The Biography of a Prairie Girl Part 21

Langdon gave a laugh and shrugged his shoulders before draining the flask in his hand.

"This is my friend," said Eagle Eye, extending one arm above the little girl and resting it on the eldest brother's shoulder. "We will help him drive the fox from the haystack."

Another cheer greeted him. He jumped to the floor, and the eldest brother followed, lifting the little girl down beside him. The crowd, eager for the vengeful finale, rushed out of the bar to the street.

Eagle Eye hung back to whisper in the eldest brother's ear. "It's a good time for you to get out," he said. "I'll help you saddle the ponies." He knelt to unfasten his spurs and put them on the other's boots.

The eldest brother felt of his belt, grasped the little girl's hand, and hurried out of a side door with the half-breed. A soldier had carried away the lamp to use it as a brand, and no one saw them leave the darkened room. Once in the stable, the work of getting the horses ready took but a few moments. Then the eldest brother and the little girl mounted and rode at a walk toward the barracks, with Eagle Eye on foot beside them and the dogs trotting after.

When they were so far that their horses' hoof-beats could not be heard by the crowd, they gave the half-breed a silent, grateful shake of the hand and galloped rapidly toward home. Not until the post was a mile behind did they halt at the top of a ridge to look back.

Volleys of shots and shouting were borne to their ears by the early morning breeze, for the crowd was celebrating the progress of a swiftly mounting blaze. Soon the eldest brother and the little girl could see the men running excitedly about, and caught the smell of kindling lumber. In a few moments the post sprang into sight as the hotel became a ma.s.s of flame.

The mob as it moved about the rim of the burning pile, looked like wooden men pulled by wires. There were fewer shots now and little shouting. The conflagration seemed to glut the horde. The eldest brother and the little girl dared pause no longer, but cantered on. When they looked around for the last time, the fire had died down, and its thin smoke was carrying up a myriad sparks, to die out in the dome of the slowly brightening sky.

XVII

ANOTHER MOUND ON THE BLUFF

COTTONWOOD leaves from the wind-break, splashed with red from the wounds of the frost, tarried at the window-panes to tap gently, or went hurrying past the farm-house with the north wind that was whining dolorously under the wet gables, to find their way through the branches of the ash-trees in front. The crows strutted across the stubbled wheat, spouting to one another over their finds. The dead pea-vines in the vegetable garden screwed about till they loosened their roots, and then scampered up the furrowed potato-field as the guardian of their gathered fruit flounced his empty sleeves and ample coat-tails at them. A family of robins that had dallied too long in the north whirred over the corn-field, where the shocks were standing in long, regular lines, and called down a last crisp good-by to the russet, plume-topped tents of autumn's invading army.

But all the bleakness without, that November morning, could not equal the bitterness within, though the iron tea-kettle was singing cheerily enough over the hot coal fire in the sitting-room stove, and the collies, to show their lazy appreciation of cozy quarters, were thumping their tails contentedly against the rag carpet. For, with the eldest and the youngest brothers elk-hunting beyond Fort Mandan, and the biggest miles away at Yankton with a load of hogs, the little girl, half dazed with anxiety, was watching, alone save for the neighbor woman, beside the canopied bed.

Her mother's illness had come with alarming suddenness. The afternoon before she had been apparently as well as usual, and when the little girl went into her room for the night, was humming to herself as she chopped up turnips for the cows. But the neighbor woman, arriving later in quest of a start of yeast, found her lying still and speechless in the entry, where she had been stricken at her work. Brandy had revived her, and she had begun to recover her strength. Yet it was plain to the neighbor woman and the little girl, no matter how much the sufferer strove to make light of her fainting, that help was needed.

Throughout the forenoon the little girl begged hard for permission to go to the station for the new doctor. Her mother, seeing through the windows how sunless and bl.u.s.tery it was outside, entreated her to wait until the next day, when the biggest brother would be home. But the neighbor woman, who dreaded a second attack, at last joined her arguments to the little girl's, dwelling upon the uncertainty of the brother's return; and shortly after dinner the mother consented.

"If there were only some one else to send," she whispered as the little girl bent over her for a parting embrace. "It is cold and stormy."

"It's getting colder every minute," was the answer. "If I go at all, I must go now. I'll take the sorrel and ride fast. And I'll be back before you know it." She kissed her mother tenderly and hastened from the house.

When she led her horse out of the barn and mounted at a nail-keg near the tool-house, she saw that her start had been delayed too long and that she was threatened with a drenching. The air was rapidly growing more chill, and northward the sky was streaked in long, slanting lines with a downfall that was advancing toward the farm. She gave no thought to deferring her trip, however, but sprang into the saddle, and instead of taking the road leading through the corn-shocks, started across the fields toward the carnelian bluff.

To her dismay, her short cut resulted only in a loss of time. When she pa.s.sed through the cottonwoods to the barley-field beyond, the ground, still soaked from the recent rain, became so soft that the sorrel sank to his knees at every step. He began to plunge excitedly, and she guided him to the left, away from the timothy meadow, to a firmer foothold on the edge of the corn-field. It brought her out upon the prairie at the western base of the hill.

As she crossed the southern slope, setting her horse into a run with her whip, she chanced to glance up toward the summit, and her eyes met an unfamiliar object. The next moment, despite her solicitude for her mother, the oncoming storm and the long road ahead, she reined him in so abruptly that he sat back upon his haunches, and then urged him up the incline to where, in place of the usual pile of stones, was a low, dark mound of earth with a pipestone cross at its head.

Halted beside the mound, her curiosity changed to sudden awe; for, leaning from her horse, she read aloud a word that imparted painful knowledge carefully kept from her for almost fourteen years,--a word that was chiseled deep into the polished face of the cross:

FATHER

Looking down thus, for the first time, at the uncovered grave, no 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 gra.s.s. 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.s 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!"