The Wind Before the Dawn Part 3

"Women's always wantin' things," was the indifferent reply. "Say, you've got a stack of wheat straw. What'll you take for it?"

In the house the sympathetic daughter helped her mother prepare for bed.

"I thought sure to-night we'd get to go," the child said. "If you could get back East you might get to stay; and then you wouldn't have to cry so much," she added as she picked up the abandoned clothing her mother had left lying on the floor.

Mrs. Farnshaw, who was turning the same matter over disconsolately as she sat on the side of the bed, shook her head with the bitter certainty that her fate would pursue her, and replied hopelessly:

"It wouldn't make no difference, I guess, Lizzie. He'd be there, an' it'd be just the same."

And the girl, who was naturally reflective, carried with her to the loft overhead that night a new idea: that it was not the place, but the manner in which lives were lived, which mattered.

The preparations for the coming of that winter were the strangest ever witnessed in a farming community. Never had any man known fuel to be so scarce. Cornstalks, which were usually staple articles for fuel in that country, had been eaten almost to the very ground, but the stubs were gathered, the dirt shaken from them, and they were then carted to the house. Rosin weeds were collected and piled in heaps. The dried dung of cattle, scattered over the grazing lands, and called "buffalo chips," was stored in long ricks, also, and used sparingly, for even this simple fuel was so scarce as to necessitate care in its use.

To keep out the driving winds, the houses were banked with sods and earth halfway to the roofs. With so little material for keeping warm, and that of the lightest variety, it was necessary to make the living quarters impervious to the never-ceasing winds which tore at the thin walls of the unprotected houses that sheltered such folk as were hardy enough to remain.

It was impossible to build sheds for all the stock, so the hogs were allowed to swarm under the feet of the horses tied in the straw stable, and many and sad were the accidents to the smaller animals. It was soon clear that not many of them could be carried through till the spring.

Seeing that they lost weight rapidly, as many as were full grown were killed and their flabby carca.s.ses salted away to be eaten.

Fortunately, the gra.s.shoppers had not arrived in Kansas till after the small grain had been nearly all cut, so that there was considerable oat and wheat straw in the country. Mr. Farnshaw bargained for every straw stack he could find, but straw was a poor subst.i.tute for the corn and hay to which the cattle were accustomed, and as the weeks lengthened into months, and winter closed in, the unprotected cattle grew thinner and ever thinner. Corn was quoted in the markets at a dollar a bushel, but in fact was not to be had at any price. Iowa had had a drought, and Illinois was the nearest base of supplies, and as it was generally known that there was no money west of the Missouri River, no grain was sent to Kansas.

Finding that the horses did not thrive on the straw alone, and knowing that wheat would very quickly kill them, Mr. Farnshaw put away a sufficient amount of oats for seed and then carefully portioned out the rest to be fed to four of his best broodmares, hoping to be able to put in the spring crops with them as well as to save the coming colts of two. The rest, he decided, must take their chances on getting through the winter alive.

The family food consisted largely of bread and the slabs of thin meat, with a sort of coffee made from browned rye. As a "company dish" there was a scanty supply of sweet corn, dried before the drought had cut the crop short. There were no eggs, because the chickens had sickened from eating gra.s.shoppers in the fall and nearly all had died. The few hens which remained clung to the limbs of the half-grown cottonwood trees throughout the long winter nights, and found barely food enough during the day to keep life in their fuzzy bodies, which could not even furnish the oil necessary to lay their feathers smooth, much less foster the growth of eggs.

Josiah Farnshaw secretly questioned the propriety of having remained in that desolate territory when, as spring approached, the shrunken cows died one after another in giving birth to the calves which had matured in their slowly perishing bodies, but he made no sign or admission of the fact.

It was a season of gloom such as our frontier states had never known, and to add to the general depression there was a growing conviction that the hatching of the gra.s.shoppers' eggs when warm weather came would complete the famine.

