy'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 gra.s.s 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-gla.s.s in form, and realized her awful danger. Calling to Sa.s.sy, she got up on her knees with the thought of flight.

Sa.s.sy 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 Sa.s.sy 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 gra.s.s. "Sa.s.sy!" she shouted again; "Sa.s.sy!" But the cyclone drowned her cry.

With starting eyes she saw the swirling currents draw Sa.s.sy, 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 a.s.sure 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.s.

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.

It was the fall before the little girl's thirteenth birthday, and she was wearing her hair in a braid and her dresses to her shoe-tops. That summer, for the first time in her life, she had not gone barefoot. She had also taken to riding a side-saddle with a red plush seat. When her mother, therefore, suggested that the trip would be a hard one, that the post was a rough place, and that, since the colonel's family had gone to a new fort in Wyoming, there was no house on the reservation at which she could stay overnight, the eldest brother pooh-poohed and declared that the little girl was no baby and that very good accommodations could be secured at a hotel near the barracks.

They started immediately after dinner, taking two dogs along, and crossed the Vermillion to the West Fork. There the cattle were brought to a stand and a camping-place was selected. They were still so near the farm that the eldest brother, anxious to know how matters were at home, induced the little girl to return to the farm-house for the night. She did so, and joined him before sunrise next morning.

There was a worried look on her face as she came galloping up, and the eldest brother, fearful that the youngest was worse, demanded the news.

"Everything's just as it was when we left," said the little girl, "only mother's awfully scared about my going, because the Swede told her last night, when he heard that I was gone, that the hotel at the post is an awful place, full of gamblers and thieves. Two or three men that had money have disappeared there, and never been seen since. The Swede says he thinks the proprietor isn't any better than he should be."

"Oh, that Swede's a regular croaker," replied the eldest brother.

"'Fraid as death of his own shadow. I can take care of you and myself and the money to boot. Needn't to fret while I've got my pistols handy."

"Well, mother says," added the little girl, "that she hopes nothing happens to the money, because it'll finish putting us in as good shape as we were before the fire. She doesn't think anybody'd hurt us, exactly."

Nothing more was said about the hotel after that, and the little girl soon forgot her disquiet in the pleasures of the trip. She had made it but two or three times since the return from her christening, and had always gone so fast in the light wagon or the buckboard that she had no time to enjoy the changing scenery. Now they were not keeping to the main road, and she saw landmarks and farms that were new to her as they traveled from the West Fork to the "Jim," and on to the Missouri.