The Biography of a Prairie Girl Part 9

"Goin' to give some of them pennies to th' Swede?" asked the youngest brother as the little girl sat down at the table and began to add up her earnings.

She flushed, but did not answer.

"Naw," said the eldest brother. "Why, th' Swede's not catchin' gophers for money; he's doin' it for love."

The little girl gathered up her pennies angrily and went to her room.

But, next morning, when the Swede boy's whistle sounded from the meadow, she mounted her pony and went down. For the biggest brother had whispered to her this word of philosophy: "Might jus' as well get th'

game with th' name."

For several nights after the departure of the big brothers, the little girl came home radiant, brushes dangling from her ap.r.o.n ruffle like scalps. Then, one evening, when four catches should have made her happy, she ate her supper with a sad and puzzled face, and afterward added only _two_ tails to her string. Her mother, seeing that something was troubling her, inquired what it was; but, on hearing the story, went into such a hearty fit of laughter that the little girl's feelings were hurt very much, and she went to bed on the instant. She did not broach the subject again. But while the two weeks of her big brothers' absence were pa.s.sing, she was often dejected.

After supper, the first night of their return, when the benches were still drawn up around the table, and the big brothers, tired with their long ride, were pulling at their corn-cob pipes, the little girl went up to the eldest and touched him timidly on the arm.

"Well, youngster," he said, "how many gophers have you snared since we've been gone?"

The little girl got red suddenly, and hesitated before she spoke.

"Sixty," she answered, half under her breath.

The biggest brother took his pipe out of his mouth in mock astonishment.

"Sixty!" he exclaimed. "Why, geewhitaker! you'll break the bank if you don't look out!"

The eldest brother put his hand into his pocket and took out some change. "Get the string," he said, "and here's your money."

The little girl looked at the coins mournfully, and then around the circle, and stepped back a few paces. "You won't b'lieve me when you see it," she said. She went out and came back presently, holding up the tails.

The eldest brother took them out of her hand, and she stood silently by while he counted them. When he had finished, he looked at her crossly.

"Sixty!" he sneered. "You haven't caught no such thing! Here's only twenty." He waved the brushes in the air, and the little girl trembled visibly. "Did you think I'd pay you for sixty," he continued, "when you ain't got the tails to show for 'em?"

The little girl trembled more than ever. "Honest," she said; "honest! We caught sixty--we did, truly--"

"Where are their tails, then? where are their tails?" asked the eldest brother, impatiently, shaking the string so violently that some of the brushes fell off. "You _say_ you did--_but what have you got to show for 'em_?"

The little girl came closer, her eyes wide and earnest. She was breathing hard and she lowered her voice as she answered.

"True as cross my heart to die," she said, "we caught sixty; but this was all the string I could get. 'Cause--'cause--there's a new kind of gophers in the timothy meadow,--_and they ain't got tails!_"

VIII

A HARVEST WEDDING

THE wedding of one of the Dutchman's seven stout daughters to a young farmer who lived in a dugout on the West Fork was an event in the little girl's life only second in importance to the christening. Two trips to Yankton on the wheat-wagon with the biggest brother shrank into insignificance before it, and she looked forward to its celebration so anxiously that time dragged as slowly as a week before Christmas.

The morning of the notable day she was unable to eat anything through sheer excitement. She pa.s.sed the hours after breakfast in restless riding over the barley stubble, where the sheep, led by a black bell-wether who sought the fields because they were forbidden ground, were mincing and picking their way. At eleven she happily welcomed a gallop to the farthest end of the farm to carry doughnuts and ginger-beer to the big brothers. At dinner-time her appet.i.te was again poor, but later, after making enough hay-twists for her mother's baking, she sc.r.a.ped the cake-batter dish clean and partook freely of several yards of red apple peelings.

The big brothers came in early from the fields to rest and get ready, and, one by one, spent half an hour in the kitchen, where the big wooden wash-tub held the center of the room. When it came time for the little girl to take a bath, the kitchen floor looked like a duck pond, for the tub was almost floating, and the well outside was noticeably low. At sunset the family sat down to a supper suggestive of the wedding feast to come. But though there were toothsome sandwiches on the table and cream popovers, not to speak of a heaping dish of watermelon sweet-pickles, the little girl again did not feel like eating, and only nibbled at a piece of raisin-pie when her mother, not realizing how satisfying the batter and peelings had been, threatened her with staying at home. After supper the big brothers. .h.i.tched the gray team to the light wagon, fastened up the chicken-coops, latched the barn door and chained the dogs; and, having finished the ch.o.r.es, blacked each other's boots, brushed their hair slick with water, changed their clothes and resigned themselves to their mother, who put the last touches to their collars and ties. Then, just as a faint bugle-call, sounding the advance, was heard from across the prairie to the west, the family climbed into the wagon.