To support his action in refusing to go East, Josiah Farnshaw a.s.serted stubbornly that the frost of their hard winter would certainly kill the larvae of the locusts. So persistent was his att.i.tude that at short intervals throughout the entire winter rumours that "th' hopper eggs is dead 's doornails" stirred the community and set its members to making tests in a vain endeavour to establish their truth. Pieces of earth, honeycombed with the tiny nests, would be placed near the fire and kept at as regular a degree of warmth as possible, the condition of the eggs would be noted carefully, and in a short time the hopes of the anxious pioneers would be dashed to the ground by wriggling little insects climbing cheerfully out of their winter quarters and hopping about in a vain search for something green to live upon. Often, in sheer desperation, the hara.s.sed settler would sweep the hatching brood into the fire, remarking as he did so, "Burnin's too good for such pests," and always fear gripped the heart. If the crops in spring were eaten, other homes must be sought, and all knew that the weakened horses were unfit for travel. In fact, no team in that entire country was fit to travel far or fast, except the two which Mr. Farnshaw groomed and fed so carefully for the sake of the spring work and the much desired colts.

The depression and worries of the Farnshaw home increased the spirit of contention and distrust of its guardians. The husband daily grew surlier and more unpleasant and the wife more lachrymose and subject to "spells."

The children learned to avoid the presence of either parent as much as possible, and to look outside the home for the joy childhood demands. The ch.o.r.es were heavy and difficult, but could at least be performed in the open light of G.o.d's great out-of-doors, where the imagination could people the world with pleasant features and pleasant prospects.

The cattle were driven daily to the ponds, half a mile away, for water, and if the ice was thick and the axe-handle benumbing to the mittened hands as they chopped the holes for the tottering animals to drink from, there was the prospect of a slide on the uncut portions of the ice later; and as the plucky youngsters followed the cattle home they dreamed of skates to be obtained in the dim future, and tried to run fast enough to keep warm. The blessing of childhood is that it cannot be cheated of its visions, and the blood of adolescence was coursing riotously through the veins of the daughter of the Farnshaw house. If her hands were cold when she returned to the barnyard, after watering the cattle, she beat them about her shoulders or held them against the shrunken flank of some dumb animal, or blew her breath through the fingers of her knitted mittens; but her thoughts were of other things.

It is an old saying that "G.o.d helps them who help themselves," and in the case of Lizzie Farnshaw the axiom became a living truth. While the rest of her family suffered and magnified their sufferings, she, by a vivid imagination, placed herself in the path of fortune and obtained the thing she demanded. The simple country schoolhouse that year, dreary and cheerless enough to the pert Miss who had come out from Topeka to teach there, and incidentally to collect twenty-five dollars a month from the school board, was to be the scene of the initial change in Lizzie Farnshaw's life.

Verily, G.o.d helps them who help themselves, and Lizzie Farnshaw proved the old saw by laying hold of and absorbing every new idea and mannerism of which the new teacher was arrogantly possessed--absorbed them, but trans.m.u.ted them, winnowing out the coa.r.s.e, the sarcastic, the unkind, and making of what was left a substance of finer fibre.

The number of children in the Prairie Home school that year was limited to five, the rest having departed for the indefinable land known as the "East." Three of these children came from the Farnshaw home and the other two from the new neighbours, the Cranes, on the Hansen place.

Sadie Crane hated the new teacher with all the might that her pinched little twelve-year-old body could bring to bear. She saw only the snippish, opinionated, young peac.o.c.k, and the self-a.s.surance which came from the empty-headed ability to tie a ribbon well. She was so occupied with resenting the young teacher's feeling of vast superiority that she failed to understand, as did the Farnshaw child, that along with all that vainglorious a.s.sumption went a real knowledge of some things with which it was valuable to become acquainted.

To the spiteful Crane child the schoolma'am was "stuck-up," while to the imaginative daughter of the Farnshaw house she was a bird of paradise, and though Lizzie was conscious that the teacher's voice was harsh, and her air affected, the child reached out like a drowning man toward this symbol of the life she coveted. To her the new teacher was a gift from heaven itself.

