The Biography of a Prairie Girl Part 6

The teacher halted when he saw him and called back to the scholars, now crowding about the door. "Bring my pointer," he cried.

Not a pupil moved. The teacher, noting that no one was obeying his order, and not daring to go forward unarmed, ran back at the top of his speed for the stick. But he was too late; for, by the time he had gained the school-room and grabbed both the pointer and the stove poker, the little girl had scrambled upon her pinto and galloped off toward the farm-house.

The teacher did not give chase, but, sputtering revenge under his breath, called the school to order. Then, not forgetting what severity is due insubordination where the sons of salary-supplying fathers are concerned, he gave the boys who had fought, but who were now docile and smiling, a mighty tongue-lashing.

When the little girl was beyond hailing distance or possibility of capture, she brought the pinto to a standstill and looked back. Once she opened her lips as if to say something, but closed them again, and, after waiting until the scholars had all gone in, rode on. She did not go home; instead, when she came in sight of the reservation road, she turned east and cantered across the prairie until only the top of the farm-house was visible to her as she sat upon her horse. Then she dismounted, tethered the pinto, made Luffree lie down, and, having taken the magazine from under the saddle-blankets, cuddled against the dog.

She was still trembling, her throat ached with unspoken anger, and, underneath her ap.r.o.n, her heart bounded so that the checks moved in regular time.

But soon she wiped her blurred eyes and turned to the pictures in the magazine. They began with a red-brown one of a storm-tossed ship on a rocky coast; and, following, were drawings of queer boxes and chairs and, yet more strange, of a herd of grazing cattle _with a board fence around it_! There was also a funny picture of a ragged boy and a stylish little girl who wore a round hat and a polonaise. And, lastly, there was shown a beautiful young woman standing by a table in a long, loose robe, very much like the army chaplain's.

It was over this picture that the little girl bent longest, and she read, not without some tedious spelling, the words that were printed beneath it:

"Mary, in cap and gown, was so bright and dainty a vision that the professor wished that more young ladies of gentle birth might attend the college."

College! It was not a new word to the little girl, for she had heard the colonel tell her mother that he was going to send his son to college.

But now she knew that girls as well as boys could go. And she saw by the picture that they wore beautiful flowing robes and square caps.

It was the cap that specially attracted her, for it rested becomingly upon a ma.s.s of wavy hair. She wished that her curls, which had to be coaxed into shape every morning with a warm stove-lifter and a wet brush, would hang in ripples like the young woman's, so that she could wear one.

"Oh, _ain't_ it sweet!" she said aloud, getting up on her knees beside Luffree and holding out the book at arm's length. And then, with the mortar-board as her inspiration, there flashed into her brain a wonderful thought that was to grow through the coming years; and her lips framed a splendid purpose--heard by no mortal ears, save those of the shivering hound and the cropping pony--that time was gloriously to fulfil.

"And maybe," she added happily, "I'll have 'monia, and my hair'll come in just as curly."

She sprang to her feet, fired with her new ambition, and undid the pony.

And remembering that it would be as well to reach the farm-house before the family could hear the second tale of trouble at the school, she hastily coiled the picket-rope, mounted, hid the magazine under the saddle-blankets, and, with the dog running stiffly in her wake, rode homeward.

When she reached the barn, she did not even wait to fasten the pinto in her stall; but, taking the magazine, raced toward the kitchen. As she halted breathless in its open door, however, she was sorry that she had not come in quietly by way of her bedroom window and waited until she was sure that her mother was alone. For she found herself in the presence not only of the big brothers, but of him whose authority she had so lately flouted!

The suddenness of the discovery drove the words she had meant to say in her own behalf from her brain. But five pairs of eyes were upon her and retreat was impossible; so she strove mutely to win any possible sympathy by covering, with one unsteady hand, the ear that had been pulled.

No one spoke for a moment. And in that brief s.p.a.ce the little girl divined, as she sought each face, that but one of the group before her was eager to see her punished, and that one was the teacher. In the eyes of the eldest brother there was no disapproval, only a lurking smile; the biggest was openly beaming with satisfaction; the youngest had taken his att.i.tude, as usual, from the eldest; and her mother's look was sadly kind. But the teacher was hostile from brow to boot.

It was the eldest brother who first broke the silence. He took his pipe from his mouth, knocked out the ashes against his bench, and addressed the little girl. "So you went on the war-path to-day?" he said.