On the trip down, the eldest and youngest brothers sat in front and drove. Their mother and the biggest brother occupied the hind seat and looked after the piccalilli and pies, which they held on their laps. So the little girl had to content herself with staying in the back of the wagon on an armful of hay and letting her feet dangle out behind. As the team trotted south over the rough path that, at the school-house, joined another leading to the Dutchman's, she clung to the side boards in impatient silence, her eyes turned across the sloughs toward the Vermilion, where, through the starlight, were coming the chaplain, some troopers, and the colonel's son.

It was a still night, and the family could hear other wagons approaching from various directions, the distant whinnying of ponies traveling singly, the barking of the Dutchman's dogs, and the thudding gallop of the nearing cavalry mounts; and when they arrived the same shouts that greeted them welcomed a score of their neighbors and the dusty army men.

The moments that followed were memorable ones to the little girl.

Standing by on tiptoe, with only the neighbor woman between her and the colonel's son, she saw the chaplain unite the Dutchman's daughter and the young farmer. The ceremony took place in the yard, so that all might witness it, and the biggest brother held the lantern by which the chaplain read from his prayer-book. The guests gathered about quietly, and listened reverently to the service and to the prayer for health and happiness in the dugout home on the Fork. And when the kissing, handshaking, and congratulations were over, they moved across the yard to the kitchen door, where they drank hearty toasts to the bride, in coffee-cups foaming high with beer. Then the married men took their wives, and the unmarried, their sweethearts, and went into the house to open the party.

The Dutchman's habitation was different from his neighbors' homes. One roof sheltered his family, his oxen and his cows, his harvested crops, his poultry and his pigs. It was a shanty roof, and it covered a long, sod building that began, at the river end, with the sitting-room, continued through the bedroom, the kitchen, the granary, the stable, and the chicken-coop, and was completed by the pig-house. The Dutchman, his wife, and their daughters could go back and forth from the best room to the beasts without leaving its cover. So, no matter how deep the snow was, the cattle never lacked for fodder, the hens for feed, or the hogs for their mash, a boiler of which, sour and fumy, cooked winter and summer upon the kitchen stove; and, when the fiercest of blizzards was blowing, the family were in no danger of getting lost between the house and the barn.

The three rooms of the building that were nearest the Vermilion, though given different names, were really all bedrooms. A high four-poster of unplaned boards stood against the low back wall of the sitting-room, beneath the rack that held the Dutchman's pipes; the sleeping-room, which the four eldest children occupied, held two smaller beds; and in the kitchen--where the family ate their breakfasts of coffee-cake and barley-coffee, their dinners of souse and vegetables and hard bread broken into a pan of clabbered milk, and supped, without plates, around a deep bowl of stew--was a wide couch that belonged to the youngest three.

But on the night of the wedding the first two rooms were empty, except for benches, the beds having been taken down early in the day and piled up beside the hay-stacks back of the stable. The couch in the kitchen was left in its place, however, and was covered from head to foot with babies.

The house was lighted by barn lanterns, hung out of the way under the shingles at the upper ends of the bare, sloping roof-joists, and their dull flames, that leaped and dipped with the moving feet beneath them, shone upon walls clean and bright in a fresh layer of newspapers, and revealed, to whomever cast a look upward, the parcels of herbs, seeds, and sewing thrust here and there in handy crevices of the brown, cobwebbed ceiling.

The Dutchman's neighbors crowded the rooms to the doors. In the kitchen were the older women, keeping watch over the couch and, at the same time, with busy clatter in a half-dozen tongues, unwrapping the edibles brought for the wedding supper. In the doorway between the other rooms sat the eldest brother playing his fiddle, the Irishman tw.a.n.ging a jews'-harp, and "Frenchy" with the bones; and on each side of them danced the guests.

The newly made bride and her husband led the quadrille in the sitting-room, opposite a trooper and the neighbor woman; the Swede had as his partner the new teacher, a young lady from St. Paul; and the biggest brother had his mother. Above them, as they promenaded, balanced, and swung, waved the black felt hat that the Dutchman had worn when he took his long trip over the prairie to invite them. Each family he visited had pinned a ribbon to its rim; and now it swayed back and forth, a gay and varicolored challenge to the hands reached out to grasp it.