This young girl from Topeka brought into activity every faculty the sensitive, ambitious child possessed.

Lizzie Farnshaw laid hold, with a strong hand, upon every blessing which came in her way. She knew that the foppish young thing at the teacher's desk was "stuck-up," but Lizzie was willing that she should be whatever she chose, so long as it was possible to live near her, to study her, and to become like the best that was in her.

The teacher's matter-of-fact a.s.sumption that no self-respecting person failed to obtain a high-school education was a good thing for the country girl, however overdrawn it might be. Lizzie Farnshaw listened and built air-castles. To this one child, out of that entire community, the idea appealed alluringly. But for her castles in Spain she must have burst with her unexpressed desires. To add fuel to the fires of her fancy, Mr.

Farnshaw also fell under the fascinations of the school teacher and boasted in the bosom of his family that "Lizzie's just as smart as that Topeka girl any day," and when his daughter began to talk hopefully about teaching school it appealed to the father's pride, and he encouraged her dreams. He had been the leading man in the community since coming to Kansas because of the number of cattle he had been able to acc.u.mulate. A small legacy had aided in that acc.u.mulation, and it appealed to his pride to have his daughter's intellectual ambitions adding to the general family importance. Pride is an important factor in the lives of all, but to the children of the farm it is an ambrosia, which once sipped is never forgotten and to obtain which many strange sacrifices will be made. Mr.

Farnshaw usually regarded a request from his children as a thing to be denied promptly, and always as a matter for suspicion. Yet here he was, considering soberly, yea pleasurably, a move involving money, at a time when money was more than usually scarce. His a.s.sent was even of such a nature as to deceive both himself and the child into thinking that it was being done for her benefit!

The young girl received a new impetus toward improvement. The family began to regard her as a member set apart, as one from whom special things were to be expected. From being just comfortably at the head of her cla.s.ses, she became more ambitious, reached over into new territory, and induced the teacher to create new cla.s.ses for her benefit. The subjects required for the examination of teachers were added to those usually carried. There was a real purpose in her efforts now, and the smoky kerosene lamp burned stubbornly till late hours.

The new teacher not only listened to recitations but appealed to the artistic in the newly developing woman. She rolled her hair from neck to brow in a "French twist" and set on the top of it an "Alsatian bow," which stood like gigantic b.u.t.terfly wings across her proud head. The long basque of her school dress was made after the newest pattern and had smoke-pearl b.u.t.tons, in overlapping groups of three, set on each side of its vest front. The skirt of this wonderful dress was "shirred" and hung in graceful festoons between the rows of gatherings, and was of an entirely new style. Last, but not least, the teacher's feet were shod in "side laces," the first pair of a new kind of shoes, destined to become popular, which laced on the inside of the ankle instead of on the top as we have them now. Of all her stylish attractions this was the most absorbing.

"Fool shoes," Sadie Crane called them, and her little black eyes twinkled with a consuming spite when she mentioned them, but the ambitious Farnshaw child, reaching out for improvement and change, coveted them, and preened her own feathers, and mimicked, and dreamed. She accepted the shoes just as she accepted the teacher's other attributes: they were better than her own.

To be better than her own--that was the measure of Lizzie Farnshaw's demand. If the shoes, the clothing, the manners, the ideas, were better than her own they were worthy of honest consideration. The teacher's tongue was sharp and her criticisms ruthless, but they had elements of truth in them, and even when they were directed against the child herself they were a splendid spur. The young girl copied her manners, her gait, and her vocabulary. She watched her own conversation to see that she did not say "have went" and "those kind"; she became observant of the state of her finger-nails; if she had to lace her shoes with twine string, she blackened the string with soot from the under side of the stove lids, and polished her shoes from the same source.