She made no answer, but moved toward her mother.

"This youngster," he went on, wheeling around on the teacher, "is well up in them chart pages and can read pretty good in most books. So I guess"--he drawled it out sneeringly--"as long as you ain't got any cla.s.ses that exactly fit her, she'd better lie fallow for a while."

The little girl shot a proud glance at the Yankton man as she heard the eldest brother's praise, and, emboldened, spoke up for herself. "I _can_ read all the chart," she declared, "and I can read everyfing in the First Reader. And I could spell 'man'"--she put the hand that she had been holding over her ear on a level with her knee--"when I was so high."

The teacher snorted. "You know your own business," he said to the eldest brother.

"Guess we do," chimed in the biggest, grinning. "No use bothering her with a-b, ab, when she can read the things she does." The teacher stood up, ready to go. "And I was about to remark," continued the biggest, banteringly, "that she's got a lot of mighty nice stories that she's read and done with; and if you'd like to borrow one, once in a while, to pa.s.s an evenin' with, you'd find 'em mighty educatin'."

"Thank you," answered the teacher; "but like as not you'll need 'em all to finish up _her_ eddication on. I guess maybe you'll be sending her to Sioux Falls in a year or so to kind o' polish her off."

The sarcasm in the voice stung the biggest brother. "Well," he said, "she could polish off right here on these plains and have a lot more in her noddle in a year or two than _some_ people I know."

This boast of her favorite again brought the little girl's courage up.

"I don't want to go to a city school," she declared, "'cause they don't wear caps there."

The teacher was tramping out, with no backward look or good-by word, and he did not wait to hear more. So it was the eldest brother who answered her. "If you don't go here and you don't go to Sioux Falls," he said, "I'd like to know where you'll learn anything. Ma ain't got no time to be your governess."

"I don't want no governess, either," she replied. "I know what I'm going to do." She brought forward the magazine, which she had been holding behind her back with one hand, and, opening it at the drawing of the young woman in cap and gown, laid it on the biggest brother's knee. Then she went up to her mother, her face fairly shining through the dust and tear-marks on it. Her mother put out her arms and gently drew the little girl to her. Into her mind had come the picture of herself, in spotless pinafore, bending with her governess over her English books. And beside that picture, the little girl, sunburned, soiled, and poorly shod, made a sharp contrast.

"What are you going to do, pet lamb?" she asked.

"I'm going to cut 'nough carpet-rags this winter to last you a whole year," said the little girl, "'cause next summer you won't have me any more. I'm--I'm--going to college."

THE teacher, jogging out of the barn-yard to the ash-lane, heard a hearty roll of ba.s.sos from the kitchen, and did not doubt but that he was its target. He reined in his horse at the bare flower-beds and glowered back at the door. Then, with a mutter, ungrammatical but eloquent, he spurred on toward the lonely, supperless shack by the slough.

VI

THE STORY OF A PLANTING

THE little girl was making believe, as she planted the corn, that the field was a great city; the long rows, reaching up from the timothy meadow to the carnelian bluff, were the beautiful streets; and the hills, two steps apart, were the houses. She had a seed-bag slung under her arm, and when she came to a hill she put her hand into it and took out four plump, yellow kernels. And as she went along, dropping her gifts at each door, she played that she was visiting and said, "How do you do?" as politely as she could to the lady of the house, at the same time taking off her battered blue sailor-hat and bowing,--just as she had seen the lightning-rod agent do to her mother.

She had begun the game by naming every family she called upon. But it was not long before she had used up all the names she could think of--those of the neighbors, the Indians, the story-book people, the horses, the cows, the oxen, the dogs, and even the vegetables in the garden. So, after having planted a row or two, she contented herself with making believe she was among strangers and just offering a friendly greeting to every household.

She had come out to the field when the prairie-chickens were still playing their bagpipes on the river bank, their booming sounding through the morning air so clearly that the little girl had been sure they were not farther than the edge of the wheat-field, and had walked out of her way to try to see them, tramping along in her best shoes, which had shiny copper toes and store-made laces. But when she had reached the wheat, the booming, like a will-o'-the-wisp, had been temptingly farther on; and she had turned back to the newly marked corn-land.

Her big brothers had sent her out to drop and cover eighty rows, the last corn-planting to be done that year on the big Dakota farm. They had finished the rest of the field themselves and, intent on getting in the rutabaga crop, had turned over the remaining strip to the little girl, declaring that she could drop and cover forty rows in the morning and forty in the afternoon, and not half try. To make sure that she would have time to finish the work, they had started her off immediately after a five-o'clock breakfast; and in order that she should not lose any time at noon, they had made her take her dinner with her in a tall tin pail.

Her first glimpse of the unplanted piece had greatly discouraged her, for it seemed dreadfully wide and long. So, after deciding to plant the whole of it before doing any covering with the hoe, because the dropping of the corn was much easier and quicker to do than the hoeing, she went to work half-heartedly. Now, to make her task seem short, she had further determined to play "city."

It was such fun to pretend that, as she went bobbing and bowing up and down the rows, she forgot to stop her game and throw clods at the gray gophers. They lived in the timothy meadow, and were so bold that, if they were not watched, they would come out of their burrows and follow the rows, stealing every kernel out of the hills as they went along and putting the booty in their cheek-pouches.

After she had dropped corn as much as a whole hour, the little girl's back ached, and when she went to refill her seed-bag at the corn-barrel that stood on the border of the meadow near the row-marker, she sat down to rest a moment. The marker resembled a sleigh, only it had five runners instead of two, and there were rocks piled on top of it to make it heavy. So the minute the little girl's eyes fell upon it and she saw the runners, she thought of winter. Winter instantly reminded her of the muskrats in the slough below the bluff. And with that thought she could not resist starting down to see if they were busy after the thaw.

She gathered many flowers on the way, and stopped to pull off her shoes and stockings. At last she reached the slough and waded in to a muskrat house, where she used her hoe-handle as a poker to scare out some of the muskrats. Failing in this, she picked up her shoes and stockings and went around the slough to find out if any green leaves were unfolding yet in the wild-plum thicket. A little later she climbed the bluff to the corn-field, making a diligent search for Indian arrowheads all the way.

When she reached the seed-bag again, she threw the string over her head and started up a row determinedly. For a rod or more she did not pause either to be polite or to scare away gophers, but hurried along very fast, with her eyes to the ground. Suddenly she chanced to look just ahead of her, and stopped abruptly, standing erect. Her shadow pointed straight for the bluff: it was noon and high time to eat dinner.

She sat down on the marker and munched her sandwiches of salted lard and corn-meal bread with great appet.i.te. She was just finishing them when the call of a goose far overhead attracted her attention. She got down and lay flat on her back, with her head on the seed-bag, to watch the flock, high above her, speeding northward to the lakes, their leader crying commands to the gray company that flew in V-shaped order behind him. When the geese were but a dark thread across the north sky, she felt drowsy and, turning on her side with her hat over her face and her back to the gentle spring breeze, went fast asleep.

She lay there for hours, entirely unaware of the saucy stares of several gophers who paused in their hunt for kernels and stood straight as picket-pins to watch and wonder at the little heap of pink calico under the battered sailor-hat, or whisked about her, their short legs flashing, their tails wide and bushy, their cheek-pouches so full of kernels that they smiled fatly when they looked at her, and showed four long front teeth. But the little girl was wrapped in a happy dream of a certain beautiful red wagon with a real seat that she had seen in a thick catalogue sent her mother by a store in a distant city. So she never moved till late in the afternoon, when the gentle breeze strengthened to a sharp wind that, with a petulant gust, whirled her sailor across the rows and far away.

The flying hat caused a stampede among some curious gophers who were just then investigating a near-by unplanted row in the hope of finding more corn. Clattering shrilly, they scudded back to the meadow, and the little girl rose. After a long chase for the hat, she went stiffly to work again, not stopping to put on her shoes and stockings, though the wind was cold.

After that she planted faithfully, leaving off only to throw clods at the gophers, or to ease her back now and then. And it was when she was resting a moment that she noticed something that made her begin working harder than ever. Her shadow stretched out so far to the eastward that she could not touch its head with the end of her long hoe. When she first came out that morning, it had fallen just as far the other way.

She looked anxiously up at the sun, which was shining slantingly upon the freshly harrowed land through a gray haze that hung about it. Then she looked again at her shadow, distorted and grotesque, that moved when she moved and mimicked her when she bent to drop the corn. Its length showed her that it was getting late, and that she would soon hear the summoning blast of the cow-horn that hung behind the kitchen door.