The army chaplain was in the next room; and, as the quadrille closed in a roistering polka and a waltz struck up, he clapped in time to the couples that were circling before him, their hands on each other's shoulders, and their voices joining merrily with the music:

"In Lauterbach hab' ich mein Strumf verlor'n, Und ohne Strumf geh' ich nicht heim; Ich gehe doch wieder zu Lauterbach hin Und kauf' mir ein Strumf fur mein Bein."

Now and then a couple drew aside and sat down a moment to rest. But soon they were back on the floor again, whirling and laughing and stamping their feet, and raising clouds of dust from the rough plank floors to their scarlet faces.

Out of doors there was less noise, but no lack of fun. Smudge fires burned in a wide circle about the house to repel the hungry mosquitos that, with high, monotonous battle-songs, stormed the smoky barrier between them and the inner circle of horses and oxen feeding from wagon-boxes. Nearer the building, and set about the carefully raked yard on barrels and boxes, were Jack-o'-lanterns made of pumpkins, that gave out the uncertain, flickering light of tallow dips through their goggle-eyes and grinning mouths.

In and out among the wagons, fires, and lanterns the children were playing hide-and-go-seek, screaming with excitement as they scampered in every direction to secrete themselves, or lying still and breathless as the boy who was "it" hunted them cautiously, with one eye searching for moving shadows and the other fixed upon the wagon-wheel that was the goal. On being sent out of the house to give the dancers room, the boys had raised a joyous clamor over their banishment, and begun a game of crack-the-whip; while the girls, not wishing to soil their clothes, had walked to and fro in front of the house, with their arms around each other, and watched the dancing. But when the Swede boy, who was chosen for the snapper, was so worn and breathless with being popped from the end of the rushing line that he could run no longer, boys and girls had joined in playing tag and blindman's-buff and, afterward, hide-and-go-seek.

The little girl was with them. But, so far, in spite of her white dress, which made her an easy prey, she had not been caught. The boys who had taken their turns at the wheel had caught other boys whom she did not know; and had always managed to find and, with much struggling, kiss the particular girls they favored. No matter how conspicuously she had hidden, they had always pa.s.sed her by. As a result, after two or three disappointments, she had not taken the trouble of running to cover, but had either lingered just within the sitting-room to watch the dancing, or hung wistfully about the yard, somewhere near the colonel's son.

"Frenchy's" brother was now guarding the goal, and the little girl was ambushed behind the very straw-pile that concealed the colonel's son. It was an occasion that she had looked forward to and secretly brought to pa.s.s, yet, as she knelt close beside him, she could not think of one of the polite things she had planned to say to him that night. Their proximity struck her dumb, while he was silent through fear of being discovered. So they cowered together, speechless and restive, until the Swede boy tore by in an unsuccessful race for the wagon-wheel. Then the colonel's son darted out from behind the straw, and she remained regretfully looking after his blue-clad form.

All at once her meditations were rudely interrupted. "Frenchy's"

brother, skulking here and there on the lookout for a bright, telltale ap.r.o.n, came round the pile and pounced upon her. "Forfeet! forfeet!" he cried, dragging her out into the middle of the yard.

She tried to pull away from him, and twisted her head so that her face was out of reach. "You stop," she cried hotly; "you jus' stop!"

The struggle was sweet to him, however, and he only laughed at her angry commands and fought harder than ever for his due, striving at every turn to pin her arms down so that she could not resist. The boys ran up to urge him on, and the girls hopped up and down in their enjoyment of the scuffle.

But he was not able to win in the contest. The little girl was a match for him. What she lacked in strength she made up in nimbleness, and she stood her ground fiercely, wrestling on until, with a quick, furious wrench, she freed herself from his hold and bolted toward the kitchen.

"Frenchy's" brother pursued her. But, once inside, she was safe, for he dared not enter and scramble across the couch to where she had sought refuge by a window. So he turned back toward the goal. "I get you yet,"

he shouted, wiping his damp face on his shirt sleeve.

The other children gathered about him and taunted him with his failure.

To right himself in their eyes he set after one of the Dutchman's girls, who shook off her wooden shoes and fled frantically in circles to evade him. But he succeeded in catching her and taking a forfeit from one of her sun-bleached braids, after which he went to the wagon and sat down on the tongue to rest.