Mrs. Farnshaw, broken with the cold, the privations of the long winter, and the growing disappointments of her domestic life, saw nothing but overdressing and foolishness in her daughter's new attention to the details of personal appearance. Burdened with her inability to furnish the clothes the family needed, she complained monotonously over every evidence of the young girl's desire to beautify herself. When the mother's complaints became unendurable, the father usually growled out a stern, "Let the child alone," but for the most part the growing girl lived a life apart from her family, thought along different lines, and built about the future a wall they could never climb, and over whose rim they would rarely, if ever, catch a glimpse of the world within. No life, however hard, could ever tame that spirit, or grind its owner into an alien groove after that year of imaginative castle building.

CHAPTER II

BRUSHING UP TO GO TO TOPEKA

With the opening of spring and the coming of the young gra.s.s, the handful of cattle that had not died of starvation began to look healthier. A shipment of seed corn for planting, and even a stinted amount for feed, had been sent from the East in March. But for that donation even the work horses must have succ.u.mbed. Josiah Farnshaw had the best horses in the country and was suspected of having had far more help than he had really received. The two teams he had favoured all winter against the seeding season were the envy of all. Some of the old neighbours, after a winter spent with the wife's relatives in the East, had decided to return and take the chances of the gra.s.shopper-ridden Middle West, and had come with horses able to drag the plow, but, worn from travel, most of them were practically useless.

There was a lull after the small grain was in the ground. The menacing eggs of the gra.s.shoppers began to hatch as the sun warmed the earth. It was a period of intense anxiety. So many months had been spent in alternate intervals of hope and fear that now, since the test was actually and immediately to be made, the tension was terrific. Men rose as soon as the first light of day appeared and went to examine the tender grain, without which they could not remain upon the land which had cost so dear in the suffering of the winter just past.

A surprise was in store for them. The young insects matured rapidly. While they appeared in swarms, it was noticed that they disappeared immediately upon hatching.

Kansas began to get its breath.

Never was promise of crops more encouraging. There was a distinct note of rea.s.surance and hopefulness in the air. What became of the gra.s.shoppers n.o.body knew exactly, but they went almost as fast as they hatched. Some shook their heads and said, "Wait till hot weather."

Josiah Farnshaw moved steadily ahead with his planting. He announced that he had faith in Kansas--had always had--he'd stand on the burning deck!

While others hesitated, he took advantage of wind and weather to get his crops in the ground. He had been right all along. He did not propose "to be run off of the land he had homesteaded and set with trees by any durned little bugs he'd ever come across." It was necessary to be up and doing if a man was going to provide for a family.

Now this a.s.sertion proved to be true, for the agent of the harvester company visited him and requested payment of the notes given the year before. The agent was gracious when the inability to pay was explained. He would renew the paper if it could be secured by the land. There was no hurry about payment, but it was necessary for the details to be finished up in a business-like manner. The thing looked simple enough. It was a just debt and Mr. Farnshaw intended to pay it. He'd as soon it was secured by the land as any other way. The details were soon arranged.

Mr. Farnshaw agreed to meet the agent in Colebyville, the nearest town, the next day, and have the papers made out. After the agent was gone Mr.

Farnshaw went to the house to inform his wife that she was to go to town and attach her name to the doc.u.ment.

The storm of protest was expected, and when Mrs. Farnshaw broke out with:

"Now, pa, you ain't never goin' t' mortgage th' farm, are you?" he answered surlily:

"Yes, I be, an' I don't want no words about it neither," and walked determinedly out of the house, leaving his wife to cry out her fears with her children.

"We won't have where to lay our heads, soon," she announced bitterly.

"I've seen somethin' of th' mortgage business an' I ain't never seen any of 'em free from payin' interest afterward." This was no mere personal quarrel. Her children distinguished that. This was real, definite trouble.

Accustomed as the child was to her mother's woes, Lizzie Farnshaw was moved to unusual demonstrations by the quality of the outburst of tears which followed the words, and said impulsively: