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The Troll Garden, and Selected Stories

by Willa Cather · English · Gutenberg #346 · 489,241 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Troll Garden, and Selected Stories

Author: Willa Cather


        
Release date: October 1, 1995 [eBook #346]
                Most recently updated: March 9, 2018

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/346

Credits: Produced by Judith Boss, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TROLL GARDEN, AND SELECTED STORIES ***




Produced by Judith Boss





THE TROLL GARDEN

AND

SELECTED STORIES

By Willa Cather


Contents



_Selected Stories_

     On the Divide
     Eric Hermannson's Soul
     The Enchanted Bluff
     The Bohemian Girl


_The Troll Garden_

     Flavia and Her Artists
     The Sculptor's Funeral
     “A Death in the Desert”
      The Garden Lodge
     The Marriage of Phaedra
     A Wagner Matinee
     Paul's Case




SELECTED STORIES




On the Divide


Near Rattlesnake Creek, on the side of a little draw stood Canute's
shanty. North, east, south, stretched the level Nebraska plain of long
rust-red grass that undulated constantly in the wind. To the west the
ground was broken and rough, and a narrow strip of timber wound along
the turbid, muddy little stream that had scarcely ambition enough to
crawl over its black bottom. If it had not been for the few stunted
cottonwoods and elms that grew along its banks, Canute would have shot
himself years ago. The Norwegians are a timber-loving people, and if
there is even a turtle pond with a few plum bushes around it they seem
irresistibly drawn toward it.

As to the shanty itself, Canute had built it without aid of any kind,
for when he first squatted along the banks of Rattlesnake Creek there
was not a human being within twenty miles. It was built of logs split
in halves, the chinks stopped with mud and plaster. The roof was covered
with earth and was supported by one gigantic beam curved in the shape of
a round arch. It was almost impossible that any tree had ever grown in
that shape. The Norwegians used to say that Canute had taken the log
across his knee and bent it into the shape he wished. There were
two rooms, or rather there was one room with a partition made of ash
saplings interwoven and bound together like big straw basket work. In
one corner there was a cook stove, rusted and broken. In the other a
bed made of unplaned planks and poles. It was fully eight feet long, and
upon it was a heap of dark bed clothing. There was a chair and a bench
of colossal proportions. There was an ordinary kitchen cupboard with
a few cracked dirty dishes in it, and beside it on a tall box a tin
washbasin. Under the bed was a pile of pint flasks, some broken,
some whole, all empty. On the wood box lay a pair of shoes of almost
incredible dimensions. On the wall hung a saddle, a gun, and some ragged
clothing, conspicuous among which was a suit of dark cloth, apparently
new, with a paper collar carefully wrapped in a red silk handkerchief
and pinned to the sleeve. Over the door hung a wolf and a badger skin,
and on the door itself a brace of thirty or forty snake skins whose
noisy tails rattled ominously every time it opened. The strangest things
in the shanty were the wide windowsills. At first glance they looked as
though they had been ruthlessly hacked and mutilated with a hatchet, but
on closer inspection all the notches and holes in the wood took form and
shape. There seemed to be a series of pictures. They were, in a rough
way, artistic, but the figures were heavy and labored, as though they
had been cut very slowly and with very awkward instruments. There were
men plowing with little horned imps sitting on their shoulders and on
their horses' heads. There were men praying with a skull hanging over
their heads and little demons behind them mocking their attitudes. There
were men fighting with big serpents, and skeletons dancing together. All
about these pictures were blooming vines and foliage such as never grew
in this world, and coiled among the branches of the vines there was
always the scaly body of a serpent, and behind every flower there was
a serpent's head. It was a veritable Dance of Death by one who had felt
its sting. In the wood box lay some boards, and every inch of them
was cut up in the same manner. Sometimes the work was very rude and
careless, and looked as though the hand of the workman had trembled. It
would sometimes have been hard to distinguish the men from their evil
geniuses but for one fact, the men were always grave and were either
toiling or praying, while the devils were always smiling and dancing.
Several of these boards had been split for kindling and it was evident
that the artist did not value his work highly.

It was the first day of winter on the Divide. Canute stumbled into his
shanty carrying a basket of cobs, and after filling the stove, sat
down on a stool and crouched his seven foot frame over the fire, staring
drearily out of the window at the wide gray sky. He knew by heart every
individual clump of bunch grass in the miles of red shaggy prairie that
stretched before his cabin. He knew it in all the deceitful loveliness
of its early summer, in all the bitter barrenness of its autumn. He had
seen it smitten by all the plagues of Egypt. He had seen it parched by
drought, and sogged by rain, beaten by hail, and swept by fire, and in
the grasshopper years he had seen it eaten as bare and clean as bones
that the vultures have left. After the great fires he had seen it
stretch for miles and miles, black and smoking as the floor of hell.

He rose slowly and crossed the room, dragging his big feet heavily as
though they were burdens to him. He looked out of the window into the
hog corral and saw the pigs burying themselves in the straw before the
shed. The leaden gray clouds were beginning to spill themselves, and the
snow flakes were settling down over the white leprous patches of frozen
earth where the hogs had gnawed even the sod away. He shuddered and
began to walk, trampling heavily with his ungainly feet. He was the
wreck of ten winters on the Divide and he knew what that meant. Men fear
the winters of the Divide as a child fears night or as men in the North
Seas fear the still dark cold of the polar twilight. His eyes fell upon
his gun, and he took it down from the wall and looked it over. He
sat down on the edge of his bed and held the barrel towards his face,
letting his forehead rest upon it, and laid his finger on the trigger.
He was perfectly calm, there was neither passion nor despair in his
face, but the thoughtful look of a man who is considering. Presently
he laid down the gun, and reaching into the cupboard, drew out a pint
bottle of raw white alcohol. Lifting it to his lips, he drank greedily.
He washed his face in the tin basin and combed his rough hair and
shaggy blond beard. Then he stood in uncertainty before the suit of dark
clothes that hung on the wall. For the fiftieth time he took them in
his hands and tried to summon courage to put them on. He took the paper
collar that was pinned to the sleeve of the coat and cautiously slipped
it under his rough beard, looking with timid expectancy into the
cracked, splashed glass that hung over the bench. With a short laugh he
threw it down on the bed, and pulling on his old black hat, he went out,
striking off across the level.

It was a physical necessity for him to get away from his cabin once in a
while. He had been there for ten years, digging and plowing and sowing,
and reaping what little the hail and the hot winds and the frosts left
him to reap. Insanity and suicide are very common things on the Divide.
They come on like an epidemic in the hot wind season. Those scorching
dusty winds that blow up over the bluffs from Kansas seem to dry up the
blood in men's veins as they do the sap in the corn leaves. Whenever the
yellow scorch creeps down over the tender inside leaves about the ear,
then the coroners prepare for active duty; for the oil of the country is
burned out and it does not take long for the flame to eat up the wick.
It causes no great sensation there when a Dane is found swinging to his
own windmill tower, and most of the Poles after they have become too
careless and discouraged to shave themselves keep their razors to cut
their throats with.

It may be that the next generation on the Divide will be very happy, but
the present one came too late in life. It is useless for men that have
cut hemlocks among the mountains of Sweden for forty years to try to be
happy in a country as flat and gray and naked as the sea. It is not easy
for men that have spent their youth fishing in the Northern seas to be
content with following a plow, and men that have served in the Austrian
army hate hard work and coarse clothing on the loneliness of the plains,
and long for marches and excitement and tavern company and pretty
barmaids. After a man has passed his fortieth birthday it is not easy
for him to change the habits and conditions of his life. Most men bring
with them to the Divide only the dregs of the lives that they have
squandered in other lands and among other peoples.

Canute Canuteson was as mad as any of them, but his madness did not
take the form of suicide or religion but of alcohol. He had always taken
liquor when he wanted it, as all Norwegians do, but after his first year
of solitary life he settled down to it steadily. He exhausted whisky
after a while, and went to alcohol, because its effects were speedier
and surer. He was a big man and with a terrible amount of resistant
force, and it took a great deal of alcohol even to move him. After nine
years of drinking, the quantities he could take would seem fabulous to
an ordinary drinking man. He never let it interfere with his work, he
generally drank at night and on Sundays. Every night, as soon as his
chores were done, he began to drink. While he was able to sit up he
would play on his mouth harp or hack away at his window sills with his
jackknife. When the liquor went to his head he would lie down on his bed
and stare out of the window until he went to sleep. He drank alone and
in solitude not for pleasure or good cheer, but to forget the awful
loneliness and level of the Divide. Milton made a sad blunder when he
put mountains in hell. Mountains postulate faith and aspiration. All
mountain peoples are religious. It was the cities of the plains that,
because of their utter lack of spirituality and the mad caprice of their
vice, were cursed of God.

Alcohol is perfectly consistent in its effects upon man. Drunkenness is
merely an exaggeration. A foolish man drunk becomes maudlin; a bloody
man, vicious; a coarse man, vulgar. Canute was none of these, but he was
morose and gloomy, and liquor took him through all the hells of Dante.
As he lay on his giant's bed all the horrors of this world and every
other were laid bare to his chilled senses. He was a man who knew no
joy, a man who toiled in silence and bitterness. The skull and the
serpent were always before him, the symbols of eternal futileness and of
eternal hate.

When the first Norwegians near enough to be called neighbors came,
Canute rejoiced, and planned to escape from his bosom vice. But he was
not a social man by nature and had not the power of drawing out the
social side of other people. His new neighbors rather feared him because
of his great strength and size, his silence and his lowering brows.
Perhaps, too, they knew that he was mad, mad from the eternal treachery
of the plains, which every spring stretch green and rustle with the
promises of Eden, showing long grassy lagoons full of clear water
and cattle whose hoofs are stained with wild roses. Before autumn the
lagoons are dried up, and the ground is burnt dry and hard until it
blisters and cracks open.

So instead of becoming a friend and neighbor to the men that settled
about him, Canute became a mystery and a terror. They told awful stories
of his size and strength and of the alcohol he drank.

They said that one night, when he went out to see to his horses just
before he went to bed, his steps were unsteady and the rotten planks
of the floor gave way and threw him behind the feet of a fiery young
stallion. His foot was caught fast in the floor, and the nervous horse
began kicking frantically. When Canute felt the blood trickling down
into his eyes from a scalp wound in his head, he roused himself from his
kingly indifference, and with the quiet stoical courage of a drunken man
leaned forward and wound his arms about the horse's hind legs and held
them against his breast with crushing embrace. All through the darkness
and cold of the night he lay there, matching strength against strength.
When little Jim Peterson went over the next morning at four o'clock to
go with him to the Blue to cut wood, he found him so, and the horse was
on its fore knees, trembling and whinnying with fear. This is the story
the Norwegians tell of him, and if it is true it is no wonder that they
feared and hated this Holder of the Heels of Horses.

One spring there moved to the next “eighty” a family that made a great
change in Canute's life. Ole Yensen was too drunk most of the time to be
afraid of any one, and his wife Mary was too garrulous to be afraid of
any one who listened to her talk, and Lena, their pretty daughter, was
not afraid of man nor devil. So it came about that Canute went over to
take his alcohol with Ole oftener than he took it alone, After a while
the report spread that he was going to marry Yensen's daughter, and the
Norwegian girls began to tease Lena about the great bear she was going
to keep house for. No one could quite see how the affair had come about,
for Canute's tactics of courtship were somewhat peculiar. He apparently
never spoke to her at all: he would sit for hours with Mary chattering
on one side of him and Ole drinking on the other and watch Lena at her
work. She teased him, and threw flour in his face and put vinegar in
his coffee, but he took her rough jokes with silent wonder, never even
smiling. He took her to church occasionally, but the most watchful and
curious people never saw him speak to her. He would sit staring at her
while she giggled and flirted with the other men.

Next spring Mary Lee went to town to work in a steam laundry. She came
home every Sunday, and always ran across to Yensens to startle Lena
with stories of ten cent theaters, firemen's dances, and all the other
esthetic delights of metropolitan life. In a few weeks Lena's head was
completely turned, and she gave her father no rest until he let her go
to town to seek her fortune at the ironing board. From the time she came
home on her first visit she began to treat Canute with contempt. She had
bought a plush cloak and kid gloves, had her clothes made by the dress
maker, and assumed airs and graces that made the other women of the
neighborhood cordially detest her. She generally brought with her a
young man from town who waxed his mustache and wore a red necktie, and
she did not even introduce him to Canute.

The neighbors teased Canute a good deal until he knocked one of them
down. He gave no sign of suffering from her neglect except that he drank
more and avoided the other Norwegians more carefully than ever, He lay
around in his den and no one knew what he felt or thought, but little
Jim Peterson, who had seen him glowering at Lena in church one Sunday
when she was there with the town man, said that he would not give an
acre of his wheat for Lena's life or the town chap's either; and Jim's
wheat was so wondrously worthless that the statement was an exceedingly
strong one.

Canute had bought a new suit of clothes that looked as nearly like the
town man as possible. They had cost him half a millet crop; for
tailors are not accustomed to fitting giants and they charge for it. He
had hung those clothes in his shanty two months ago and had never put
them on, partly from fear of ridicule, partly from discouragement, and
partly because there was something in his own soul that revolted at the
littleness of the device.

Lena was at home just at this time. Work was slack in the laundry and
Mary had not been well, so Lena stayed at home, glad enough to get an
opportunity to torment Canute once more.

She was washing in the side kitchen, singing loudly as she worked. Mary
was on her knees, blacking the stove and scolding violently about the
young man who was coming out from town that night. The young man had
committed the fatal error of laughing at Mary's ceaseless babble and had
never been forgiven.

“He is no good, and you will come to a bad end by running with him! I do
not see why a daughter of mine should act so. I do not see why the Lord
should visit such a punishment upon me as to give me such a daughter.
There are plenty of good men you can marry.”

Lena tossed her head and answered curtly, “I don't happen to want to
marry any man right away, and so long as Dick dresses nice and has
plenty of money to spend, there is no harm in my going with him.”

“Money to spend? Yes, and that is all he does with it I'll be bound. You
think it very fine now, but you will change your tune when you have been
married five years and see your children running naked and your cupboard
empty. Did Anne Hermanson come to any good end by marrying a town man?”

“I don't know anything about Anne Hermanson, but I know any of the
laundry girls would have Dick quick enough if they could get him.”

“Yes, and a nice lot of store clothes huzzies you are too. Now there is
Canuteson who has an 'eighty' proved up and fifty head of cattle and--”

“And hair that ain't been cut since he was a baby, and a big dirty
beard, and he wears overalls on Sundays, and drinks like a pig. Besides
he will keep. I can have all the fun I want, and when I am old and ugly
like you he can have me and take care of me. The Lord knows there ain't
nobody else going to marry him.”

Canute drew his hand back from the latch as though it were red hot. He
was not the kind of man to make a good eavesdropper, and he wished he
had knocked sooner. He pulled himself together and struck the door like
a battering ram. Mary jumped and opened it with a screech.

“God! Canute, how you scared us! I thought it was crazy Lou--he has been
tearing around the neighborhood trying to convert folks. I am afraid as
death of him. He ought to be sent off, I think. He is just as liable as
not to kill us all, or burn the barn, or poison the dogs. He has been
worrying even the poor minister to death, and he laid up with the
rheumatism, too! Did you notice that he was too sick to preach last
Sunday? But don't stand there in the cold, come in. Yensen isn't here,
but he just went over to Sorenson's for the mail; he won't be gone long.
Walk right in the other room and sit down.”

Canute followed her, looking steadily in front of him and not noticing
Lena as he passed her. But Lena's vanity would not allow him to pass
unmolested. She took the wet sheet she was wringing out and cracked him
across the face with it, and ran giggling to the other side of the room.
The blow stung his cheeks and the soapy water flew in his eyes, and
he involuntarily began rubbing them with his hands. Lena giggled with
delight at his discomfiture, and the wrath in Canute's face grew blacker
than ever. A big man humiliated is vastly more undignified than a little
one. He forgot the sting of his face in the bitter consciousness that
he had made a fool of himself He stumbled blindly into the living room,
knocking his head against the door jamb because he forgot to stoop.
He dropped into a chair behind the stove, thrusting his big feet back
helplessly on either side of him.

Ole was a long time in coming, and Canute sat there, still and silent,
with his hands clenched on his knees, and the skin of his face seemed to
have shriveled up into little wrinkles that trembled when he lowered his
brows. His life had been one long lethargy of solitude and alcohol,
but now he was awakening, and it was as when the dumb stagnant heat of
summer breaks out into thunder.

When Ole came staggering in, heavy with liquor, Canute rose at once.

“Yensen,” he said quietly, “I have come to see if you will let me marry
your daughter today.”

“Today!” gasped Ole.

“Yes, I will not wait until tomorrow. I am tired of living alone.”

Ole braced his staggering knees against the bedstead, and stammered
eloquently: “Do you think I will marry my daughter to a drunkard? a man
who drinks raw alcohol? a man who sleeps with rattle snakes? Get out
of my house or I will kick you out for your impudence.” And Ole began
looking anxiously for his feet.

Canute answered not a word, but he put on his hat and went out into the
kitchen. He went up to Lena and said without looking at her, “Get your
things on and come with me!”

The tones of his voice startled her, and she said angrily, dropping the
soap, “Are you drunk?”

“If you do not come with me, I will take you--you had better come,” said
Canute quietly.

She lifted a sheet to strike him, but he caught her arm roughly and
wrenched the sheet from her. He turned to the wall and took down a hood
and shawl that hung there, and began wrapping her up. Lena scratched
and fought like a wild thing. Ole stood in the door, cursing, and Mary
howled and screeched at the top of her voice. As for Canute, he
lifted the girl in his arms and went out of the house. She kicked and
struggled, but the helpless wailing of Mary and Ole soon died away in
the distance, and her face was held down tightly on Canute's shoulder so
that she could not see whither he was taking her. She was conscious only
of the north wind whistling in her ears, and of rapid steady motion and
of a great breast that heaved beneath her in quick, irregular breaths.
The harder she struggled the tighter those iron arms that had held the
heels of horses crushed about her, until she felt as if they would crush
the breath from her, and lay still with fear. Canute was striding across
the level fields at a pace at which man never went before, drawing the
stinging north winds into his lungs in great gulps. He walked with his
eyes half closed and looking straight in front of him, only lowering
them when he bent his head to blow away the snow flakes that settled
on her hair. So it was that Canute took her to his home, even as his
bearded barbarian ancestors took the fair frivolous women of the South
in their hairy arms and bore them down to their war ships. For ever and
anon the soul becomes weary of the conventions that are not of it, and
with a single stroke shatters the civilized lies with which it is unable
to cope, and the strong arm reaches out and takes by force what it
cannot win by cunning.

When Canute reached his shanty he placed the girl upon a chair, where
she sat sobbing. He stayed only a few minutes. He filled the stove
with wood and lit the lamp, drank a huge swallow of alcohol and put the
bottle in his pocket. He paused a moment, staring heavily at the weeping
girl, then he went off and locked the door and disappeared in the
gathering gloom of the night.

Wrapped in flannels and soaked with turpentine, the little Norwegian
preacher sat reading his Bible, when he heard a thundering knock at his
door, and Canute entered, covered with snow and his beard frozen fast to
his coat.

“Come in, Canute, you must be frozen,” said the little man, shoving a
chair towards his visitor.

Canute remained standing with his hat on and said quietly, “I want you
to come over to my house tonight to marry me to Lena Yensen.”

“Have you got a license, Canute?”

“No, I don't want a license. I want to be married.”

“But I can't marry you without a license, man, it would not be legal.”

A dangerous light came in the big Norwegian's eye. “I want you to come
over to my house to marry me to Lena Yensen.”

“No, I can't, it would kill an ox to go out in a storm like this, and my
rheumatism is bad tonight.”

“Then if you will not go I must take you,” said Canute with a sigh.

He took down the preacher's bearskin coat and bade him put it on while
he hitched up his buggy. He went out and closed the door softly after
him. Presently he returned and found the frightened minister crouching
before the fire with his coat lying beside him. Canute helped him put it
on and gently wrapped his head in his big muffler. Then he picked him
up and carried him out and placed him in his buggy. As he tucked the
buffalo robes around him he said: “Your horse is old, he might flounder
or lose his way in this storm. I will lead him.”

The minister took the reins feebly in his hands and sat shivering with
the cold. Sometimes when there was a lull in the wind, he could see the
horse struggling through the snow with the man plodding steadily beside
him. Again the blowing snow would hide them from him altogether. He had
no idea where they were or what direction they were going. He felt as
though he were being whirled away in the heart of the storm, and he said
all the prayers he knew. But at last the long four miles were over, and
Canute set him down in the snow while he unlocked the door. He saw the
bride sitting by the fire with her eyes red and swollen as though
she had been weeping. Canute placed a huge chair for him, and said
roughly,--

“Warm yourself.”

Lena began to cry and moan afresh, begging the minister to take her
home. He looked helplessly at Canute. Canute said simply,

“If you are warm now, you can marry us.”

“My daughter, do you take this step of your own free will?” asked the
minister in a trembling voice.

“No, sir, I don't, and it is disgraceful he should force me into it! I
won't marry him.”

“Then, Canute, I cannot marry you,” said the minister, standing as
straight as his rheumatic limbs would let him.

“Are you ready to marry us now, sir?” said Canute, laying one iron hand
on his stooped shoulder. The little preacher was a good man, but like
most men of weak body he was a coward and had a horror of physical
suffering, although he had known so much of it. So with many qualms of
conscience he began to repeat the marriage service. Lena sat sullenly in
her chair, staring at the fire. Canute stood beside her, listening with
his head bent reverently and his hands folded on his breast. When the
little man had prayed and said amen, Canute began bundling him up again.

“I will take you home, now,” he said as he carried him out and placed
him in his buggy, and started off with him through the fury of the
storm, floundering among the snow drifts that brought even the giant
himself to his knees.

After she was left alone, Lena soon ceased weeping. She was not of a
particularly sensitive temperament, and had little pride beyond that of
vanity. After the first bitter anger wore itself out, she felt nothing
more than a healthy sense of humiliation and defeat. She had no
inclination to run away, for she was married now, and in her eyes
that was final and all rebellion was useless. She knew nothing about
a license, but she knew that a preacher married folks. She consoled
herself by thinking that she had always intended to marry Canute
someday, anyway.

She grew tired of crying and looking into the fire, so she got up and
began to look about her. She had heard queer tales about the inside of
Canute's shanty, and her curiosity soon got the better of her rage.
One of the first things she noticed was the new black suit of clothes
hanging on the wall. She was dull, but it did not take a vain woman long
to interpret anything so decidedly flattering, and she was pleased in
spite of herself. As she looked through the cupboard, the general air of
neglect and discomfort made her pity the man who lived there.

“Poor fellow, no wonder he wants to get married to get somebody to wash
up his dishes. Batchin's pretty hard on a man.”

It is easy to pity when once one's vanity has been tickled. She looked
at the windowsill and gave a little shudder and wondered if the man were
crazy. Then she sat down again and sat a long time wondering what her
Dick and Ole would do.

“It is queer Dick didn't come right over after me. He surely came, for
he would have left town before the storm began and he might just as
well come right on as go back. If he'd hurried he would have gotten here
before the preacher came. I suppose he was afraid to come, for he
knew Canuteson could pound him to jelly, the coward!” Her eyes flashed
angrily.

The weary hours wore on and Lena began to grow horribly lonesome. It was
an uncanny night and this was an uncanny place to be in. She could
hear the coyotes howling hungrily a little way from the cabin, and more
terrible still were all the unknown noises of the storm. She remembered
the tales they told of the big log overhead and she was afraid of those
snaky things on the windowsills. She remembered the man who had been
killed in the draw, and she wondered what she would do if she saw crazy
Lou's white face glaring into the window. The rattling of the door
became unbearable, she thought the latch must be loose and took the
lamp to look at it. Then for the first time she saw the ugly brown snake
skins whose death rattle sounded every time the wind jarred the door.

“Canute, Canute!” she screamed in terror.

Outside the door she heard a heavy sound as of a big dog getting up and
shaking himself. The door opened and Canute stood before her, white as a
snow drift.

“What is it?” he asked kindly.

“I am cold,” she faltered.

He went out and got an armful of wood and a basket of cobs and filled
the stove. Then he went out and lay in the snow before the door.
Presently he heard her calling again.

“What is it?” he said, sitting up.

“I'm so lonesome, I'm afraid to stay in here all alone.”

“I will go over and get your mother.” And he got up.

“She won't come.”

“I'll bring her,” said Canute grimly.

“No, no. I don't want her, she will scold all the time.”

“Well, I will bring your father.”

She spoke again and it seemed as though her mouth was close up to the
key-hole. She spoke lower than he had ever heard her speak before, so
low that he had to put his ear up to the lock to hear her.

“I don't want him either, Canute,--I'd rather have you.”

For a moment she heard no noise at all, then something like a groan.
With a cry of fear she opened the door, and saw Canute stretched in the
snow at her feet, his face in his hands, sobbing on the doorstep.





Eric Hermannson's Soul


It was a great night at the Lone Star schoolhouse--a night when the
Spirit was present with power and when God was very near to man. So
it seemed to Asa Skinner, servant of God and Free Gospeller. The
schoolhouse was crowded with the saved and sanctified, robust men
and women, trembling and quailing before the power of some mysterious
psychic force. Here and there among this cowering, sweating multitude
crouched some poor wretch who had felt the pangs of an awakened
conscience, but had not yet experienced that complete divestment of
reason, that frenzy born of a convulsion of the mind, which, in the
parlance of the Free Gospellers, is termed “the Light.” On the floor
before the mourners' bench lay the unconscious figure of a man in whom
outraged nature had sought her last resort. This “trance” state is the
highest evidence of grace among the Free Gospellers, and indicates a
close walking with God.

Before the desk stood Asa Skinner, shouting of the mercy and vengeance
of God, and in his eyes shone a terrible earnestness, an almost
prophetic flame. Asa was a converted train gambler who used to run
between Omaha and Denver. He was a man made for the extremes of life;
from the most debauched of men he had become the most ascetic. His was a
bestial face, a face that bore the stamp of Nature's eternal injustice.
The forehead was low, projecting over the eyes, and the sandy hair was
plastered down over it and then brushed back at an abrupt right angle.
The chin was heavy, the nostrils were low and wide, and the lower lip
hung loosely except in his moments of spasmodic earnestness, when it
shut like a steel trap. Yet about those coarse features there were
deep, rugged furrows, the scars of many a hand-to-hand struggle with the
weakness of the flesh, and about that drooping lip were sharp, strenuous
lines that had conquered it and taught it to pray. Over those seamed
cheeks there was a certain pallor, a greyness caught from many a vigil.
It was as though, after Nature had done her worst with that face, some
fine chisel had gone over it, chastening and almost transfiguring it.
Tonight, as his muscles twitched with emotion, and the perspiration
dropped from his hair and chin, there was a certain convincing power
in the man. For Asa Skinner was a man possessed of a belief, of that
sentiment of the sublime before which all inequalities are leveled, that
transport of conviction which seems superior to all laws of condition,
under which debauchees have become martyrs; which made a tinker an
artist and a camel-driver the founder of an empire. This was with Asa
Skinner tonight, as he stood proclaiming the vengeance of God.

It might have occurred to an impartial observer that Asa Skinner's God
was indeed a vengeful God if he could reserve vengeance for those of
his creatures who were packed into the Lone Star schoolhouse that night.
Poor exiles of all nations; men from the south and the north, peasants
from almost every country of Europe, most of them from the mountainous,
night-bound coast of Norway. Honest men for the most part, but men with
whom the world had dealt hardly; the failures of all countries, men
sobered by toil and saddened by exile, who had been driven to fight for
the dominion of an untoward soil, to sow where others should gather, the
advance guard of a mighty civilization to be.

Never had Asa Skinner spoken more earnestly than now. He felt that
the Lord had this night a special work for him to do. Tonight Eric
Hermannson, the wildest lad on all the Divide, sat in his audience with
a fiddle on his knee, just as he had dropped in on his way to play for
some dance. The violin is an object of particular abhorrence to the Free
Gospellers. Their antagonism to the church organ is bitter enough, but
the fiddle they regard as a very incarnation of evil desires, singing
forever of worldly pleasures and inseparably associated with all
forbidden things.

Eric Hermannson had long been the object of the prayers of the
revivalists. His mother had felt the power of the Spirit weeks ago, and
special prayer-meetings had been held at her house for her son. But
Eric had only gone his ways laughing, the ways of youth, which are short
enough at best, and none too flowery on the Divide.

He slipped away from the prayer-meetings to meet the Campbell boys in
Genereau's saloon, or hug the plump little French girls at Chevalier's
dances, and sometimes, of a summer night, he even went across the dewy
cornfields and through the wild-plum thicket to play the fiddle for Lena
Hanson, whose name was a reproach through all the Divide country, where
the women are usually too plain and too busy and too tired to depart
from the ways of virtue. On such occasions Lena, attired in a pink
wrapper and silk stockings and tiny pink slippers, would sing to him,
accompanying herself on a battered guitar. It gave him a delicious sense
of freedom and experience to be with a woman who, no matter how, had
lived in big cities and knew the ways of town folk, who had never worked
in the fields and had kept her hands white and soft, her throat fair
and tender, who had heard great singers in Denver and Salt Lake, and who
knew the strange language of flattery and idleness and mirth.

Yet, careless as he seemed, the frantic prayers of his mother were not
altogether without their effect upon Eric. For days he had been fleeing
before them as a criminal from his pursuers, and over his pleasures had
fallen the shadow of something dark and terrible that dogged his steps.
The harder he danced, the louder he sang, the more was he conscious that
this phantom was gaining upon him, that in time it would track him down.
One Sunday afternoon, late in the fall, when he had been drinking beer
with Lena Hanson and listening to a song which made his cheeks burn, a
rattlesnake had crawled out of the side of the sod house and thrust its
ugly head in under the screen door. He was not afraid of snakes, but he
knew enough of Gospellism to feel the significance of the reptile lying
coiled there upon her doorstep. His lips were cold when he kissed Lena
goodbye, and he went there no more.

The final barrier between Eric and his mother's faith was his violin,
and to that he clung as a man sometimes will cling to his dearest sin,
to the weakness more precious to him than all his strength, In the great
world beauty comes to men in many guises, and art in a hundred forms,
but for Eric there was only his violin.

It stood, to him, for all the manifestations of art; it was his only
bridge into the kingdom of the soul.

It was to Eric Hermannson that the evangelist directed his impassioned
pleading that night.

“_Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?_ Is there a Saul here tonight
who has stopped his ears to that gentle pleading, who has thrust a spear
into that bleeding side? Think of it, my brother; you are offered this
wonderful love and you prefer the worm that dieth not and the fire which
will not be quenched. What right have you to lose one of God's precious
souls? _Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?_”

A great joy dawned in Asa Skinner's pale face, for he saw that Eric
Hermannson was swaying to and fro in his seat. The minister fell upon
his knees and threw his long arms up over his head.

“O my brothers! I feel it coming, the blessing we have prayed for. I
tell you the Spirit is coming! just a little more prayer, brothers, a
little more zeal, and he will be here. I can feel his cooling wing upon
my brow. Glory be to God forever and ever, amen!”

The whole congregation groaned under the pressure of this spiritual
panic. Shouts and hallelujahs went up from every lip. Another figure
fell prostrate upon the floor. From the mourners' bench rose a chant of
terror and rapture:


            “Eating honey and drinking wine,
            _Glory to the bleeding Lamb!_
            I am my Lord's and he is mine,
            _Glory to the bleeding Lamb!”_


The hymn was sung in a dozen dialects and voiced all the vague yearning
of these hungry lives, of these people who had starved all the passions
so long, only to fall victims to the barest of them all, fear.

A groan of ultimate anguish rose from Eric Hermannson's bowed head,
and the sound was like the groan of a great tree when it falls in the
forest.

The minister rose suddenly to his feet and threw back his head, crying
in a loud voice:

“_Lazarus, come forth!_ Eric Hermannson, you are lost, going down at
sea. In the name of God, and Jesus Christ his Son, I throw you the life
line. Take hold! Almighty God, my soul for his!” The minister threw his
arms out and lifted his quivering face.

Eric Hermannson rose to his feet; his lips were set and the lightning
was in his eyes. He took his violin by the neck and crushed it to
splinters across his knee, and to Asa Skinner the sound was like the
shackles of sin broken audibly asunder.



                              II

For more than two years Eric Hermannson kept the austere faith to which
he had sworn himself, kept it until a girl from the East came to spend
a week on the Nebraska Divide. She was a girl of other manners and
conditions, and there were greater distances between her life and Eric's
than all the miles which separated Rattlesnake Creek from New York City.
Indeed, she had no business to be in the West at all; but ah! across
what leagues of land and sea, by what improbable chances, do the
unrelenting gods bring to us our fate!

It was in a year of financial depression that Wyllis Elliot came to
Nebraska to buy cheap land and revisit the country where he had spent
a year of his youth. When he had graduated from Harvard it was still
customary for moneyed gentlemen to send their scapegrace sons to rough
it on ranches in the wilds of Nebraska or Dakota, or to consign them to
a living death in the sagebrush of the Black Hills. These young men did
not always return to the ways of civilized life. But Wyllis Elliot had
not married a half-breed, nor been shot in a cowpunchers' brawl, nor
wrecked by bad whisky, nor appropriated by a smirched adventuress. He
had been saved from these things by a girl, his sister, who had been
very near to his life ever since the days when they read fairy tales
together and dreamed the dreams that never come true. On this, his
first visit to his father's ranch since he left it six years before, he
brought her with him. She had been laid up half the winter from a sprain
received while skating, and had had too much time for reflection during
those months. She was restless and filled with a desire to see something
of the wild country of which her brother had told her so much. She was
to be married the next winter, and Wyllis understood her when she
begged him to take her with him on this long, aimless jaunt across the
continent, to taste the last of their freedom together. It comes to all
women of her type--that desire to taste the unknown which allures and
terrifies, to run one's whole soul's length out to the wind--just once.

It had been an eventful journey. Wyllis somehow understood that strain
of gypsy blood in his sister, and he knew where to take her. They had
slept in sod houses on the Platte River, made the acquaintance of the
personnel of a third-rate opera company on the train to Deadwood, dined
in a camp of railroad constructors at the world's end beyond New Castle,
gone through the Black Hills on horseback, fished for trout in Dome
Lake, watched a dance at Cripple Creek, where the lost souls who hide
in the hills gathered for their besotted revelry. And now, last of all,
before the return to thraldom, there was this little shack, anchored on
the windy crest of the Divide, a little black dot against the flaming
sunsets, a scented sea of cornland bathed in opalescent air and blinding
sunlight.

Margaret Elliot was one of those women of whom there are so many in this
day, when old order, passing, giveth place to new; beautiful, talented,
critical, unsatisfied, tired of the world at twenty-four. For the moment
the life and people of the Divide interested her. She was there but a
week; perhaps had she stayed longer, that inexorable ennui which travels
faster even than the Vestibule Limited would have overtaken her. The
week she tarried there was the week that Eric Hermannson was helping
Jerry Lockhart thresh; a week earlier or a week later, and there would
have been no story to write.

It was on Thursday and they were to leave on Saturday. Wyllis and his
sister were sitting on the wide piazza of the ranchhouse, staring out
into the afternoon sunlight and protesting against the gusts of hot wind
that blew up from the sandy riverbottom twenty miles to the southward.

The young man pulled his cap lower over his eyes and remarked:

“This wind is the real thing; you don't strike it anywhere else. You
remember we had a touch of it in Algiers and I told you it came from
Kansas. It's the keynote of this country.”

Wyllis touched her hand that lay on the hammock and continued gently:

“I hope it's paid you, Sis. Roughing it's dangerous business; it takes
the taste out of things.”

She shut her fingers firmly over the brown hand that was so like her
own.

“Paid? Why, Wyllis, I haven't been so happy since we were children and
were going to discover the ruins of Troy together some day. Do you know,
I believe I could just stay on here forever and let the world go on its
own gait. It seems as though the tension and strain we used to talk of
last winter were gone for good, as though one could never give one's
strength out to such petty things any more.”

Wyllis brushed the ashes of his pipe away from the silk handkerchief
that was knotted about his neck and stared moodily off at the skyline.

“No, you're mistaken. This would bore you after a while. You can't shake
the fever of the other life. I've tried it. There was a time when the
gay fellows of Rome could trot down into the Thebaid and burrow into the
sandhills and get rid of it. But it's all too complex now. You see
we've made our dissipations so dainty and respectable that they've
gone further in than the flesh, and taken hold of the ego proper. You
couldn't rest, even here. The war cry would follow you.”

“You don't waste words, Wyllis, but you never miss fire. I talk more
than you do, without saying half so much. You must have learned the art
of silence from these taciturn Norwegians. I think I like silent men.”

“Naturally,” said Wyllis, “since you have decided to marry the most
brilliant talker you know.”

Both were silent for a time, listening to the sighing of the hot wind
through the parched morning-glory vines. Margaret spoke first.

“Tell me, Wyllis, were many of the Norwegians you used to know as
interesting as Eric Hermannson?”

“Who, Siegfried? Well, no. He used to be the flower of the Norwegian
youth in my day, and he's rather an exception, even now. He has
retrograded, though. The bonds of the soil have tightened on him, I
fancy.”

“Siegfried? Come, that's rather good, Wyllis. He looks like a
dragon-slayer. What is it that makes him so different from the others? I
can talk to him; he seems quite like a human being.”

 “Well,” said Wyllis, meditatively, “I don't read Bourget
as much as my cultured sister, and I'm not so well up in analysis, but
I fancy it's because one keeps cherishing a perfectly unwarranted
suspicion that under that big, hulking anatomy of his, he may conceal a
soul somewhere. _Nicht wahr?_”

“Something like that,” said Margaret, thoughtfully, “except that it's
more than a suspicion, and it isn't groundless. He has one, and he makes
it known, somehow, without speaking.”

“I always have my doubts about loquacious souls,” Wyllis remarked, with
the unbelieving smile that had grown habitual with him.

Margaret went on, not heeding the interruption. “I knew it from the
first, when he told me about the suicide of his cousin, the Bernstein
boy. That kind of blunt pathos can't be summoned at will in anybody. The
earlier novelists rose to it, sometimes, unconsciously. But last night
when I sang for him I was doubly sure. Oh, I haven't told you about that
yet! Better light your pipe again. You see, he stumbled in on me in the
dark when I was pumping away at that old parlour organ to please Mrs.
Lockhart It's her household fetish and I've forgotten how many pounds of
butter she made and sold to buy it. Well, Eric stumbled in, and in some
inarticulate manner made me understand that he wanted me to sing for
him. I sang just the old things, of course. It's queer to sing familiar
things here at the world's end. It makes one think how the hearts of men
have carried them around the world, into the wastes of Iceland and the
jungles of Africa and the islands of the Pacific. I think if one lived
here long enough one would quite forget how to be trivial, and would
read only the great books that we never get time to read in the world,
and would remember only the great music, and the things that are really
worth while would stand out clearly against that horizon over there. And
of course I played the intermezzo from _Cavalleria Rusticana_ for him;
it goes rather better on an organ than most things do. He shuffled his
feet and twisted his big hands up into knots and blurted out that he
didn't know there was any music like that in the world. Why, there were
tears in his voice, Wyllis! Yes, like Rossetti, I _heard_ his tears.
Then it dawned upon me that it was probably the first good music he had
ever heard in all his life. Think of it, to care for music as he does
and never to hear it, never to know that it exists on earth! To long
for it as we long for other perfect experiences that never come. I
can't tell you what music means to that man. I never saw any one so
susceptible to it. It gave him speech, he became alive. When I had
finished the intermezzo, he began telling me about a little crippled
brother who died and whom he loved and used to carry everywhere in his
arms. He did not wait for encouragement. He took up the story and told
it slowly, as if to himself, just sort of rose up and told his own woe
to answer Mascagni's. It overcame me.”

“Poor devil,” said Wyllis, looking at her with mysterious eyes, “and so
you've given him a new woe. Now he'll go on wanting Grieg and
Schubert the rest of his days and never getting them. That's a girl's
philanthropy for you!”

Jerry Lockhart came out of the house screwing his chin over the unusual
luxury of a stiff white collar, which his wife insisted upon as a
necessary article of toilet while Miss Elliot was at the house. Jerry
sat down on the step and smiled his broad, red smile at Margaret.

“Well, I've got the music for your dance, Miss Elliot. Olaf Oleson
will bring his accordion and Mollie will play the organ, when she isn't
lookin' after the grub, and a little chap from Frenchtown will bring his
fiddle--though the French don't mix with the Norwegians much.”

“Delightful! Mr. Lockhart, that dance will be the feature of our trip,
and it's so nice of you to get it up for us. We'll see the Norwegians in
character at last,” cried Margaret, cordially.

“See here, Lockhart, I'll settle with you for backing her in this
scheme,” said Wyllis, sitting up and knocking the ashes out of his pipe.
“She's done crazy things enough on this trip, but to talk of dancing all
night with a gang of half-mad Norwegians and taking the carriage at four
to catch the six o'clock train out of Riverton--well, it's tommyrot,
that's what it is!”

“Wyllis, I leave it to your sovereign power of reason to decide whether
it isn't easier to stay up all night than to get up at three in the
morning. To get up at three, think what that means! No, sir, I prefer to
keep my vigil and then get into a sleeper.”

“But what do you want with the Norwegians? I thought you were tired of
dancing.”

“So I am, with some people. But I want to see a Norwegian dance, and I
intend to. Come, Wyllis, you know how seldom it is that one really wants
to do anything nowadays. I wonder when I have really wanted to go to a
party before. It will be something to remember next month at Newport,
when we have to and don't want to. Remember your own theory that
contrast is about the only thing that makes life endurable. This is my
party and Mr. Lockhart's; your whole duty tomorrow night will consist in
being nice to the Norwegian girls. I'll warrant you were adept enough
at it once. And you'd better be very nice indeed, for if there are many
such young Valkyries as Eric's sister among them, they would simply tie
you up in a knot if they suspected you were guying them.”

Wyllis groaned and sank back into the hammock to consider his fate,
while his sister went on.

“And the guests, Mr. Lockhart, did they accept?”

Lockhart took out his knife and began sharpening it on the sole of his
plowshoe.

“Well, I guess we'll have a couple dozen. You see it's pretty hard to
get a crowd together here any more. Most of 'em have gone over to the
Free Gospellers, and they'd rather put their feet in the fire than shake
'em to a fiddle.”

Margaret made a gesture of impatience. “Those Free Gospellers have just
cast an evil spell over this country, haven't they?”

“Well,” said Lockhart, cautiously, “I don't just like to pass judgment
on any Christian sect, but if you're to know the chosen by their works,
the Gospellers can't make a very proud showin', an' that's a fact.
They're responsible for a few suicides, and they've sent a good-sized
delegation to the state insane asylum, an' I don't see as they've made
the rest of us much better than we were before. I had a little herdboy
last spring, as square a little Dane as I want to work for me, but after
the Gospellers got hold of him and sanctified him, the little beggar
used to get down on his knees out on the prairie and pray by the hour
and let the cattle get into the corn, an' I had to fire him. That's
about the way it goes. Now there's Eric; that chap used to be a hustler
and the spryest dancer in all this section-called all the dances. Now
he's got no ambition and he's glum as a preacher. I don't suppose we can
even get him to come in tomorrow night.”

“Eric? Why, he must dance, we can't let him off,” said Margaret,
quickly. “Why, I intend to dance with him myself.”

“I'm afraid he won't dance. I asked him this morning if he'd help us out
and he said, 'I don't dance now, any more,'” said Lockhart, imitating
the laboured English of the Norwegian.

“'The Miller of Hofbau, the Miller of Hofbau, O my Princess!'” chirped
Wyllis, cheerfully, from his hammock.

The red on his sister's cheek deepened a little, and she laughed
mischievously. “We'll see about that, sir. I'll not admit that I am
beaten until I have asked him myself.”

Every night Eric rode over to St. Anne, a little village in the heart
of the French settlement, for the mail. As the road lay through the most
attractive part of the Divide country, on several occasions Margaret
Elliot and her brother had accompanied him. Tonight Wyllis had business
with Lockhart, and Margaret rode with Eric, mounted on a frisky little
mustang that Mrs. Lockhart had broken to the sidesaddle. Margaret
regarded her escort very much as she did the servant who always
accompanied her on long rides at home, and the ride to the village was
a silent one. She was occupied with thoughts of another world, and Eric
was wrestling with more thoughts than had ever been crowded into his
head before.

He rode with his eyes riveted on that slight figure before him, as
though he wished to absorb it through the optic nerves and hold it in
his brain forever. He understood the situation perfectly. His brain
worked slowly, but he had a keen sense of the values of things. This
girl represented an entirely new species of humanity to him, but he knew
where to place her. The prophets of old, when an angel first appeared
unto them, never doubted its high origin.

Eric was patient under the adverse conditions of his life, but he
was not servile. The Norse blood in him had not entirely lost its
self-reliance. He came of a proud fisher line, men who were not afraid
of anything but the ice and the devil, and he had prospects before him
when his father went down off the North Cape in the long Arctic night,
and his mother, seized by a violent horror of seafaring life, had
followed her brother to America. Eric was eighteen then, handsome as
young Siegfried, a giant in stature, with a skin singularly pure and
delicate, like a Swede's; hair as yellow as the locks of Tennyson's
amorous Prince, and eyes of a fierce, burning blue, whose flash was most
dangerous to women.

He had in those days a certain pride of bearing, a certain confidence of
approach, that usually accompanies physical perfection. It was even said
of him then that he was in love with life, and inclined to levity, a
vice most unusual on the Divide. But the sad history of those Norwegian
exiles, transplanted in an arid soil and under a scorching sun, had
repeated itself in his case. Toil and isolation had sobered him, and
he grew more and more like the clods among which he laboured. It was as
though some red-hot instrument had touched for a moment those delicate
fibers of the brain which respond to acute pain or pleasure, in which
lies the power of exquisite sensation, and had seared them quite away.
It is a painful thing to watch the light die out of the eyes of those
Norsemen, leaving an expression of impenetrable sadness, quite passive,
quite hopeless, a shadow that is never lifted. With some this change
comes almost at once, in the first bitterness of homesickness, with
others it comes more slowly, according to the time it takes each man's
heart to die.

Oh, those poor Northmen of the Divide! They are dead many a year before
they are put to rest in the little graveyard on the windy hill where
exiles of all nations grow akin.

The peculiar species of hypochondria to which the exiles of his people
sooner or later succumb had not developed in Eric until that night at
the Lone Star schoolhouse, when he had broken his violin across his
knee. After that, the gloom of his people settled down upon him, and the
gospel of maceration began its work.

_“If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out,”_ et cetera. The pagan smile
that once hovered about his lips was gone, and he was one with sorrow.
Religion heals a hundred hearts for one that it embitters, but when it
destroys, its work is quick and deadly, and where the agony of the cross
has been, joy will not come again. This man understood things literally:
one must live without pleasure to die without fear; to save the soul, it
was necessary to starve the soul.

The sun hung low above the cornfields when Margaret and her cavalier
left St. Anne. South of the town there is a stretch of road that runs
for some three miles through the French settlement, where the prairie
is as level as the surface of a lake. There the fields of flax and
wheat and rye are bordered by precise rows of slender, tapering Lombard
poplars. It was a yellow world that Margaret Elliot saw under the wide
light of the setting sun.

The girl gathered up her reins and called back to Eric, “It will be safe
to run the horses here, won't it?”

“Yes, I think so, now,” he answered, touching his spur to his pony's
flank. They were off like the wind. It is an old saying in the West that
newcomers always ride a horse or two to death before they get broken
in to the country. They are tempted by the great open spaces and try to
outride the horizon, to get to the end of something. Margaret galloped
over the level road, and Eric, from behind, saw her long veil fluttering
in the wind. It had fluttered just so in his dreams last night and the
night before. With a sudden inspiration of courage he overtook her and
rode beside her, looking intently at her half-averted face. Before, he
had only stolen occasional glances at it, seen it in blinding flashes,
always with more or less embarrassment, but now he determined to let
every line of it sink into his memory. Men of the world would have said
that it was an unusual face, nervous, finely cut, with clear, elegant
lines that betokened ancestry. Men of letters would have called it a
historic face, and would have conjectured at what old passions, long
asleep, what old sorrows forgotten time out of mind, doing battle
together in ages gone, had curved those delicate nostrils, left their
unconscious memory in those eyes. But Eric read no meaning in these
details. To him this beauty was something more than colour and line;
it was a flash of white light, in which one cannot distinguish colour
because all colours are there. To him it was a complete revelation, an
embodiment of those dreams of impossible loveliness that linger by a
young man's pillow on midsummer nights; yet, because it held something
more than the attraction of health and youth and shapeliness, it
troubled him, and in its presence he felt as the Goths before the white
marbles in the Roman Capitol, not knowing whether they were men or gods.
At times he felt like uncovering his head before it, again the fury
seized him to break and despoil, to find the clay in this spirit-thing
and stamp upon it. Away from her, he longed to strike out with his arms,
and take and hold; it maddened him that this woman whom he could break
in his hands should be so much stronger than he. But near her, he never
questioned this strength; he admitted its potentiality as he admitted
the miracles of the Bible; it enervated and conquered him.

Tonight, when he rode so close to her that he could have touched her, he
knew that he might as well reach out his hand to take a star.

Margaret stirred uneasily under his gaze and turned questioningly in her
saddle.

“This wind puts me a little out of breath when we ride fast,” she said.

Eric turned his eyes away.

“I want to ask you if I go to New York to work, if I maybe hear music
like you sang last night? I been a purty good hand to work,” he asked,
timidly.

Margaret looked at him with surprise, and then, as she studied the
outline of his face, pityingly.

“Well, you might--but you'd lose a good deal else. I shouldn't like you
to go to New York--and be poor, you'd be out of atmosphere, some
way,” she said, slowly. Inwardly she was thinking: _There he would be
altogether sordid, impossible--a machine who would carry one's trunks
upstairs, perhaps. Here he is every inch a man, rather picturesque; why
is it?_ “No,” she added aloud, “I shouldn't like that.”

“Then I not go,” said Eric, decidedly.

Margaret turned her face to hide a smile. She was a trifle amused and a
trifle annoyed. Suddenly she spoke again.

“But I'll tell you what I do want you to do, Eric. I want you to dance
with us tomorrow night and teach me some of the Norwegian dances; they
say you know them all. Won't you?”

Eric straightened himself in his saddle and his eyes flashed as they had
done in the Lone Star schoolhouse when he broke his violin across his
knee.

“Yes, I will,” he said, quietly, and he believed that he delivered his
soul to hell as he said it.

They had reached the rougher country now, where the road wound through
a narrow cut in one of the bluffs along the creek, when a beat of hoofs
ahead and the sharp neighing of horses made the ponies start and Eric
rose in his stirrups. Then down the gulch in front of them and over the
steep clay banks thundered a herd of wild ponies, nimble as monkeys and
wild as rabbits, such as horse-traders drive east from the plains of
Montana to sell in the farming country. Margaret's pony made a shrill
sound, a neigh that was almost a scream, and started up the clay bank to
meet them, all the wild blood of the range breaking out in an instant.
Margaret called to Eric just as he threw himself out of the saddle and
caught her pony's bit. But the wiry little animal had gone mad and was
kicking and biting like a devil. Her wild brothers of the range were all
about her, neighing, and pawing the earth, and striking her with their
forefeet and snapping at her flanks. It was the old liberty of the range
that the little beast fought for.

“Drop the reins and hold tight, tight!” Eric called, throwing all his
weight upon the bit, struggling under those frantic forefeet that now
beat at his breast, and now kicked at the wild mustangs that surged and
tossed about him. He succeeded in wrenching the pony's head toward him
and crowding her withers against the clay bank, so that she could not
roll.

“Hold tight, tight!” he shouted again, launching a kick at a snorting
animal that reared back against Margaret's saddle. If she should lose
her courage and fall now, under those hoofs--He struck out again and
again, kicking right and left with all his might. Already the negligent
drivers had galloped into the cut, and their long quirts were whistling
over the heads of the herd. As suddenly as it had come, the struggling,
frantic wave of wild life swept up out of the gulch and on across the
open prairie, and with a long despairing whinny of farewell the pony
dropped her head and stood trembling in her sweat, shaking the foam and
blood from her bit.

Eric stepped close to Margaret's side and laid his hand on her saddle.
“You are not hurt?” he asked, hoarsely. As he raised his face in the
soft starlight she saw that it was white and drawn and that his lips
were working nervously.

“No, no, not at all. But you, you are suffering; they struck you!” she
cried in sharp alarm.

He stepped back and drew his hand across his brow.

“No, it is not that,” he spoke rapidly now, with his hands clenched at
his side. “But if they had hurt you, I would beat their brains out with
my hands. I would kill them all. I was never afraid before. You are the
only beautiful thing that has ever come close to me. You came like an
angel out of the sky. You are like the music you sing, you are like the
stars and the snow on the mountains where I played when I was a little
boy. You are like all that I wanted once and never had, you are all
that they have killed in me. I die for you tonight, tomorrow, for all
eternity. I am not a coward; I was afraid because I love you more than
Christ who died for me, more than I am afraid of hell, or hope for
heaven. I was never afraid before. If you had fallen--oh, my God!” He
threw his arms out blindly and dropped his head upon the pony's mane,
leaning limply against the animal like a man struck by some sickness.
His shoulders rose and fell perceptibly with his laboured breathing. The
horse stood cowed with exhaustion and fear. Presently Margaret laid her
hand on Eric's head and said gently:

“You are better now, shall we go on? Can you get your horse?”

“No, he has gone with the herd. I will lead yours, she is not safe.
I will not frighten you again.” His voice was still husky, but it was
steady now. He took hold of the bit and tramped home in silence.

When they reached the house, Eric stood stolidly by the pony's head
until Wyllis came to lift his sister from the saddle.

“The horses were badly frightened, Wyllis. I think I was pretty
thoroughly scared myself,” she said as she took her brother's arm and
went slowly up the hill toward the house. “No, I'm not hurt, thanks to
Eric. You must thank him for taking such good care of me. He's a mighty
fine fellow. I'll tell you all about it in the morning, dear. I was
pretty well shaken up and I'm going right to bed now. Good night.”

When she reached the low room in which she slept, she sank upon the bed
in her riding dress, face downward.

“Oh, I pity him! I pity him!” she murmured, with a long sigh of
exhaustion. She must have slept a little. When she rose again, she took
from her dress a letter that had been waiting for her at the village
post-office. It was closely written in a long, angular hand, covering a
dozen pages of foreign note-paper, and began:

My Dearest Margaret: if I should attempt to say _how like a winter hath
thine absence been_, I should incur the risk of being tedious. Really,
it takes the sparkle out of everything. Having nothing better to do, and
not caring to go anywhere in particular without you, I remained in the
city until Jack Courtwell noted my general despondency and brought me
down here to his place on the sound to manage some open-air theatricals
he is getting up. _As You Like It_ is of course the piece selected. Miss
Harrison plays Rosalind. I wish you had been here to take the part. Miss
Harrison reads her lines well, but she is either a maiden-all-forlorn or
a tomboy; insists on reading into the part all sorts of deeper meanings
and highly coloured suggestions wholly out of harmony with the pastoral
setting. Like most of the professionals, she exaggerates the emotional
element and quite fails to do justice to Rosalind's facile wit and
really brilliant mental qualities. Gerard will do Orlando, but rumor
says he is _epris_ of your sometime friend, Miss Meredith, and his
memory is treacherous and his interest fitful.

My new pictures arrived last week on the _Gascogne_. The Puvis de
Chavannes is even more beautiful than I thought it in Paris. A pale
dream-maiden sits by a pale dream-cow and a stream of anemic water flows
at her feet. The Constant, you will remember, I got because you admired
it. It is here in all its florid splendour, the whole dominated by a
glowing sensuosity. The drapery of the female figure is as wonderful as
you said; the fabric all barbaric pearl and gold, painted with an easy,
effortless voluptuousness, and that white, gleaming line of African
coast in the background recalls memories of you very precious to me. But
it is useless to deny that Constant irritates me. Though I cannot prove
the charge against him, his brilliancy always makes me suspect him of
cheapness.

Here Margaret stopped and glanced at the remaining pages of this strange
love-letter. They seemed to be filled chiefly with discussions of
pictures and books, and with a slow smile she laid them by.

She rose and began undressing. Before she lay down she went to open the
window. With her hand on the sill, she hesitated, feeling suddenly as
though some danger were lurking outside, some inordinate desire waiting
to spring upon her in the darkness. She stood there for a long time,
gazing at the infinite sweep of the sky.

“Oh, it is all so little, so little there,” she murmured. “When
everything else is so dwarfed, why should one expect love to be great?
Why should one try to read highly coloured suggestions into a life like
that? If only I could find one thing in it all that mattered greatly,
one thing that would warm me when I am alone! Will life never give me
that one great moment?”

As she raised the window, she heard a sound in the plum bushes outside.
It was only the house-dog roused from his sleep, but Margaret started
violently and trembled so that she caught the foot of the bed for
support. Again she felt herself pursued by some overwhelming longing,
some desperate necessity for herself, like the outstretching of
helpless, unseen arms in the darkness, and the air seemed heavy with
sighs of yearning. She fled to her bed with the words, “I love you more
than Christ who died for me!” ringing in her ears.


                             III

About midnight the dance at Lockhart's was at its height. Even the old
men who had come to “look on” caught the spirit of revelry and stamped
the floor with the vigor of old Silenus. Eric took the violin from the
Frenchmen, and Minna Oleson sat at the organ, and the music grew more
and more characteristic--rude, half mournful music, made up of the
folksongs of the North, that the villagers sing through the long night
in hamlets by the sea, when they are thinking of the sun, and the
spring, and the fishermen so long away. To Margaret some of it sounded
like Grieg's _Peer Gynt_ music. She found something irresistibly
infectious in the mirth of these people who were so seldom merry, and
she felt almost one of them. Something seemed struggling for freedom
in them tonight, something of the joyous childhood of the nations
which exile had not killed. The girls were all boisterous with delight.
Pleasure came to them but rarely, and when it came, they caught at it
wildly and crushed its fluttering wings in their strong brown fingers.
They had a hard life enough, most of them. Torrid summers and freezing
winters, labour and drudgery and ignorance, were the portion of
their girlhood; a short wooing, a hasty, loveless marriage, unlimited
maternity, thankless sons, premature age and ugliness, were the dower
of their womanhood. But what matter? Tonight there was hot liquor in the
glass and hot blood in the heart; tonight they danced.

Tonight Eric Hermannson had renewed his youth. He was no longer the big,
silent Norwegian who had sat at Margaret's feet and looked hopelessly
into her eyes. Tonight he was a man, with a man's rights and a man's
power. Tonight he was Siegfried indeed. His hair was yellow as the heavy
wheat in the ripe of summer, and his eyes flashed like the blue water
between the ice packs in the north seas. He was not afraid of Margaret
tonight, and when he danced with her he held her firmly. She was tired
and dragged on his arm a little, but the strength of the man was like
an all-pervading fluid, stealing through her veins, awakening under her
heart some nameless, unsuspected existence that had slumbered there all
these years and that went out through her throbbing fingertips to his
that answered. She wondered if the hoydenish blood of some lawless
ancestor, long asleep, were calling out in her tonight, some drop of
a hotter fluid that the centuries had failed to cool, and why, if this
curse were in her, it had not spoken before. But was it a curse, this
awakening, this wealth before undiscovered, this music set free? For the
first time in her life her heart held something stronger than herself,
was not this worthwhile? Then she ceased to wonder. She lost sight of
the lights and the faces and the music was drowned by the beating of her
own arteries. She saw only the blue eyes that flashed above her, felt
only the warmth of that throbbing hand which held hers and which the
blood of his heart fed. Dimly, as in a dream, she saw the drooping
shoulders, high white forehead and tight, cynical mouth of the man she
was to marry in December. For an hour she had been crowding back the
memory of that face with all her strength.

“Let us stop, this is enough,” she whispered. His only answer was to
tighten the arm behind her. She sighed and let that masterful strength
bear her where it would. She forgot that this man was little more than
a savage, that they would part at dawn. The blood has no memories, no
reflections, no regrets for the past, no consideration of the future.

“Let us go out where it is cooler,” she said when the music stopped;
thinking, _I am growing faint here, I shall be all right in the open
air_. They stepped out into the cool, blue air of the night.

Since the older folk had begun dancing, the young Norwegians had been
slipping out in couples to climb the windmill tower into the cooler
atmosphere, as is their custom.

“You like to go up?” asked Eric, close to her ear.

She turned and looked at him with suppressed amusement. “How high is
it?”

“Forty feet, about. I not let you fall.” There was a note of
irresistible pleading in his voice, and she felt that he tremendously
wished her to go. Well, why not? This was a night of the unusual, when
she was not herself at all, but was living an unreality. Tomorrow, yes,
in a few hours, there would be the Vestibule Limited and the world.

“Well, if you'll take good care of me. I used to be able to climb, when
I was a little girl.”

Once at the top and seated on the platform, they were silent. Margaret
wondered if she would not hunger for that scene all her life, through
all the routine of the days to come. Above them stretched the great
Western sky, serenely blue, even in the night, with its big, burning
stars, never so cold and dead and far away as in denser atmospheres. The
moon would not be up for twenty minutes yet, and all about the horizon,
that wide horizon, which seemed to reach around the world, lingered a
pale white light, as of a universal dawn. The weary wind brought up to
them the heavy odours of the cornfields. The music of the dance sounded
faintly from below. Eric leaned on his elbow beside her, his legs
swinging down on the ladder. His great shoulders looked more than ever
like those of the stone Doryphorus, who stands in his perfect, reposeful
strength in the Louvre, and had often made her wonder if such men died
forever with the youth of Greece.

“How sweet the corn smells at night,” said Margaret nervously.

“Yes, like the flowers that grow in paradise, I think.”

She was somewhat startled by this reply, and more startled when this
taciturn man spoke again.

“You go away tomorrow?”

“Yes, we have stayed longer than we thought to now.”

“You not come back any more?”

“No, I expect not. You see, it is a long trip halfway across the
continent.”

“You soon forget about this country, I guess.” It seemed to him now
a little thing to lose his soul for this woman, but that she should
utterly forget this night into which he threw all his life and all his
eternity, that was a bitter thought.

“No, Eric, I will not forget. You have all been too kind to me for that.
And you won't be sorry you danced this one night, will you?”

“I never be sorry. I have not been so happy before. I not be so happy
again, ever. You will be happy many nights yet, I only this one. I will
dream sometimes, maybe.”

The mighty resignation of his tone alarmed and touched her. It was as
when some great animal composes itself for death, as when a great ship
goes down at sea.

She sighed, but did not answer him. He drew a little closer and looked
into her eyes.

“You are not always happy, too?” he asked.

“No, not always, Eric; not very often, I think.”

“You have a trouble?”

“Yes, but I cannot put it into words. Perhaps if I could do that, I
could cure it.”

He clasped his hands together over his heart, as children do when they
pray, and said falteringly, “If I own all the world, I give him you.”

Margaret felt a sudden moisture in her eyes, and laid her hand on his.

“Thank you, Eric; I believe you would. But perhaps even then I should
not be happy. Perhaps I have too much of it already.”

She did not take her hand away from him; she did not dare. She sat still
and waited for the traditions in which she had always believed to speak
and save her. But they were dumb. She belonged to an ultra-refined
civilization which tries to cheat nature with elegant sophistries. Cheat
nature? Bah! One generation may do it, perhaps two, but the third--Can
we ever rise above nature or sink below her? Did she not turn on
Jerusalem as upon Sodom, upon St. Anthony in his desert as upon Nero
in his seraglio? Does she not always cry in brutal triumph: “I am here
still, at the bottom of things, warming the roots of life; you cannot
starve me nor tame me nor thwart me; I made the world, I rule it, and I
am its destiny.”

This woman, on a windmill tower at the world's end with a giant
barbarian, heard that cry tonight, and she was afraid! Ah! the terror
and the delight of that moment when first we fear ourselves! Until then
we have not lived.

“Come, Eric, let us go down; the moon is up and the music has begun
again,” she said.

He rose silently and stepped down upon the ladder, putting his arm about
her to help her. That arm could have thrown Thor's hammer out in the
cornfields yonder, yet it scarcely touched her, and his hand trembled
as it had done in the dance. His face was level with hers now and the
moonlight fell sharply upon it. All her life she had searched the faces
of men for the look that lay in his eyes. She knew that that look had
never shone for her before, would never shine for her on earth again,
that such love comes to one only in dreams or in impossible places like
this, unattainable always. This was Love's self, in a moment it would
die. Stung by the agonized appeal that emanated from the man's whole
being, she leaned forward and laid her lips on his. Once, twice and
again she heard the deep respirations rattle in his throat while
she held them there, and the riotous force under her head became
an engulfing weakness. He drew her up to him until he felt all the
resistance go out of her body, until every nerve relaxed and yielded.
When she drew her face back from his, it was white with fear.

“Let us go down, oh, my God! let us go down!” she muttered. And the
drunken stars up yonder seemed reeling to some appointed doom as she
clung to the rounds of the ladder. All that she was to know of love she
had left upon his lips.

“The devil is loose again,” whispered Olaf Oleson, as he saw Eric
dancing a moment later, his eyes blazing.

But Eric was thinking with an almost savage exultation of the time when
he should pay for this. Ah, there would be no quailing then! if ever a
soul went fearlessly, proudly down to the gates infernal, his should go.
For a moment he fancied he was there already, treading down the tempest
of flame, hugging the fiery hurricane to his breast. He wondered whether
in ages gone, all the countless years of sinning in which men had sold
and lost and flung their souls away, any man had ever so cheated Satan,
had ever bartered his soul for so great a price.

It seemed but a little while till dawn.

The carriage was brought to the door and Wyllis Elliot and his sister
said goodbye. She could not meet Eric's eyes as she gave him her hand,
but as he stood by the horse's head, just as the carriage moved off, she
gave him one swift glance that said, “I will not forget.” In a moment
the carriage was gone.

Eric changed his coat and plunged his head into the water tank and went
to the barn to hook up his team. As he led his horses to the door, a
shadow fell across his path, and he saw Skinner rising in his stirrups.
His rugged face was pale and worn with looking after his wayward flock,
with dragging men into the way of salvation.

“Good morning, Eric. There was a dance here last night?” he asked,
sternly.

“A dance? Oh, yes, a dance,” replied Eric, cheerfully.

“Certainly you did not dance, Eric?”

“Yes, I danced. I danced all the time.”

The minister's shoulders drooped, and an expression of profound
discouragement settled over his haggard face. There was almost anguish
in the yearning he felt for this soul.

“Eric, I didn't look for this from you. I thought God had set his mark
on you if he ever had on any man. And it is for things like this that
you set your soul back a thousand years from God. O foolish and perverse
generation!”

Eric drew himself up to his full height and looked off to where the new
day was gilding the corn-tassels and flooding the uplands with light.
As his nostrils drew in the breath of the dew and the morning, something
from the only poetry he had ever read flashed across his mind, and he
murmured, half to himself, with dreamy exultation:

“'And a day shall be as a thousand years, and a thousand years as a
day.'”




The Enchanted Bluff

We had our swim before sundown, and while we were cooking our supper the
oblique rays of light made a dazzling glare on the white sand about
us. The translucent red ball itself sank behind the brown stretches
of cornfield as we sat down to eat, and the warm layer of air that had
rested over the water and our clean sand bar grew fresher and smelled of
the rank ironweed and sunflowers growing on the flatter shore. The river
was brown and sluggish, like any other of the half-dozen streams that
water the Nebraska corn lands. On one shore was an irregular line of
bald clay bluffs where a few scrub oaks with thick trunks and flat,
twisted tops threw light shadows on the long grass. The western shore
was low and level, with cornfields that stretched to the skyline, and
all along the water's edge were little sandy coves and beaches where
slim cottonwoods and willow saplings flickered.

The turbulence of the river in springtime discouraged milling, and,
beyond keeping the old red bridge in repair, the busy farmers did not
concern themselves with the stream; so the Sandtown boys were left in
undisputed possession. In the autumn we hunted quail through the miles
of stubble and fodder land along the flat shore, and, after the winter
skating season was over and the ice had gone out, the spring freshets
and flooded bottoms gave us our great excitement of the year. The
channel was never the same for two successive seasons. Every spring the
swollen stream undermined a bluff to the east, or bit out a few acres of
cornfield to the west and whirled the soil away, to deposit it in spumy
mud banks somewhere else. When the water fell low in midsummer, new sand
bars were thus exposed to dry and whiten in the August sun. Sometimes
these were banked so firmly that the fury of the next freshet failed to
unseat them; the little willow seedlings emerged triumphantly from the
yellow froth, broke into spring leaf, shot up into summer growth, and
with their mesh of roots bound together the moist sand beneath them
against the batterings of another April. Here and there a cottonwood
soon glittered among them, quivering in the low current of air that,
even on breathless days when the dust hung like smoke above the wagon
road, trembled along the face of the water.

It was on such an island, in the third summer of its yellow green, that
we built our watch fire; not in the thicket of dancing willow wands, but
on the level terrace of fine sand which had been added that spring;
a little new bit of world, beautifully ridged with ripple marks, and
strewn with the tiny skeletons of turtles and fish, all as white and dry
as if they had been expertly cured. We had been careful not to mar the
freshness of the place, although we often swam to it on summer evenings
and lay on the sand to rest.

This was our last watch fire of the year, and there were reasons why I
should remember it better than any of the others. Next week the other
boys were to file back to their old places in the Sandtown High School,
but I was to go up to the Divide to teach my first country school in the
Norwegian district. I was already homesick at the thought of quitting
the boys with whom I had always played; of leaving the river, and going
up into a windy plain that was all windmills and cornfields and
big pastures; where there was nothing wilful or unmanageable in the
landscape, no new islands, and no chance of unfamiliar birds--such as
often followed the watercourses.

Other boys came and went and used the river for fishing or skating,
but we six were sworn to the spirit of the stream, and we were friends
mainly because of the river. There were the two Hassler boys, Fritz and
Otto, sons of the little German tailor. They were the youngest of us;
ragged boys of ten and twelve, with sunburned hair, weather-stained
faces, and pale blue eyes. Otto, the elder, was the best mathematician
in school, and clever at his books, but he always dropped out in the
spring term as if the river could not get on without him. He and Fritz
caught the fat, horned catfish and sold them about the town, and they
lived so much in the water that they were as brown and sandy as the
river itself.

There was Percy Pound, a fat, freckled boy with chubby cheeks, who took
half a dozen boys' story-papers and was always being kept in for reading
detective stories behind his desk. There was Tip Smith, destined by
his freckles and red hair to be the buffoon in all our games, though he
walked like a timid little old man and had a funny, cracked laugh. Tip
worked hard in his father's grocery store every afternoon, and swept it
out before school in the morning. Even his recreations were laborious.
He collected cigarette cards and tin tobacco-tags indefatigably, and
would sit for hours humped up over a snarling little scroll-saw which he
kept in his attic. His dearest possessions were some little pill bottles
that purported to contain grains of wheat from the Holy Land, water from
the Jordan and the Dead Sea, and earth from the Mount of Olives. His
father had bought these dull things from a Baptist missionary who
peddled them, and Tip seemed to derive great satisfaction from their
remote origin.

The tall boy was Arthur Adams. He had fine hazel eyes that were almost
too reflective and sympathetic for a boy, and such a pleasant voice that
we all loved to hear him read aloud. Even when he had to read poetry
aloud at school, no one ever thought of laughing. To be sure, he was
not at school very much of the time. He was seventeen and should
have finished the High School the year before, but he was always off
somewhere with his gun. Arthur's mother was dead, and his father, who
was feverishly absorbed in promoting schemes, wanted to send the boy
away to school and get him off his hands; but Arthur always begged off
for another year and promised to study. I remember him as a tall, brown
boy with an intelligent face, always lounging among a lot of us little
fellows, laughing at us oftener than with us, but such a soft, satisfied
laugh that we felt rather flattered when we provoked it. In after-years
people said that Arthur had been given to evil ways as a lad, and it is
true that we often saw him with the gambler's sons and with old Spanish
Fanny's boy, but if he learned anything ugly in their company he never
betrayed it to us. We would have followed Arthur anywhere, and I am
bound to say that he led us into no worse places than the cattail
marshes and the stubble fields. These, then, were the boys who camped
with me that summer night upon the sand bar.

After we finished our supper we beat the willow thicket for driftwood.
By the time we had collected enough, night had fallen, and the pungent,
weedy smell from the shore increased with the coolness. We threw
ourselves down about the fire and made another futile effort to show
Percy Pound the Little Dipper. We had tried it often before, but he
could never be got past the big one.

“You see those three big stars just below the handle, with the bright
one in the middle?” said Otto Hassler; “that's Orion's belt, and the
bright one is the clasp.” I crawled behind Otto's shoulder and sighted
up his arm to the star that seemed perched upon the tip of his steady
forefinger. The Hassler boys did seine-fishing at night, and they knew a
good many stars.

Percy gave up the Little Dipper and lay back on the sand, his hands
clasped under his head. “I can see the North Star,” he announced,
contentedly, pointing toward it with his big toe. “Anyone might get lost
and need to know that.”

We all looked up at it.

“How do you suppose Columbus felt when his compass didn't point north
any more?” Tip asked.

Otto shook his head. “My father says that there was another North Star
once, and that maybe this one won't last always. I wonder what would
happen to us down here if anything went wrong with it?”

Arthur chuckled. “I wouldn't worry, Ott. Nothing's apt to happen to it
in your time. Look at the Milky Way! There must be lots of good dead
Indians.”

We lay back and looked, meditating, at the dark cover of the world. The
gurgle of the water had become heavier. We had often noticed a mutinous,
complaining note in it at night, quite different from its cheerful
daytime chuckle, and seeming like the voice of a much deeper and more
powerful stream. Our water had always these two moods: the one of sunny
complaisance, the other of inconsolable, passionate regret.

“Queer how the stars are all in sort of diagrams,” remarked Otto. “You
could do most any proposition in geometry with 'em. They always look
as if they meant something. Some folks say everybody's fortune is all
written out in the stars, don't they?”

“They believe so in the old country,” Fritz affirmed.

But Arthur only laughed at him. “You're thinking of Napoleon, Fritzey.
He had a star that went out when he began to lose battles. I guess the
stars don't keep any close tally on Sandtown folks.”

We were speculating on how many times we could count a hundred before
the evening star went down behind the cornfields, when someone cried,
“There comes the moon, and it's as big as a cart wheel!”

We all jumped up to greet it as it swam over the bluffs behind us. It
came up like a galleon in full sail; an enormous, barbaric thing, red as
an angry heathen god.

“When the moon came up red like that, the Aztecs used to sacrifice their
prisoners on the temple top,” Percy announced.

“Go on, Perce. You got that out of _Golden Days_. Do you believe that,
Arthur?” I appealed.

Arthur answered, quite seriously: “Like as not. The moon was one of
their gods. When my father was in Mexico City he saw the stone where
they used to sacrifice their prisoners.”

As we dropped down by the fire again some one asked whether the
Mound-Builders were older than the Aztecs. When we once got upon the
Mound-Builders we never willingly got away from them, and we were still
conjecturing when we heard a loud splash in the water.

“Must have been a big cat jumping,” said Fritz. “They do sometimes. They
must see bugs in the dark. Look what a track the moon makes!”

There was a long, silvery streak on the water, and where the current
fretted over a big log it boiled up like gold pieces.

“Suppose there ever _was_ any gold hid away in this old river?” Fritz
asked. He lay like a little brown Indian, close to the fire, his chin on
his hand and his bare feet in the air. His brother laughed at him, but
Arthur took his suggestion seriously.

“Some of the Spaniards thought there was gold up here somewhere. Seven
cities chuck full of gold, they had it, and Coronado and his men came up
to hunt it. The Spaniards were all over this country once.”

Percy looked interested. “Was that before the Mormons went through?”

We all laughed at this.

“Long enough before. Before the Pilgrim Fathers, Perce. Maybe they came
along this very river. They always followed the watercourses.”

“I wonder where this river really does begin?” Tip mused. That was an
old and a favorite mystery which the map did not clearly explain. On the
map the little black line stopped somewhere in western Kansas; but since
rivers generally rose in mountains, it was only reasonable to suppose
that ours came from the Rockies. Its destination, we knew, was the
Missouri, and the Hassler boys always maintained that we could embark
at Sandtown in floodtime, follow our noses, and eventually arrive at
New Orleans. Now they took up their old argument. “If us boys had grit
enough to try it, it wouldn't take no time to get to Kansas City and St.
Joe.”

We began to talk about the places we wanted to go to. The Hassler boys
wanted to see the stockyards in Kansas City, and Percy wanted to see
a big store in Chicago. Arthur was interlocutor and did not betray
himself.

“Now it's your turn, Tip.”

Tip rolled over on his elbow and poked the fire, and his eyes looked
shyly out of his queer, tight little face. “My place is awful far away.
My Uncle Bill told me about it.”

Tip's Uncle Bill was a wanderer, bitten with mining fever, who had
drifted into Sandtown with a broken arm, and when it was well had
drifted out again.

“Where is it?”

“Aw, it's down in New Mexico somewheres. There aren't no railroads or
anything. You have to go on mules, and you run out of water before you
get there and have to drink canned tomatoes.”

“Well, go on, kid. What's it like when you do get there?”

Tip sat up and excitedly began his story.

“There's a big red rock there that goes right up out of the sand for
about nine hundred feet. The country's flat all around it, and this here
rock goes up all by itself, like a monument. They call it the Enchanted
Bluff down there, because no white man has ever been on top of it. The
sides are smooth rock, and straight up, like a wall. The Indians say
that hundreds of years ago, before the Spaniards came, there was a
village away up there in the air. The tribe that lived there had some
sort of steps, made out of wood and bark, bung down over the face of the
bluff, and the braves went down to hunt and carried water up in big jars
swung on their backs. They kept a big supply of water and dried meat up
there, and never went down except to hunt. They were a peaceful tribe
that made cloth and pottery, and they went up there to get out of the
wars. You see, they could pick off any war party that tried to get up
their little steps. The Indians say they were a handsome people, and
they had some sort of queer religion. Uncle Bill thinks they were
Cliff-Dwellers who had got into trouble and left home. They weren't
fighters, anyhow.

“One time the braves were down hunting and an awful storm came up--a
kind of waterspout--and when they got back to their rock they found
their little staircase had been all broken to pieces, and only a few
steps were left hanging away up in the air. While they were camped at
the foot of the rock, wondering what to do, a war party from the north
came along and massacred 'em to a man, with all the old folks and women
looking on from the rock. Then the war party went on south and left the
village to get down the best way they could. Of course they never got
down. They starved to death up there, and when the war party came back
on their way north, they could hear the children crying from the edge
of the bluff where they had crawled out, but they didn't see a sign of a
grown Indian, and nobody has ever been up there since.”

We exclaimed at this dolorous legend and sat up.

“There couldn't have been many people up there,” Percy demurred. “How
big is the top, Tip?”

“Oh, pretty big. Big enough so that the rock doesn't look nearly as tall
as it is. The top's bigger than the base. The bluff is sort of worn away
for several hundred feet up. That's one reason it's so hard to climb.”

I asked how the Indians got up, in the first place.

“Nobody knows how they got up or when. A hunting party came along once
and saw that there was a town up there, and that was all.”

Otto rubbed his chin and looked thoughtful. “Of course there must be
some way to get up there. Couldn't people get a rope over someway and
pull a ladder up?”

Tip's little eyes were shining with excitement. “I know a way. Me and
Uncle Bill talked it over. There's a kind of rocket that would take a
rope over--lifesavers use 'em--and then you could hoist a rope ladder
and peg it down at the bottom and make it tight with guy ropes on the
other side. I'm going to climb that there bluff, and I've got it all
planned out.”

Fritz asked what he expected to find when he got up there.

“Bones, maybe, or the ruins of their town, or pottery, or some of their
idols. There might be 'most anything up there. Anyhow, I want to see.”

“Sure nobody else has been up there, Tip?” Arthur asked.

“Dead sure. Hardly anybody ever goes down there. Some hunters tried to
cut steps in the rock once, but they didn't get higher than a man can
reach. The Bluff's all red granite, and Uncle Bill thinks it's a boulder
the glaciers left. It's a queer place, anyhow. Nothing but cactus and
desert for hundreds of miles, and yet right under the Bluff there's good
water and plenty of grass. That's why the bison used to go down there.”

Suddenly we heard a scream above our fire, and jumped up to see a dark,
slim bird floating southward far above us--a whooping crane, we knew by
her cry and her long neck. We ran to the edge of the island, hoping we
might see her alight, but she wavered southward along the rivercourse
until we lost her. The Hassler boys declared that by the look of the
heavens it must be after midnight, so we threw more wood on our fire,
put on our jackets, and curled down in the warm sand. Several of us
pretended to doze, but I fancy we were really thinking about Tip's Bluff
and the extinct people. Over in the wood the ring doves were calling
mournfully to one another, and once we heard a dog bark, far away.
“Somebody getting into old Tommy's melon patch,” Fritz murmured
sleepily, but nobody answered him. By and by Percy spoke out of the
shadows.

“Say, Tip, when you go down there will you take me with you?”

“Maybe.”

“Suppose one of us beats you down there, Tip?”

“Whoever gets to the Bluff first has got to promise to tell the rest of
us exactly what he finds,” remarked one of the Hassler boys, and to this
we all readily assented.

Somewhat reassured, I dropped off to sleep. I must have dreamed about a
race for the Bluff, for I awoke in a kind of fear that other people were
getting ahead of me and that I was losing my chance. I sat up in my
damp clothes and looked at the other boys, who lay tumbled in uneasy
attitudes about the dead fire. It was still dark, but the sky was blue
with the last wonderful azure of night. The stars glistened like crystal
globes, and trembled as if they shone through a depth of clear water.
Even as I watched, they began to pale and the sky brightened. Day came
suddenly, almost instantaneously. I turned for another look at the blue
night, and it was gone. Everywhere the birds began to call, and all
manner of little insects began to chirp and hop about in the willows.
A breeze sprang up from the west and brought the heavy smell of ripened
corn. The boys rolled over and shook themselves. We stripped and plunged
into the river just as the sun came up over the windy bluffs.

When I came home to Sandtown at Christmas time, we skated out to
our island and talked over the whole project of the Enchanted Bluff,
renewing our resolution to find it.


Although that was twenty years ago, none of us have ever climbed the
Enchanted Bluff. Percy Pound is a stockbroker in Kansas City and will go
nowhere that his red touring car cannot carry him. Otto Hassler went
on the railroad and lost his foot braking; after which he and Fritz
succeeded their father as the town tailors.

Arthur sat about the sleepy little town all his life--he died before he
was twenty-five. The last time I saw him, when I was home on one of my
college vacations, he was sitting in a steamer chair under a cottonwood
tree in the little yard behind one of the two Sandtown saloons. He was
very untidy and his hand was not steady, but when he rose, unabashed,
to greet me, his eyes were as clear and warm as ever. When I had talked
with him for an hour and heard him laugh again, I wondered how it was
that when Nature had taken such pains with a man, from his hands to the
arch of his long foot, she had ever lost him in Sandtown. He joked about
Tip Smith's Bluff, and declared he was going down there just as soon
as the weather got cooler; he thought the Grand Canyon might be worth
while, too.

I was perfectly sure when I left him that he would never get beyond
the high plank fence and the comfortable shade of the cottonwood. And,
indeed, it was under that very tree that he died one summer morning.

Tip Smith still talks about going to New Mexico. He married
a slatternly, unthrifty country girl, has been much tied to a
perambulator, and has grown stooped and grey from irregular meals and
broken sleep. But the worst of his difficulties are now over, and he
has, as he says, come into easy water. When I was last in Sandtown I
walked home with him late one moonlight night, after he had balanced his
cash and shut up his store. We took the long way around and sat down on
the schoolhouse steps, and between us we quite revived the romance of
the lone red rock and the extinct people. Tip insists that he still
means to go down there, but he thinks now he will wait until his boy
Bert is old enough to go with him. Bert has been let into the story, and
thinks of nothing but the Enchanted Bluff.






The Bohemian Girl

The transcontinental express swung along the windings of the Sand River
Valley, and in the rear seat of the observation car a young man sat
greatly at his ease, not in the least discomfited by the fierce sunlight
which beat in upon his brown face and neck and strong back. There was
a look of relaxation and of great passivity about his broad shoulders,
which seemed almost too heavy until he stood up and squared them. He
wore a pale flannel shirt and a blue silk necktie with loose ends. His
trousers were wide and belted at the waist, and his short sack coat hung
open. His heavy shoes had seen good service. His reddish-brown hair,
like his clothes, had a foreign cut. He had deep-set, dark blue eyes
under heavy reddish eyebrows. His face was kept clean only by close
shaving, and even the sharpest razor left a glint of yellow in the
smooth brown of his skin. His teeth and the palms of his hands were very
white. His head, which looked hard and stubborn, lay indolently in the
green cushion of the wicker chair, and as he looked out at the ripe
summer country a teasing, not unkindly smile played over his lips.
Once, as he basked thus comfortably, a quick light flashed in his eyes,
curiously dilating the pupils, and his mouth became a hard, straight
line, gradually relaxing into its former smile of rather kindly mockery.
He told himself, apparently, that there was no point in getting excited;
and he seemed a master hand at taking his ease when he could. Neither
the sharp whistle of the locomotive nor the brakeman's call disturbed
him. It was not until after the train had stopped that he rose, put on
a Panama hat, took from the rack a small valise and a flute case, and
stepped deliberately to the station platform. The baggage was already
unloaded, and the stranger presented a check for a battered sole-leather
steamer trunk.

“Can you keep it here for a day or two?” he asked the agent. “I may send
for it, and I may not.”

“Depends on whether you like the country, I suppose?” demanded the agent
in a challenging tone.

“Just so.”

The agent shrugged his shoulders, looked scornfully at the small trunk,
which was marked “N.E.,” and handed out a claim check without further
comment. The stranger watched him as he caught one end of the trunk and
dragged it into the express room. The agent's manner seemed to remind
him of something amusing. “Doesn't seem to be a very big place,” he
remarked, looking about.

“It's big enough for us,” snapped the agent, as he banged the trunk into
a corner.

That remark, apparently, was what Nils Ericson had wanted. He chuckled
quietly as he took a leather strap from his pocket and swung his valise
around his shoulder. Then he settled his Panama securely on his head,
turned up his trousers, tucked the flute case under his arm, and started
off across the fields. He gave the town, as he would have said, a wide
berth, and cut through a great fenced pasture, emerging, when he rolled
under the barbed wire at the farther corner, upon a white dusty road
which ran straight up from the river valley to the high prairies, where
the ripe wheat stood yellow and the tin roofs and weathercocks were
twinkling in the fierce sunlight. By the time Nils had done three miles,
the sun was sinking and the farm wagons on their way home from town came
rattling by, covering him with dust and making him sneeze. When one of
the farmers pulled up and offered to give him a lift, he clambered in
willingly. The driver was a thin, grizzled old man with a long lean
neck and a foolish sort of beard, like a goat's. “How fur ye goin'?” he
asked, as he clucked to his horses and started off.

“Do you go by the Ericson place?”

“Which Ericson?” The old man drew in his reins as if he expected to stop
again.

“Preacher Ericson's.”

“Oh, the Old Lady Ericson's!” He turned and looked at Nils. “La, me! If
you're goin' out there you might a' rid out in the automobile. That's a
pity, now. The Old Lady Ericson was in town with her auto. You might 'a'
heard it snortin' anywhere about the post-office er the butcher shop.”

“Has she a motor?” asked the stranger absently.

“'Deed an' she has! She runs into town every night about this time for
her mail and meat for supper. Some folks say she's afraid her auto won't
get exercise enough, but I say that's jealousy.”

“Aren't there any other motors about here?”

“Oh, yes! we have fourteen in all. But nobody else gets around like
the Old Lady Ericson. She's out, rain er shine, over the whole county,
chargin' into town and out amongst her farms, an' up to her sons'
places. Sure you ain't goin' to the wrong place?” He craned his neck and
looked at Nils' flute case with eager curiosity. “The old woman ain't
got any piany that I knows on. Olaf, he has a grand. His wife's musical:
took lessons in Chicago.”

“I'm going up there tomorrow,” said Nils imperturbably. He saw that the
driver took him for a piano tuner.

“Oh, I see!” The old man screwed up his eyes mysteriously. He was a
little dashed by the stranger's noncommunicativeness, but he soon broke
out again.

“I'm one o' Miss Ericson's tenants. Look after one of her places. I did
own the place myself once, but I lost it a while back, in the bad years
just after the World's Fair. Just as well, too, I say. Lets you out o'
payin' taxes. The Ericsons do own most of the county now. I remember
the old preacher's favorite text used to be, 'To them that hath shall be
given.' They've spread something wonderful--run over this here country
like bindweed. But I ain't one that begretches it to 'em. Folks is
entitled to what they kin git; and they're hustlers. Olaf, he's in the
Legislature now, and a likely man fur Congress. Listen, if that ain't
the old woman comin' now. Want I should stop her?”

Nils shook his head. He heard the deep chug-chug of a motor vibrating
steadily in the clear twilight behind them. The pale lights of the car
swam over the hill, and the old man slapped his reins and turned clear
out of the road, ducking his head at the first of three angry snorts
from behind. The motor was running at a hot, even speed, and passed
without turning an inch from its course. The driver was a stalwart woman
who sat at ease in the front seat and drove her car bareheaded. She left
a cloud of dust and a trail of gasoline behind her. Her tenant threw
back his head and sneezed.

“Whew! I sometimes say I'd as lief be _before_ Mrs. Ericson as behind
her. She does beat all! Nearly seventy, and never lets another soul
touch that car. Puts it into commission herself every morning, and keeps
it tuned up by the hitch-bar all day. I never stop work for a drink
o' water that I don't hear her a-churnin' up the road. I reckon her
darter-in-laws never sets down easy nowadays. Never know when she'll pop
in. Mis' Otto, she says to me: 'We're so afraid that thing'll blow up
and do Ma some injury yet, she's so turrible venturesome.' Says I: 'I
wouldn't stew, Mis' Otto; the old lady'll drive that car to the funeral
of every darter-in-law she's got.' That was after the old woman had
jumped a turrible bad culvert.”

The stranger heard vaguely what the old man was saying. Just now he was
experiencing something very much like homesickness, and he was wondering
what had brought it about. The mention of a name or two, perhaps;
the rattle of a wagon along a dusty road; the rank, resinous smell of
sunflowers and ironweed, which the night damp brought up from the draws
and low places; perhaps, more than all, the dancing lights of the motor
that had plunged by. He squared his shoulders with a comfortable sense
of strength.

The wagon, as it jolted westward, climbed a pretty steady up-grade. The
country, receding from the rough river valley, swelled more and more
gently, as if it had been smoothed out by the wind. On one of the last
of the rugged ridges, at the end of a branch road, stood a grim square
house with a tin roof and double porches. Behind the house stretched a
row of broken, wind-racked poplars, and down the hill slope to the left
straggled the sheds and stables. The old man stopped his horses where
the Ericsons' road branched across a dry sand creek that wound about the
foot of the hill.

“That's the old lady's place. Want I should drive in?” “No, thank you.
I'll roll out here. Much obliged to you. Good night.”

His passenger stepped down over the front wheel, and the old man drove
on reluctantly, looking back as if he would like to see how the stranger
would be received.

As Nils was crossing the dry creek he heard the restive tramp of a horse
coming toward him down the hill. Instantly he flashed out of the road
and stood behind a thicket of wild plum bushes that grew in the sandy
bed. Peering through the dusk, he saw a light horse, under tight
rein, descending the hill at a sharp walk. The rider was a slender
woman--barely visible against the dark hillside--wearing an
old-fashioned derby hat and a long riding skirt. She sat lightly in the
saddle, with her chin high, and seemed to be looking into the distance.
As she passed the plum thicket her horse snuffed the air and shied.
She struck him, pulling him in sharply, with an angry exclamation,
_“Blazne!”_ in Bohemian. Once in the main road, she let him out into
a lope, and they soon emerged upon the crest of high land, where they
moved along the skyline, silhouetted against the band of faint colour
that lingered in the west. This horse and rider, with their free,
rhythmical gallop, were the only moving things to be seen on the face of
the flat country. They seemed, in the last sad light of evening, not to
be there accidentally, but as an inevitable detail of the landscape.

Nils watched them until they had shrunk to a mere moving speck against
the sky, then he crossed the sand creek and climbed the hill. When
he reached the gate the front of the house was dark, but a light was
shining from the side windows. The pigs were squealing in the hog
corral, and Nils could see a tall boy, who carried two big wooden
buckets, moving about among them. Halfway between the barn and the
house, the windmill wheezed lazily. Following the path that ran around
to the back porch, Nils stopped to look through the screen door into
the lamplit kitchen. The kitchen was the largest room in the house; Nils
remembered that his older brothers used to give dances there when he was
a boy. Beside the stove stood a little girl with two light yellow braids
and a broad, flushed face, peering anxiously into a frying pan. In the
dining-room beyond, a large, broad-shouldered woman was moving about the
table. She walked with an active, springy step. Her face was heavy and
florid, almost without wrinkles, and her hair was black at seventy.
Nils felt proud of her as he watched her deliberate activity; never a
momentary hesitation, or a movement that did not tell. He waited until
she came out into the kitchen and, brushing the child aside, took her
place at the stove. Then he tapped on the screen door and entered.

“It's nobody but Nils, Mother. I expect you weren't looking for me.”

Mrs. Ericson turned away from the stove and stood staring at him. “Bring
the lamp, Hilda, and let me look.”

Nils laughed and unslung his valise. “What's the matter, Mother? Don't
you know me?”

Mrs. Ericson put down the lamp. “You must be Nils. You don't look very
different, anyway.”

“Nor you, Mother. You hold your own. Don't you wear glasses yet?”

“Only to read by. Where's your trunk, Nils?”

“Oh, I left that in town. I thought it might not be convenient for you
to have company so near threshing-time.”

“Don't be foolish, Nils.” Mrs. Ericson turned back to the stove. “I
don't thresh now. I hitched the wheat land onto the next farm and have
a tenant. Hilda, take some hot water up to the company room, and go call
little Eric.”

The tow-haired child, who had been standing in mute amazement, took up
the tea-kettle and withdrew, giving Nils a long, admiring look from the
door of the kitchen stairs.

“Who's the youngster?” Nils asked, dropping down on the bench behind the
kitchen stove.

“One of your Cousin Henrik's.”

“How long has Cousin Henrik been dead?”

“Six years. There are two boys. One stays with Peter and one with
Anders. Olaf is their guardeen.”

There was a clatter of pails on the porch, and a tall, lanky boy peered
wonderingly in through the screen door. He had a fair, gentle face and
big grey eyes, and wisps of soft yellow hair hung down under his cap.
Nils sprang up and pulled him into the kitchen, hugging him and slapping
him on the shoulders. “Well, if it isn't my kid! Look at the size of
him! Don't you know me, Eric?”

The boy reddened tinder his sunburn and freckles, and hung his head. “I
guess it's Nils,” he said shyly.

“You're a good guesser,” laughed Nils giving the lad's hand a swing. To
himself he was thinking: “That's why the little girl looked so friendly.
He's taught her to like me. He was only six when I went away, and he's
remembered for twelve years.”

Eric stood fumbling with his cap and smiling. “You look just like I
thought you would,” he ventured.

“Go wash your hands, Eric,” called Mrs. Ericson. “I've got cob corn for
supper, Nils. You used to like it. I guess you don't get much of that in
the old country. Here's Hilda; she'll take you up to your room. You'll
want to get the dust off you before you eat.”

Mrs. Ericson went into the dining-room to lay another plate, and the
little girl came up and nodded to Nils as if to let him know that his
room was ready. He put out his hand and she took it, with a startled
glance up at his face. Little Eric dropped his towel, threw an arm about
Nils and one about Hilda, gave them a clumsy squeeze, and then stumbled
out to the porch.

During supper Nils heard exactly how much land each of his eight grown
brothers farmed, how their crops were coming on, and how much livestock
they were feeding. His mother watched him narrowly as she talked.
“You've got better looking, Nils,” she remarked abruptly, whereupon he
grinned and the children giggled. Eric, although he was eighteen and as
tall as Nils, was always accounted a child, being the last of so many
sons. His face seemed childlike, too, Nils thought, and he had the open,
wandering eyes of a little boy. All the others had been men at his age.

After supper Nils went out to the front porch and sat down on the step
to smoke a pipe. Mrs. Ericson drew a rocking-chair up near him and began
to knit busily. It was one of the few Old World customs she had kept up,
for she could not bear to sit with idle hands.

“Where's little Eric, Mother?”

“He's helping Hilda with the dishes. He does it of his own will; I don't
like a boy to be too handy about the house.”

“He seems like a nice kid.”

“He's very obedient.”

Nils smiled a little in the dark. It was just as well to shift the line
of conversation. “What are you knitting there, Mother?”

“Baby stockings. The boys keep me busy.” Mrs. Ericson chuckled and
clicked her needles.

“How many grandchildren have you?”

“Only thirty-one now. Olaf lost his three. They were sickly, like their
mother.”

“I supposed he had a second crop by this time!”

“His second wife has no children. She's too proud. She tears about on
horseback all the time. But she'll get caught up with, yet. She sets
herself very high, though nobody knows what for. They were low enough
Bohemians she came of. I never thought much of Bohemians; always
drinking.”

Nils puffed away at his pipe in silence, and Mrs. Ericson knitted on. In
a few moments she added grimly: “She was down here tonight, just before
you came. She'd like to quarrel with me and come between me and Olaf,
but I don't give her the chance. I suppose you'll be bringing a wife
home some day.”

“I don't know. I've never thought much about it.”

“Well, perhaps it's best as it is,” suggested Mrs. Ericson hopefully.
“You'd never be contented tied down to the land. There was roving blood
in your father's family, and it's come out in you. I expect your own
way of life suits you best.” Mrs. Ericson had dropped into a blandly
agreeable tone which Nils well remembered. It seemed to amuse him a
good deal and his white teeth flashed behind his pipe. His mother's
strategies had always diverted him, even when he was a boy--they were so
flimsy and patent, so illy proportioned to her vigor and force. “They've
been waiting to see which way I'd jump,” he reflected. He felt that Mrs.
Ericson was pondering his case deeply as she sat clicking her needles.

“I don't suppose you've ever got used to steady work,” she went on
presently. “Men ain't apt to if they roam around too long. It's a pity
you didn't come back the year after the World's Fair. Your father picked
up a good bit of land cheap then, in the hard times, and I expect maybe
he'd have give you a farm, it's too bad you put off comin' back so long,
for I always thought he meant to do something by you.”

Nils laughed and shook the ashes out of his pipe. “I'd have missed a lot
if I had come back then. But I'm sorry I didn't get back to see father.”

“Well, I suppose we have to miss things at one end or the other. Perhaps
you are as well satisfied with your own doings, now, as you'd have been
with a farm,” said Mrs. Ericson reassuringly.

“Land's a good thing to have,” Nils commented, as he lit another match
and sheltered it with his hand.

His mother looked sharply at his face until the match burned out. “Only
when you stay on it!” she hastened to say.

Eric came round the house by the path just then, and Nils rose, with a
yawn. “Mother, if you don't mind, Eric and I will take a little tramp
before bedtime. It will make me sleep.”

“Very well; only don't stay long. I'll sit up and wait for you. I like
to lock up myself.”

Nils put his hand on Eric's shoulder, and the two tramped down the hill
and across the sand creek into the dusty highroad beyond. Neither spoke.
They swung along at an even gait, Nils puffing at his pipe. There was no
moon, and the white road and the wide fields lay faint in the starlight.
Over everything was darkness and thick silence, and the smell of dust
and sunflowers. The brothers followed the road for a mile or more
without finding a place to sit down. Finally, Nils perched on a stile
over the wire fence, and Eric sat on the lower step.

“I began to think you never would come back, Nils,” said the boy softly.

“Didn't I promise you I would?”

“Yes; but people don't bother about promises they make to babies. Did
you really know you were going away for good when you went to Chicago
with the cattle that time?”

“I thought it very likely, if I could make my way.”

“I don't see how you did it, Nils. Not many fellows could.” Eric rubbed
his shoulder against his brother's knee.

“The hard thing was leaving home you and father. It was easy enough,
once I got beyond Chicago. Of course I got awful homesick; used to cry
myself to sleep. But I'd burned my bridges.”

“You had always wanted to go, hadn't you?”

“Always. Do you still sleep in our little room? Is that cottonwood still
by the window?”

Eric nodded eagerly and smiled up at his brother in the grey darkness.

“You remember how we always said the leaves were whispering when they
rustled at night? Well, they always whispered to me about the sea.
Sometimes they said names out of the geography books. In a high wind
they had a desperate sound, like someone trying to tear loose.”

“How funny, Nils,” said Eric dreamily, resting his chin on his hand.
“That tree still talks like that, and 'most always it talks to me about
you.”

They sat a while longer, watching the stars. At last Eric whispered
anxiously: “Hadn't we better go back now? Mother will get tired waiting
for us.” They rose and took a short cut home, through the pasture.


                           II

The next morning Nils woke with the first flood of light that came with
dawn. The white-plastered walls of his room reflected the glare that
shone through the thin window shades, and he found it impossible to
sleep. He dressed hurriedly and slipped down the hall and up the back
stairs to the half-story room which he used to share with his little
brother. Eric, in a skimpy nightshirt, was sitting on the edge of the
bed, rubbing his eyes, his pale yellow hair standing up in tufts all
over his head. When he saw Nils, he murmured something confusedly and
hustled his long legs into his trousers. “I didn't expect you'd be up so
early, Nils,” he said, as his head emerged from his blue shirt.

“Oh, you thought I was a dude, did you?” Nils gave him a playful tap
which bent the tall boy up like a clasp knife. “See here: I must teach
you to box.” Nils thrust his hands into his pockets and walked about.
“You haven't changed things much up here. Got most of my old traps,
haven't you?”

He took down a bent, withered piece of sapling that hung over the
dresser. “If this isn't the stick Lou Sandberg killed himself with!”

The boy looked up from his shoe-lacing.

“Yes; you never used to let me play with that. Just how did he do it,
Nils? You were with father when he found Lou, weren't you?”

“Yes. Father was going off to preach somewhere, and, as we drove along,
Lou's place looked sort of forlorn, and we thought we'd stop and cheer
him up. When we found him father said he'd been dead a couple days. He'd
tied a piece of binding twine round his neck, made a noose in each end,
fixed the nooses over the ends of a bent stick, and let the stick spring
straight; strangled himself.”

“What made him kill himself such a silly way?”

The simplicity of the boy's question set Nils laughing. He clapped
little Eric on the shoulder. “What made him such a silly as to kill
himself at all, I should say!”

“Oh, well! But his hogs had the cholera, and all up and died on him,
didn't they?”

“Sure they did; but he didn't have cholera; and there were plenty of
hogs left in the world, weren't there?”

“Well, but, if they weren't his, how could they do him any good?” Eric
asked, in astonishment.

“Oh, scat! He could have had lots of fun with other people's hogs. He
was a chump, Lou Sandberg. To kill yourself for a pig--think of that,
now!” Nils laughed all the way downstairs, and quite embarrassed little
Eric, who fell to scrubbing his face and hands at the tin basin. While
he was parting his wet hair at the kitchen looking glass, a heavy tread
sounded on the stairs. The boy dropped his comb. “Gracious, there's
Mother. We must have talked too long.” He hurried out to the shed,
slipped on his overalls, and disappeared with the milking pails.

Mrs. Ericson came in, wearing a clean white apron, her black hair
shining from the application of a wet brush.

“Good morning, Mother. Can't I make the fire for you?”

“No, thank you, Nils. It's no trouble to make a cob fire, and I like to
manage the kitchen stove myself” Mrs. Ericson paused with a shovel full
of ashes in her hand. “I expect you will be wanting to see your brothers
as soon as possible. I'll take you up to Anders' place this morning.
He's threshing, and most of our boys are over there.”

“Will Olaf be there?”

Mrs. Ericson went on taking out the ashes, and spoke between shovels.
“No; Olaf's wheat is all in, put away in his new barn. He got six
thousand bushel this year. He's going to town today to get men to finish
roofing his barn.”

“So Olaf is building a new barn?” Nils asked absently.

“Biggest one in the county, and almost done. You'll likely be here for
the barn-raising. He's going to have a supper and a dance as soon as
everybody's done threshing. Says it keeps the voters in good humour. I
tell him that's all nonsense; but Olaf has a head for politics.”

“Does Olaf farm all Cousin Henrik's land?”

Mrs. Ericson frowned as she blew into the faint smoke curling up about
the cobs. “Yes; he holds it in trust for the children, Hilda and her
brothers. He keeps strict account of everything he raises on it, and
puts the proceeds out at compound interest for them.”

Nils smiled as he watched the little flames shoot up. The door of the
back stairs opened, and Hilda emerged, her arms behind her, buttoning
up her long gingham apron as she came. He nodded to her gaily, and she
twinkled at him out of her little blue eyes, set far apart over her wide
cheekbones.

“There, Hilda, you grind the coffee--and just put in an extra handful;
I expect your Cousin Nils likes his strong,” said Mrs. Ericson, as she
went out to the shed.

Nils turned to look at the little girl, who gripped the coffee grinder
between her knees and ground so hard that her two braids bobbed and her
face flushed under its broad spattering of freckles. He noticed on her
middle finger something that had not been there last night, and that had
evidently been put on for company: a tiny gold ring with a clumsily set
garnet stone. As her hand went round and round he touched the ring with
the tip of his finger, smiling.

Hilda glanced toward the shed door through which Mrs. Ericson had
disappeared. “My Cousin Clara gave me that,” she whispered bashfully.
“She's Cousin Olaf's wife.”


                           III

Mrs. Olaf Ericson--Clara Vavrika, as many people still called her--was
moving restlessly about her big bare house that morning. Her husband had
left for the county town before his wife was out of bed--her lateness
in rising was one of the many things the Ericson family had against her.
Clara seldom came downstairs before eight o'clock, and this morning
she was even later, for she had dressed with unusual care. She put
on, however, only a tight-fitting black dress, which people thereabouts
thought very plain. She was a tall, dark woman of thirty, with a rather
sallow complexion and a touch of dull salmon red in her cheeks, where
the blood seemed to burn under her brown skin. Her hair, parted evenly
above her low forehead, was so black that there were distinctly blue
lights in it. Her black eyebrows were delicate half-moons and her lashes
were long and heavy. Her eyes slanted a little, as if she had a strain
of Tartar or gypsy blood, and were sometimes full of fiery determination
and sometimes dull and opaque. Her expression was never altogether
amiable; was often, indeed, distinctly sullen, or, when she was
animated, sarcastic. She was most attractive in profile, for then one
saw to advantage her small, well-shaped head and delicate ears, and felt
at once that here was a very positive, if not an altogether pleasing,
personality.

The entire management of Mrs. Olaf's household devolved upon her aunt,
Johanna Vavrika, a superstitious, doting woman of fifty. When Clara
was a little girl her mother died, and Johanna's life had been spent
in ungrudging service to her niece. Clara, like many self-willed and
discontented persons, was really very apt, without knowing it, to do
as other people told her, and to let her destiny be decided for her
by intelligences much below her own. It was her Aunt Johanna who had
humoured and spoiled her in her girlhood, who had got her off to Chicago
to study piano, and who had finally persuaded her to marry Olaf Ericson
as the best match she would be likely to make in that part of the
country. Johanna Vavrika had been deeply scarred by smallpox in the old
country. She was short and fat, homely and jolly and sentimental.
She was so broad, and took such short steps when she walked, that her
brother, Joe Vavrika, always called her his duck. She adored her niece
because of her talent, because of her good looks and masterful ways, but
most of all because of her selfishness.

Clara's marriage with Olaf Ericson was Johanna's particular triumph. She
was inordinately proud of Olaf's position, and she found a sufficiently
exciting career in managing Clara's house, in keeping it above the
criticism of the Ericsons, in pampering Olaf to keep him from finding
fault with his wife, and in concealing from every one Clara's domestic
infelicities. While Clara slept of a morning, Johanna Vavrika was
bustling about, seeing that Olaf and the men had their breakfast, and
that the cleaning or the butter-making or the washing was properly begun
by the two girls in the kitchen. Then, at about eight o'clock, she would
take Clara's coffee up to her, and chat with her while she drank it,
telling her what was going on in the house. Old Mrs. Ericson frequently
said that her daughter-in-law would not know what day of the week it
was if Johanna did not tell her every morning. Mrs. Ericson despised and
pitied Johanna, but did not wholly dislike her. The one thing she hated
in her daughter-in-law above everything else was the way in which Clara
could come it over people. It enraged her that the affairs of her son's
big, barnlike house went on as well as they did, and she used to feel
that in this world we have to wait overlong to see the guilty punished.
“Suppose Johanna Vavrika died or got sick?” the old lady used to say to
Olaf. “Your wife wouldn't know where to look for her own dish-cloth.”
 Olaf only shrugged his shoulders. The fact remained that Johanna did not
die, and, although Mrs. Ericson often told her she was looking poorly,
she was never ill. She seldom left the house, and she slept in a little
room off the kitchen. No Ericson, by night or day, could come prying
about there to find fault without her knowing it. Her one weakness was
that she was an incurable talker, and she sometimes made trouble without
meaning to.

This morning Clara was tying a wine-coloured ribbon about her throat
when Johanna appeared with her coffee. After putting the tray on a
sewing table, she began to make Clara's bed, chattering the while in
Bohemian.

“Well, Olaf got off early, and the girls are baking. I'm going down
presently to make some poppy-seed bread for Olaf. He asked for prune
preserves at breakfast, and I told him I was out of them, and to bring
some prunes and honey and cloves from town.”

Clara poured her coffee. “Ugh! I don't see how men can eat so much sweet
stuff. In the morning, too!”

Her aunt chuckled knowingly. “Bait a bear with honey, as we say in the
old country.”

“Was he cross?” her niece asked indifferently.

“Olaf? Oh, no! He was in fine spirits. He's never cross if you know how
to take him. I never knew a man to make so little fuss about bills. I
gave him a list of things to get a yard long, and he didn't say a word;
just folded it up and put it in his pocket.”

“I can well believe he didn't say a word,” Clara remarked with a shrug.
“Some day he'll forget how to talk.”

“Oh, but they say he's a grand speaker in the Legislature. He knows
when to keep quiet. That's why he's got such influence in politics. The
people have confidence in him.” Johanna beat up a pillow and held it
under her fat chin while she slipped on the case. Her niece laughed.

“Maybe we could make people believe we were wise, Aunty, if we held our
tongues. Why did you tell Mrs. Ericson that Norman threw me again last
Saturday and turned my foot? She's been talking to Olaf.”

Johanna fell into great confusion. “Oh, but, my precious, the old lady
asked for you, and she's always so angry if I can't give an excuse.
Anyhow, she needn't talk; she's always tearing up something with that
motor of hers.”

When her aunt clattered down to the kitchen, Clara went to dust the
parlour. Since there was not much there to dust, this did not take very
long. Olaf had built the house new for her before their marriage, but
her interest in furnishing it had been short-lived. It went, indeed,
little beyond a bathtub and her piano. They had disagreed about almost
every other article of furniture, and Clara had said she would rather
have her house empty than full of things she didn't want. The house was
set in a hillside, and the west windows of the parlour looked out above
the kitchen yard thirty feet below. The east windows opened directly
into the front yard. At one of the latter, Clara, while she was dusting,
heard a low whistle. She did not turn at once, but listened intently as
she drew her cloth slowly along the round of a chair. Yes, there it was:

I dreamt that I dwelt in ma-a-arble halls.

She turned and saw Nils Ericson laughing in the sunlight, his hat in his
hand, just outside the window. As she crossed the room he leaned against
the wire screen. “Aren't you at all surprised to see me, Clara Vavrika?”

“No; I was expecting to see you. Mother Ericson telephoned Olaf last
night that you were here.”

Nils squinted and gave a long whistle. “Telephoned? That must have been
while Eric and I were out walking. Isn't she enterprising? Lift this
screen, won't you?”

Clara lifted the screen, and Nils swung his leg across the window-sill.
As he stepped into the room she said: “You didn't think you were going
to get ahead of your mother, did you?”

He threw his hat on the piano. “Oh, I do sometimes. You see, I'm ahead
of her now. I'm supposed to be in Anders' wheat-field. But, as we were
leaving, Mother ran her car into a soft place beside the road and sank
up to the hubs. While they were going for the horses to pull her out,
I cut away behind the stacks and escaped.” Nils chuckled. Clara's dull
eyes lit up as she looked at him admiringly.

“You've got them guessing already. I don't know what your mother said
to Olaf over the telephone, but be came back looking as if he'd seen
a ghost, and he didn't go to bed until a dreadful hour--ten o'clock, I
should think. He sat out on the porch in the dark like a graven image.
It had been one of his talkative days, too.” They both laughed, easily
and lightly, like people who have laughed a great deal together; but
they remained standing.

“Anders and Otto and Peter looked as if they had seen ghosts, too, over
in the threshing field. What's the matter with them all?”

Clara gave him a quick, searching look. “Well, for one thing, they've
always been afraid you have the other will.”

Nils looked interested. “The other will?”

“Yes. A later one. They knew your father made another, but they never
knew what he did with it. They almost tore the old house to pieces
looking for it. They always suspected that he carried on a clandestine
correspondence with you, for the one thing he would do was to get his
own mail himself. So they thought he might have sent the new will to
you for safekeeping. The old one, leaving everything to your mother, was
made long before you went away, and it's understood among them that it
cuts you out--that she will leave all the property to the others. Your
father made the second will to prevent that. I've been hoping you
had it. It would be such fun to spring it on them.” Clara laughed
mirthfully, a thing she did not often do now.

Nils shook his head reprovingly. “Come, now, you're malicious.”

“No, I'm not. But I'd like something to happen to stir them all up, just
for once. There never was such a family for having nothing ever happen
to them but dinner and threshing. I'd almost be willing to die, just to
have a funeral. _You_ wouldn't stand it for three weeks.”

Nils bent over the piano and began pecking at the keys with the finger
of one hand. “I wouldn't? My dear young lady, how do you know what I can
stand? _You_ wouldn't wait to find out.”

Clara flushed darkly and frowned. “I didn't believe you would ever come
back--” she said defiantly.

“Eric believed I would, and he was only a baby when I went away.
However, all's well that ends well, and I haven't come back to be a
skeleton at the feast. We mustn't quarrel. Mother will be here with a
search warrant pretty soon.” He swung round and faced her, thrusting his
hands into his coat pockets. “Come, you ought to be glad to see me, if
you want something to happen. I'm something, even without a will. We can
have a little fun, can't we? I think we can!”

She echoed him, “I think we can!” They both laughed and their eyes
sparkled. Clara Vavrika looked ten years younger than when she had put
the velvet ribbon about her throat that morning.

“You know, I'm so tickled to see mother,” Nils went on. “I didn't know
I was so proud of her. A regular pile driver. How about little pigtails,
down at the house? Is Olaf doing the square thing by those children?”

Clara frowned pensively. “Olaf has to do something that looks like the
square thing, now that he's a public man!” She glanced drolly at Nils.
“But he makes a good commission out of it. On Sundays they all get
together here and figure. He lets Peter and Anders put in big bills for
the keep of the two boys, and he pays them out of the estate. They are
always having what they call accountings. Olaf gets something out of
it, too. I don't know just how they do it, but it's entirely a family
matter, as they say. And when the Ericsons say that--” Clara lifted her
eyebrows.

Just then the angry _honk-honk_ of an approaching motor sounded from
down the road. Their eyes met and they began to laugh. They laughed as
children do when they can not contain themselves, and can not explain
the cause of their mirth to grown people, but share it perfectly
together. When Clara Vavrika sat down at the piano after he was gone,
she felt that she had laughed away a dozen years. She practised as if
the house were burning over her head.

When Nils greeted his mother and climbed into the front seat of the
motor beside her, Mrs. Ericson looked grim, but she made no comment
upon his truancy until she had turned her car and was retracing her
revolutions along the road that ran by Olaf's big pasture. Then she
remarked dryly:

“If I were you I wouldn't see too much of Olaf's wife while you are
here. She's the kind of woman who can't see much of men without getting
herself talked about. She was a good deal talked about before he married
her.”

“Hasn't Olaf tamed her?” Nils asked indifferently.

Mrs. Ericson shrugged her massive shoulders. “Olaf don't seem to have
much luck, when it comes to wives. The first one was meek enough, but
she was always ailing. And this one has her own way. He says if he
quarreled with her she'd go back to her father, and then he'd lose the
Bohemian vote. There are a great many Bohunks in this district. But when
you find a man under his wife's thumb you can always be sure there's a
soft spot in him somewhere.”

Nils thought of his own father, and smiled. “She brought him a good deal
of money, didn't she, besides the Bohemian vote?”

Mrs. Ericson sniffed. “Well, she has a fair half section in her own
name, but I can't see as that does Olaf much good. She will have a good
deal of property some day, if old Vavrika don't marry again. But I don't
consider a saloonkeeper's money as good as other people's money.”

Nils laughed outright. “Come, Mother, don't let your prejudices carry
you that far. Money's money. Old Vavrika's a mighty decent sort of
saloonkeeper. Nothing rowdy about him.”

Mrs. Ericson spoke up angrily. “Oh, I know you always stood up for them!
But hanging around there when you were a boy never did you any good,
Nils, nor any of the other boys who went there. There weren't so many
after her when she married Olaf, let me tell you. She knew enough to
grab her chance.”

Nils settled back in his seat. “Of course I liked to go there, Mother,
and you were always cross about it. You never took the trouble to find
out that it was the one jolly house in this country for a boy to go to.
All the rest of you were working yourselves to death, and the houses
were mostly a mess, full of babies and washing and flies. Oh, it was all
right--I understand that; but you are young only once, and I happened
to be young then. Now, Vavrika's was always jolly. He played the violin,
and I used to take my flute, and Clara played the piano, and
Johanna used to sing Bohemian songs. She always had a big supper for
us--herrings and pickles and poppy-seed bread, and lots of cake and
preserves. Old Joe had been in the army in the old country, and he could
tell lots of good stories. I can see him cutting bread, at the head of
the table, now. I don't know what I'd have done when I was a kid if it
hadn't been for the Vavrikas, really.”

“And all the time he was taking money that other people had worked hard
in the fields for,” Mrs. Ericson observed.

“So do the circuses, Mother, and they're a good thing. People ought to
get fun for some of their money. Even father liked old Joe.”

“Your father,” Mrs. Ericson said grimly, “liked everybody.”

As they crossed the sand creek and turned into her own place, Mrs.
Ericson observed, “There's Olaf's buggy. He's stopped on his way from
town.” Nils shook himself and prepared to greet his brother, who was
waiting on the porch.

Olaf was a big, heavy Norwegian, slow of speech and movement. His head
was large and square, like a block of wood. When Nils, at a distance,
tried to remember what his brother looked like, he could recall only his
heavy head, high forehead, large nostrils, and pale blue eyes, set far
apart. Olaf's features were rudimentary: the thing one noticed was the
face itself, wide and flat and pale; devoid of any expression, betraying
his fifty years as little as it betrayed anything else, and powerful by
reason of its very stolidness. When Olaf shook hands with Nils he looked
at him from under his light eyebrows, but Nils felt that no one could
ever say what that pale look might mean. The one thing he had always
felt in Olaf was a heavy stubbornness, like the unyielding stickiness of
wet loam against the plow. He had always found Olaf the most difficult
of his brothers.

“How do you do, Nils? Expect to stay with us long?”

“Oh, I may stay forever,” Nils answered gaily. “I like this country
better than I used to.”

“There's been some work put into it since you left,” Olaf remarked.

“Exactly. I think it's about ready to live in now--and I'm about ready
to settle down.” Nils saw his brother lower his big head (“Exactly like
a bull,” he thought.) “Mother's been persuading me to slow down now, and
go in for farming,” he went on lightly.

Olaf made a deep sound in his throat. “Farming ain't learned in a day,”
 he brought out, still looking at the ground.

“Oh, I know! But I pick things up quickly.” Nils had not meant to
antagonize his brother, and he did not know now why he was doing it. “Of
course,” he went on, “I shouldn't expect to make a big success, as you
fellows have done. But then, I'm not ambitious. I won't want much. A
little land, and some cattle, maybe.”

Olaf still stared at the ground, his head down. He wanted to ask Nils
what he had been doing all these years, that he didn't have a business
somewhere he couldn't afford to leave; why he hadn't more pride than to
come back with only a little sole-leather trunk to show for himself, and
to present himself as the only failure in the family. He did not ask one
of these questions, but he made them all felt distinctly.

“Humph!” Nils thought. “No wonder the man never talks, when he can butt
his ideas into you like that without ever saying a word. I suppose he
uses that kind of smokeless powder on his wife all the time. But I guess
she has her innings.” He chuckled, and Olaf looked up. “Never mind
me, Olaf. I laugh without knowing why, like little Eric. He's another
cheerful dog.”

“Eric,” said Olaf slowly, “is a spoiled kid. He's just let his mother's
best cow go dry because he don't milk her right. I was hoping you'd take
him away somewhere and put him into business. If he don't do any good
among strangers, he never will.” This was a long speech for Olaf, and as
he finished it he climbed into his buggy.

Nils shrugged his shoulders. “Same old tricks,” he thought. “Hits from
behind you every time. What a whale of a man!” He turned and went round
to the kitchen, where his mother was scolding little Eric for letting
the gasoline get low.


                           IV

Joe Vavrika's saloon was not in the county seat, where Olaf and Mrs.
Ericson did their trading, but in a cheerfuller place, a little Bohemian
settlement which lay at the other end of the county, ten level miles
north of Olaf's farm. Clara rode up to see her father almost every day.
Vavrika's house was, so to speak, in the back yard of his saloon. The
garden between the two buildings was inclosed by a high board fence
as tight as a partition, and in summer Joe kept beer tables and wooden
benches among the gooseberry bushes under his little cherry tree. At
one of these tables Nils Ericson was seated in the late afternoon, three
days after his return home. Joe had gone in to serve a customer, and
Nils was lounging on his elbows, looking rather mournfully into his
half-emptied pitcher, when he heard a laugh across the little garden.
Clara, in her riding habit, was standing at the back door of the house,
under the grapevine trellis that old Joe had grown there long ago. Nils
rose.

“Come out and keep your father and me company. We've been gossiping all
afternoon. Nobody to bother us but the flies.”

She shook her head. “No, I never come out here any more. Olaf doesn't
like it. I must live up to my position, you know.”

“You mean to tell me you never come out and chat with the boys, as you
used to? He _has_ tamed you! Who keeps up these flower-beds?”

“I come out on Sundays, when father is alone, and read the Bohemian
papers to him. But I am never here when the bar is open. What have you
two been doing?”

“Talking, as I told you. I've been telling him about my travels. I find
I can't talk much at home, not even to Eric.”

Clara reached up and poked with her riding-whip at a white moth that was
fluttering in the sunlight among the vine leaves. “I suppose you will
never tell me about all those things.”

“Where can I tell them? Not in Olaf's house, certainly. What's the
matter with our talking here?” He pointed persuasively with his hat
to the bushes and the green table, where the flies were singing lazily
above the empty beer glasses.

Clara shook her head weakly. “No, it wouldn't do. Besides, I am going
now.”

“I'm on Eric's mare. Would you be angry if I overtook you?”

Clara looked back and laughed. “You might try and see. I can leave you
if I don't want you. Eric's mare can't keep up with Norman.”

Nils went into the bar and attempted to pay his score. Big Joe, six feet
four, with curly yellow hair and mustache, clapped him on the shoulder.
“Not a Goddamn a your money go in my drawer, you hear? Only next time
you bring your flute, te-te-te-te-te-ty.” Joe wagged his fingers in
imitation of the flute player's position.

“My Clara, she come all-a-time Sundays an' play for me. She not like to
play at Ericson's place.” He shook his yellow curls and laughed. “Not a
Goddamn a fun at Ericson's. You come a Sunday. You like-a fun. No forget
de flute.” Joe talked very rapidly and always tumbled over his English.
He seldom spoke it to his customers, and had never learned much.

Nils swung himself into the saddle and trotted to the west of the
village, where the houses and gardens scattered into prairie land and
the road turned south. Far ahead of him, in the declining light, he saw
Clara Vavrika's slender figure, loitering on horseback. He touched his
mare with the whip, and shot along the white, level road, under the
reddening sky. When he overtook Olaf's wife he saw that she had been
crying. “What's the matter, Clara Vavrika?” he asked kindly.

“Oh, I get blue sometimes. It was awfully jolly living there with
father. I wonder why I ever went away.”

Nils spoke in a low, kind tone that he sometimes used with women:
“That's what I've been wondering these many years. You were the last
girl in the country I'd have picked for a wife for Olaf. What made you
do it, Clara?”

“I suppose I really did it to oblige the neighbours”--Clara tossed her
head. “People were beginning to wonder.”

“To wonder?”

“Yes--why I didn't get married. I suppose I didn't like to keep them in
suspense. I've discovered that most girls marry out of consideration for
the neighbourhood.”

Nils bent his head toward her and his white teeth flashed. “I'd have
gambled that one girl I knew would say, 'Let the neighbourhood be
damned.'”

Clara shook her head mournfully. “You see, they have it on you, Nils;
that is, if you're a woman. They say you're beginning to go off. That's
what makes us get married: we can't stand the laugh.”

Nils looked sidewise at her. He had never seen her head droop before.
Resignation was the last thing he would have expected of her. “In your
case, there wasn't something else?”

“Something else?”

“I mean, you didn't do it to spite somebody? Somebody who didn't come
back?”

Clara drew herself up. “Oh, I never thought you'd come back. Not after
I stopped writing to you, at least. _That_ was all over, long before I
married Olaf.”

“It never occurred to you, then, that the meanest thing you could do to
me was to marry Olaf?”

Clara laughed. “No; I didn't know you were so fond of Olaf.”

Nils smoothed his horse's mane with his glove. “You know, Clara Vavrika,
you are never going to stick it out. You'll cut away some day, and I've
been thinking you might as well cut away with me.”

Clara threw up her chin. “Oh, you don't know me as well as you think. I
won't cut away. Sometimes, when I'm with father, I feel like it. But I
can hold out as long as the Ericsons can. They've never got the best of
me yet, and one can live, so long as one isn't beaten. If I go back to
father, it's all up with Olaf in politics. He knows that, and he never
goes much beyond sulking. I've as much wit as the Ericsons. I'll never
leave them unless I can show them a thing or two.”

“You mean unless you can come it over them?”

“Yes--unless I go away with a man who is cleverer than they are, and who
has more money.”

Nils whistled. “Dear me, you are demanding a good deal. The Ericsons,
take the lot of them, are a bunch to beat. But I should think the
excitement of tormenting them would have worn off by this time.”

“It has, I'm afraid,” Clara admitted mournfully.

“Then why don't you cut away? There are more amusing games than this in
the world. When I came home I thought it might amuse me to bully a few
quarter sections out of the Ericsons; but I've almost decided I can get
more fun for my money somewhere else.”

Clara took in her breath sharply. “Ah, you have got the other will! That
was why you came home!”

“No, it wasn't. I came home to see how you were getting on with Olaf.”

Clara struck her horse with the whip, and in a bound she was far ahead
of him. Nils dropped one word, “Damn!” and whipped after her; but she
leaned forward in her saddle and fairly cut the wind. Her long riding
skirt rippled in the still air behind her. The sun was just sinking
behind the stubble in a vast, clear sky, and the shadows drew across the
fields so rapidly that Nils could scarcely keep in sight the dark figure
on the road. When he overtook her he caught her horse by the bridle.
Norman reared, and Nils was frightened for her; but Clara kept her seat.

“Let me go, Nils Ericson!” she cried. “I hate you more than any of
them. You were created to torture me, the whole tribe of you--to make me
suffer in every possible way.”

She struck her horse again and galloped away from him. Nils set his
teeth and looked thoughtful. He rode slowly home along the deserted
road, watching the stars come out in the clear violet sky.

They flashed softly into the limpid heavens, like jewels let fall into
clear water. They were a reproach, he felt, to a sordid world. As he
turned across the sand creek, he looked up at the North Star and smiled,
as if there were an understanding between them. His mother scolded him
for being late for supper.


                           V

On Sunday afternoon Joe Vavrika, in his shirt sleeves and carpet
slippers, was sitting in his garden, smoking a long-tasseled porcelain
pipe with a hunting scene painted on the bowl. Clara sat under the
cherry tree, reading aloud to him from the weekly Bohemian papers. She
had worn a white muslin dress under her riding habit, and the leaves
of the cherry tree threw a pattern of sharp shadows over her skirt. The
black cat was dozing in the sunlight at her feet, and Joe's dachshund
was scratching a hole under the scarlet geraniums and dreaming of
badgers. Joe was filling his pipe for the third time since dinner,
when he heard a knocking on the fence. He broke into a loud guffaw and
unlatched the little door that led into the street. He did not call Nils
by name, but caught him by the hand and dragged him in. Clara stiffened
and the colour deepened under her dark skin. Nils, too, felt a little
awkward. He had not seen her since the night when she rode away from him
and left him alone on the level road between the fields. Joe dragged him
to the wooden bench beside the green table.

“You bring de flute,” he cried, tapping the leather case under Nils'
arm. “Ah, das-a good' Now we have some liddle fun like old times. I got
somet'ing good for you.” Joe shook his finger at Nils and winked his
blue eye, a bright clear eye, full of fire, though the tiny bloodvessels
on the ball were always a little distended. “I got somet'ing for you
from”--he paused and waved his hand--“Hongarie. You know Hongarie? You
wait!” He pushed Nils down on the bench, and went through the back door
of his saloon.

Nils looked at Clara, who sat frigidly with her white skirts drawn
tight about her. “He didn't tell you he had asked me to come, did he?
He wanted a party and proceeded to arrange it. Isn't he fun? Don't be
cross; let's give him a good time.”

Clara smiled and shook out her skirt. “Isn't that like Father? And he
has sat here so meekly all day. Well, I won't pout. I'm glad you came.
He doesn't have very many good times now any more. There are so few of
his kind left. The second generation are a tame lot.”

Joe came back with a flask in one hand and three wine glasses caught by
the stems between the fingers of the other. These he placed on the table
with an air of ceremony, and, going behind Nils, held the flask between
him and the sun, squinting into it admiringly. “You know dis, Tokai? A
great friend of mine, he bring dis to me, a present out of Hongarie. You
know how much it cost, dis wine? Chust so much what it weigh in gold.
Nobody but de nobles drink him in Bohemie. Many, many years I save him
up, dis Tokai.” Joe whipped out his official corkscrew and delicately
removed the cork. “De old man die what bring him to me, an' dis wine he
lay on his belly in my cellar an' sleep. An' now,” carefully pouring
out the heavy yellow wine, “an' now he wake up; and maybe he wake us
up, too!” He carried one of the glasses to his daughter and presented it
with great gallantry.

Clara shook her head, but, seeing her father's disappointment, relented.
“You taste it first. I don't want so much.”

Joe sampled it with a beatific expression, and turned to Nils. “You
drink him slow, dis wine. He very soft, but he go down hot. You see!”

After a second glass Nils declared that he couldn't take any more
without getting sleepy. “Now get your fiddle, Vavrika,” he said as he
opened his flute case.

But Joe settled back in his wooden rocker and wagged his big carpet
slipper. “No-no-no-no-no-no-no! No play fiddle now any more: too much
ache in de finger,” waving them, “all-a-time rheumatic. You play de
flute, te-tety-tetety-te. Bohemie songs.”

“I've forgotten all the Bohemian songs I used to play with you and
Johanna. But here's one that will make Clara pout. You remember how her
eyes used to snap when we called her the Bohemian Girl?” Nils lifted his
flute and began “When Other Lips and Other Hearts,” and Joe hummed the
air in a husky baritone, waving his carpet slipper. “Oh-h-h, das-a fine
music,” he cried, clapping his hands as Nils finished. “Now 'Marble
Halls, Marble Halls'! Clara, you sing him.”

Clara smiled and leaned back in her chair, beginning softly:

       “I dreamt that I dwelt in ma-a-arble halls,
          With vassals and serfs at my knee,”

and Joe hummed like a big bumblebee.

“There's one more you always played,” Clara said quietly, “I remember
that best.” She locked her hands over her knee and began “The Heart
Bowed Down,” and sang it through without groping for the words. She was
singing with a good deal of warmth when she came to the end of the old
song:

             “For memory is the only friend
             That grief can call its own.”

Joe flashed out his red silk handkerchief and blew his nose, shaking his
head. “No-no-no-no-no-no-no! Too sad, too sad! I not like-a dat. Play
quick somet'ing gay now.”

Nils put his lips to the instrument, and Joe lay back in his chair,
laughing and singing, “Oh, Evelina, Sweet Evelina!” Clara laughed, too.
Long ago, when she and Nils went to high school, the model student of
their class was a very homely girl in thick spectacles. Her name was
Evelina Oleson; she had a long, swinging walk which somehow suggested
the measure of that song, and they used mercilessly to sing it at her.

“Dat ugly Oleson girl, she teach in de school,” Joe gasped, “an' she
still walks chust like dat, yup-a, yup-a, yup-a, chust like a
camel she go! Now, Nils, we have some more li'l drink. Oh,
yes-yes-yes-yes-yes-yes-_yes_! Dis time you haf to drink, and Clara she
haf to, so she show she not jealous. So, we all drink to your girl. You
not tell her name, eh? No-no-no, I no make you tell. She pretty, eh? She
make good sweetheart? I bet!” Joe winked and lifted his glass. “How soon
you get married?”

Nils screwed up his eyes. “That I don't know. When she says.”

Joe threw out his chest. “Das-a way boys talks. No way for mans. Mans
say, 'You come to de church, an' get a hurry on you.' Das-a way mans
talks.”

“Maybe Nils hasn't got enough to keep a wife,” put in Clara ironically.
“How about that, Nils?” she asked him frankly, as if she wanted to know.

Nils looked at her coolly, raising one eyebrow. “Oh, I can keep her, all
right.”

“The way she wants to be kept?”

“With my wife, I'll decide that,” replied Nils calmly. “I'll give her
what's good for her.”

Clara made a wry face. “You'll give her the strap, I expect, like old
Peter Oleson gave his wife.”

“When she needs it,” said Nils lazily, locking his hands behind his head
and squinting up through the leaves of the cherry tree. “Do you remember
the time I squeezed the cherries all over your clean dress, and Aunt
Johanna boxed my ears for me? My gracious, weren't you mad! You had both
hands full of cherries, and I squeezed 'em and made the juice fly all
over you. I liked to have fun with you; you'd get so mad.”

“We _did_ have fun, didn't we? None of the other kids ever had so much
fun. We knew how to play.”

Nils dropped his elbows on the table and looked steadily across at her.
“I've played with lots of girls since, but I haven't found one who was
such good fun.”

Clara laughed. The late afternoon sun was shining full in her face,
and deep in the back of her eyes there shone something fiery, like the
yellow drops of Tokai in the brown glass bottle. “Can you still play, or
are you only pretending?”

“I can play better than I used to, and harder.”

“Don't you ever work, then?” She had not intended to say it. It slipped
out because she was confused enough to say just the wrong thing.

“I work between times.” Nils' steady gaze still beat upon her. “Don't
you worry about my working, Mrs. Ericson. You're getting like all the
rest of them.” He reached his brown, warm hand across the table and
dropped it on Clara's, which was cold as an icicle. “Last call for play,
Mrs. Ericson!” Clara shivered, and suddenly her hands and cheeks grew
warm. Her fingers lingered in his a moment, and they looked at each
other earnestly. Joe Vavrika had put the mouth of the bottle to his lips
and was swallowing the last drops of the Tokai, standing. The sun, just
about to sink behind his shop, glistened on the bright glass, on his
flushed face and curly yellow hair. “Look,” Clara whispered, “that's the
way I want to grow old.”


                           VI

On the day of Olaf Ericson's barn-raising, his wife, for once in a way,
rose early. Johanna Vavrika had been baking cakes and frying and boiling
and spicing meats for a week beforehand, but it was not until the day
before the party was to take place that Clara showed any interest in it.
Then she was seized with one of her fitful spasms of energy, and took
the wagon and little Eric and spent the day on Plum Creek, gathering
vines and swamp goldenrod to decorate the barn.

By four o'clock in the afternoon buggies and wagons began to arrive at
the big unpainted building in front of Olaf's house. When Nils and his
mother came at five, there were more than fifty people in the barn, and
a great drove of children. On the ground floor stood six long tables,
set with the crockery of seven flourishing Ericson families, lent for
the occasion. In the middle of each table was a big yellow pumpkin,
hollowed out and filled with woodbine. In one corner of the barn, behind
a pile of green-and-white striped watermelons, was a circle of chairs
for the old people; the younger guests sat on bushel measures or
barbed-wire spools, and the children tumbled about in the haymow. The
box stalls Clara had converted into booths. The framework was hidden by
goldenrod and sheaves of wheat, and the partitions were covered 'With
wild grapevines full of fruit. At one of these Johanna Vavrika watched
over her cooked meats, enough to provision an army; and at the next her
kitchen girls had ranged the ice-cream freezers, and Clara was already
cutting pies and cakes against the hour of serving. At the third stall,
little Hilda, in a bright pink lawn dress, dispensed lemonade throughout
the afternoon. Olaf, as a public man, had thought it inadvisable to
serve beer in his barn; but Joe Vavrika had come over with two demijohns
concealed in his buggy, and after his arrival the wagon shed was much
frequented by the men.

“Hasn't Cousin Clara fixed things lovely?” little Hilda whispered, when
Nils went up to her stall and asked for lemonade.

Nils leaned against the booth, talking to the excited little girl and
watching the people. The barn faced the west, and the sun, pouring in
at the big doors, filled the whole interior with a golden light,
through which filtered fine particles of dust from the haymow, where the
children were romping. There was a great chattering from the stall where
Johanna Vavrika exhibited to the admiring women her platters heaped with
fried chicken, her roasts of beef, boiled tongues, and baked hams
with cloves stuck in the crisp brown fat and garnished with tansy and
parsley. The older women, having assured themselves that there were
twenty kinds of cake, not counting cookies, and three dozen fat pies,
repaired to the corner behind the pile of watermelons, put on their
white aprons, and fell to their knitting and fancywork. They were a fine
company of old women, and a Dutch painter would have loved to find them
there together, where the sun made bright patches on the floor and sent
long, quivering shafts of gold through the dusky shade up among the
rafters. There were fat, rosy old women who looked hot in their best
black dresses; spare, alert old women with brown, dark-veined hands; and
several of almost heroic frame, not less massive than old Mrs. Ericson
herself. Few of them wore glasses, and old Mrs. Svendsen, a Danish
woman, who was quite bald, wore the only cap among them. Mrs. Oleson,
who had twelve big grandchildren, could still show two braids of yellow
hair as thick as her own wrists. Among all these grandmothers there were
more brown heads than white. They all had a pleased, prosperous air, as
if they were more than satisfied with themselves and with life. Nils,
leaning against Hilda's lemonade stand, watched them as they sat
chattering in four languages, their fingers never lagging behind their
tongues.

“Look at them over there,” he whispered, detaining Clara as she passed
him. “Aren't they the Old Guard? I've just counted thirty hands. I guess
they've wrung many a chicken's neck and warmed many a boy's jacket for
him in their time.”

In reality he fell into amazement when he thought of the Herculean
labours those fifteen pairs of hands had performed: of the cows they
had milked, the butter they had made, the gardens they had planted, the
children and grandchildren they had tended, the brooms they had worn
out, the mountains of food they had cooked. It made him dizzy. Clara
Vavrika smiled a hard, enigmatical smile at him and walked rapidly away.
Nils' eyes followed her white figure as she went toward the house.
He watched her walking alone in the sunlight, looked at her slender,
defiant shoulders and her little hard-set head with its coils of
blue-black hair. “No,” he reflected; “she'd never be like them, not if
she lived here a hundred years. She'd only grow more bitter. You can't
tame a wild thing; you can only chain it. People aren't all alike. I
mustn't lose my nerve.” He gave Hilda's pigtail a parting tweak and
set out after Clara. “Where to?” he asked, as he came upon her in the
kitchen.

“I'm going to the cellar for preserves.”

“Let me go with you. I never get a moment alone with you. Why do you
keep out of my way?”

Clara laughed. “I don't usually get in anybody's way.”

Nils followed her down the stairs and to the far corner of the cellar,
where a basement window let in a stream of light. From a swinging shelf
Clara selected several glass jars, each labeled in Johanna's careful
hand. Nils took up a brown flask. “What's this? It looks good.”

“It is. It's some French brandy father gave me when I was married. Would
you like some? Have you a corkscrew? I'll get glasses.”

When she brought them, Nils took them from her and put them down on
the window-sill. “Clara Vavrika, do you remember how crazy I used to be
about you?”

Clara shrugged her shoulders. “Boys are always crazy about somebody or
another. I dare say some silly has been crazy about Evelina Oleson. You
got over it in a hurry.”

“Because I didn't come back, you mean? I had to get on, you know, and it
was hard sledding at first. Then I heard you'd married Olaf.”

“And then you stayed away from a broken heart,” Clara laughed.

“And then I began to think about you more than I had since I first went
away. I began to wonder if you were really as you had seemed to me when
I was a boy. I thought I'd like to see. I've had lots of girls, but no
one ever pulled me the same way. The more I thought about you, the
more I remembered how it used to be--like hearing a wild tune you
can't resist, calling you out at night. It had been a long while since
anything had pulled me out of my boots, and I wondered whether anything
ever could again.” Nils thrust his hands into his coat pockets and
squared his shoulders, as his mother sometimes squared hers, as Olaf, in
a clumsier manner, squared his. “So I thought I'd come back and see. Of
course the family have tried to do me, and I rather thought I'd bring
out father's will and make a fuss. But they can have their old land;
they've put enough sweat into it.” He took the flask and filled the
two glasses carefully to the brim. “I've found out what I want from the
Ericsons. Drink _skoal_, Clara.” He lifted his glass, and Clara took
hers with downcast eyes. “Look at me, Clara Vavrika. _Skoal!_”

She raised her burning eyes and answered fiercely: “_Skoal!_”


The barn supper began at six o'clock and lasted for two hilarious
hours. Yense Nelson had made a wager that he could eat two whole fried
chickens, and he did. Eli Swanson stowed away two whole custard pies,
and Nick Hermanson ate a chocolate layer cake to the last crumb. There
was even a cooky contest among the children, and one thin, slablike
Bohemian boy consumed sixteen and won the prize, a gingerbread pig
which Johanna Vavrika had carefully decorated with red candies and burnt
sugar. Fritz Sweiheart, the German carpenter, won in the pickle contest,
but he disappeared soon after supper and was not seen for the rest of
the evening. Joe Vavrika said that Fritz could have managed the pickles
all right, but he had sampled the demijohn in his buggy too often before
sitting down to the table.

While the supper was being cleared away the two fiddlers began to tune
up for the dance. Clara was to accompany them on her old upright piano,
which had been brought down from her father's. By this time Nils had
renewed old acquaintances. Since his interview with Clara in the cellar,
he had been busy telling all the old women how young they looked, and
all the young ones how pretty they were, and assuring the men that
they had here the best farmland in the world. He had made himself so
agreeable that old Mrs. Ericson's friends began to come up to her and
tell how lucky she was to get her smart son back again, and please to
get him to play his flute. Joe Vavrika, who could still play very well
when he forgot that he had rheumatism, caught up a fiddle from Johnny
Oleson and played a crazy Bohemian dance tune that set the wheels going.
When he dropped the bow every one was ready to dance.

Olaf, in a frock coat and a solemn made-up necktie, led the grand march
with his mother. Clara had kept well out of _that_ by sticking to the
piano. She played the march with a pompous solemnity which greatly
amused the prodigal son, who went over and stood behind her.

“Oh, aren't you rubbing it into them, Clara Vavrika? And aren't you
lucky to have me here, or all your wit would be thrown away.”

“I'm used to being witty for myself. It saves my life.”

The fiddles struck up a polka, and Nils convulsed Joe Vavrika by leading
out Evelina Oleson, the homely schoolteacher. His next partner was a
very fat Swedish girl, who, although she was an heiress, had not been
asked for the first dance, but had stood against the wall in her tight,
high-heeled shoes, nervously fingering a lace handkerchief. She was soon
out of breath, so Nils led her, pleased and panting, to her seat,
and went over to the piano, from which Clara had been watching his
gallantry. “Ask Olena Yenson,” she whispered. “She waltzes beautifully.”

Olena, too, was rather inconveniently plump, handsome in a smooth, heavy
way, with a fine colour and good-natured, sleepy eyes. She was redolent
of violet sachet powder, and had warm, soft, white hands, but she danced
divinely, moving as smoothly as the tide coming in. “There, that's
something like,” Nils said as he released her. “You'll give me the next
waltz, won't you? Now I must go and dance with my little cousin.”

Hilda was greatly excited when Nils went up to her stall and held out
his arm. Her little eyes sparkled, but she declared that she could not
leave her lemonade. Old Mrs. Ericson, who happened along at this moment,
said she would attend to that, and Hilda came out, as pink as her pink
dress. The dance was a schottische, and in a moment her yellow braids
were fairly standing on end. “Bravo!” Nils cried encouragingly. “Where
did you learn to dance so nicely?”

“My Cousin Clara taught me,” the little girl panted.

Nils found Eric sitting with a group of boys who were too awkward or too
shy to dance, and told him that he must dance the next waltz with Hilda.

The boy screwed up his shoulders. “Aw, Nils, I can't dance. My feet are
too big; I look silly.”

“Don't be thinking about yourself. It doesn't matter how boys look.”

Nils had never spoken to him so sharply before, and Eric made haste to
scramble out of his corner and brush the straw from his coat.

Clara nodded approvingly. “Good for you, Nils. I've been trying to
get hold of him. They dance very nicely together; I sometimes play for
them.”

“I'm obliged to you for teaching him. There's no reason why he should
grow up to be a lout.”

“He'll never be that. He's more like you than any of them. Only he
hasn't your courage.” From her slanting eyes Clara shot forth one of
those keen glances, admiring and at the same time challenging, which she
seldom bestowed on any one, and which seemed to say, “Yes, I admire you,
but I am your equal.”

Clara was proving a much better host than Olaf, who, once the supper was
over, seemed to feel no interest in anything but the lanterns. He had
brought a locomotive headlight from town to light the revels, and he
kept skulking about as if he feared the mere light from it might set his
new barn on fire. His wife, on the contrary, was cordial to every one,
was animated and even gay. The deep salmon colour in her cheeks burned
vividly, and her eyes were full of life. She gave the piano over to the
fat Swedish heiress, pulled her father away from the corner where he
sat gossiping with his cronies, and made him dance a Bohemian dance with
her. In his youth Joe had been a famous dancer, and his daughter got
him so limbered up that every one sat around and applauded them. The old
ladies were particularly delighted, and made them go through the dance
again. From their corner where they watched and commented, the old women
kept time with their feet and hands, and whenever the fiddles struck up
a new air old Mrs. Svendsen's white cap would begin to bob.

Clara was waltzing with little Eric when Nils came up to them, brushed
his brother aside, and swung her out among the dancers. “Remember how
we used to waltz on rollers at the old skating rink in town? I suppose
people don't do that any more. We used to keep it up for hours. You
know, we never did moon around as other boys and girls did. It was dead
serious with us from the beginning. When we were most in love with each
other, we used to fight. You were always pinching people; your fingers
were like little nippers. A regular snapping turtle, you were. Lord, how
you'd like Stockholm! Sit out in the streets in front of cafes and talk
all night in summer, just like a reception--officers and ladies and
funny English people. Jolliest people in the world, the Swedes, once you
get them going. Always drinking things--champagne and stout mixed,
half-and-half, serve it out of big pitchers, and serve plenty. Slow
pulse, you know; they can stand a lot. Once they light up, they're
glowworms, I can tell you.”

“All the same, you don't really like gay people.”

“_I_ don't?”

“No; I could tell that when you were looking at the old women there this
afternoon. They're the kind you really admire, after all; women like
your mother. And that's the kind you'll marry.”

“Is it, Miss Wisdom? You'll see who I'll marry, and she won't have a
domestic virtue to bless herself with. She'll be a snapping turtle,
and she'll be a match for me. All the same, they're a fine bunch of old
dames over there. You admire them yourself.

“No, I don't; I detest them.”

“You won't, when you look back on them from Stockholm or Budapest.
Freedom settles all that. Oh, but you're the real Bohemian Girl, Clara
Vavrika!” Nils laughed down at her sullen frown and began mockingly to
sing:

       “Oh, how could a poor gypsy maiden like me
       Expect the proud bride of a baron to be?”

Clara clutched his shoulder. “Hush, Nils; every one is looking at you.”

“I don't care. They can't gossip. It's all in the family, as the
Ericsons say when they divide up little Hilda's patrimony amongst them.
Besides, we'll give them something to talk about when we hit the
trail. Lord, it will be a godsend to them! They haven't had anything so
interesting to chatter about since the grasshopper year. It'll give
them a new lease of life. And Olaf won't lose the Bohemian vote, either.
They'll have the laugh on him so that they'll vote two apiece. They'll
send him to Congress. They'll never forget his barn party, or us.
They'll always remember us as we're dancing together now. We're making
a legend. Where's my waltz, boys?” he called as they whirled past the
fiddlers.

The musicians grinned, looked at each other, hesitated, and began a new
air; and Nils sang with them, as the couples fell from a quick waltz to
a long, slow glide:

           “When other lips and other hearts
            Their tale of love shall tell,
            In language whose excess imparts
            The power they feel so well.”

The old women applauded vigorously. “What a gay one he is, that Nils!”
 And old Mrs. Svendsen's cap lurched dreamily from side to side to the
flowing measure of the dance.

          “Of days that have as ha-a-p-py been,
          And you'll remember me.”


                          VII

The moonlight flooded that great, silent land. The reaped fields lay
yellow in it. The straw stacks and poplar windbreaks threw sharp black
shadows. The roads were white rivers of dust. The sky was a deep,
crystalline blue, and the stars were few and faint. Everything seemed to
have succumbed, to have sunk to sleep, under the great, golden, tender,
midsummer moon. The splendour of it seemed to transcend human life and
human fate. The senses were too feeble to take it in, and every time one
looked up at the sky one felt unequal to it, as if one were sitting deaf
under the waves of a great river of melody. Near the road, Nils Ericson
was lying against a straw stack in Olaf's wheat field. His own life
seemed strange and unfamiliar to him, as if it were something he had
read about, or dreamed, and forgotten. He lay very still, watching the
white road that ran in front of him, lost itself among the fields, and
then, at a distance, reappeared over a little hill. At last, against
this white band he saw something moving rapidly, and he got up and
walked to the edge of the field. “She is passing the row of poplars
now,” he thought. He heard the padded beat of hoofs along the dusty
road, and as she came into sight he stepped out and waved his arms.
Then, for fear of frightening the horse, he drew back and waited. Clara
had seen him, and she came up at a walk. Nils took the horse by the bit
and stroked his neck.

“What are you doing out so late, Clara Vavrika? I went to the house, but
Johanna told me you had gone to your father's.”

“Who can stay in the house on a night like this? Aren't you out
yourself?”

“Ah, but that's another matter.”

Nils turned the horse into the field.

“What are you doing? Where are you taking Norman?”

“Not far, but I want to talk to you tonight; I have something to say to
you. I can't talk to you at the house, with Olaf sitting there on the
porch, weighing a thousand tons.”

Clara laughed. “He won't be sitting there now. He's in bed by this time,
and asleep--weighing a thousand tons.”

Nils plodded on across the stubble. “Are you really going to spend the
rest of your life like this, night after night, summer after summer?
Haven't you anything better to do on a night like this than to wear
yourself and Norman out tearing across the country to your father's
and back? Besides, your father won't live forever, you know. His little
place will be shut up or sold, and then you'll have nobody but the
Ericsons. You'll have to fasten down the hatches for the winter then.”

Clara moved her head restlessly. “Don't talk about that. I try never to
think of it. If I lost Father I'd lose everything, even my hold over the
Ericsons.”

“Bah! You'd lose a good deal more than that. You'd lose your race,
everything that makes you yourself. You've lost a good deal of it now.”

“Of what?”

“Of your love of life, your capacity for delight.”

Clara put her hands up to her face. “I haven't, Nils Ericson, I haven't!
Say anything to me but that. I won't have it!” she declared vehemently.

Nils led the horse up to a straw stack, and turned to Clara, looking
at her intently, as he had looked at her that Sunday afternoon at
Vavrika's. “But why do you fight for that so? What good is the power
to enjoy, if you never enjoy? Your hands are cold again; what are you
afraid of all the time? Ah, you're afraid of losing it; that's what's
the matter with you! And you will, Clara Vavrika, you will! When I used
to know you--listen; you've caught a wild bird in your hand, haven't
you, and felt its heart beat so hard that you were afraid it would
shatter its little body to pieces? Well, you used to be just like that,
a slender, eager thing with a wild delight inside you. That is how I
remembered you. And I come back and find you--a bitter woman. This is
a perfect ferret fight here; you live by biting and being bitten. Can't
you remember what life used to be? Can't you remember that old delight?
I've never forgotten it, or known its like, on land or sea.”

He drew the horse under the shadow of the straw stack. Clara felt him
take her foot out of the stirrup, and she slid softly down into his
arms. He kissed her slowly. He was a deliberate man, but his nerves were
steel when he wanted anything. Something flashed out from him like a
knife out of a sheath. Clara felt everything slipping away from her; she
was flooded by the summer night. He thrust his hand into his pocket,
and then held it out at arm's length. “Look,” he said. The shadow of the
straw stack fell sharp across his wrist, and in the palm of his hand she
saw a silver dollar shining. “That's my pile,” he muttered; “will you go
with me?”

Clara nodded, and dropped her forehead on his shoulder.

Nils took a deep breath. “Will you go with me tonight?”

“Where?” she whispered softly.

“To town, to catch the midnight flyer.”

Clara lifted her head and pulled herself together. “Are you crazy, Nils?
We couldn't go away like that.”

“That's the only way we ever will go. You can't sit on the bank and
think about it. You have to plunge. That's the way I've always done,
and it's the right way for people like you and me. There's nothing so
dangerous as sitting still. You've only got one life, one youth, and
you can let it slip through your fingers if you want to; nothing easier.
Most people do that. You'd be better off tramping the roads with me than
you are here.” Nils held back her head and looked into her eyes. “But
I'm not that kind of a tramp, Clara. You won't have to take in sewing.
I'm with a Norwegian shipping line; came over on business with the New
York offices, but now I'm going straight back to Bergen. I expect
I've got as much money as the Ericsons. Father sent me a little to get
started. They never knew about that. There, I hadn't meant to tell you;
I wanted you to come on your own nerve.”

Clara looked off across the fields. “It isn't that, Nils, but something
seems to hold me. I'm afraid to pull against it. It comes out of the
ground, I think.”

“I know all about that. One has to tear loose. You're not needed here.
Your father will understand; he's made like us. As for Olaf, Johanna
will take better care of him than ever you could. It's now or never,
Clara Vavrika. My bag's at the station; I smuggled it there yesterday.”

Clara clung to him and hid her face against his shoulder. “Not tonight,”
 she whispered. “Sit here and talk to me tonight. I don't want to go
anywhere tonight. I may never love you like this again.”

Nils laughed through his teeth. “You can't come that on me. That's not
my way, Clara Vavrika. Eric's mare is over there behind the stacks, and
I'm off on the midnight. It's goodbye, or off across the world with me.
My carriage won't wait. I've written a letter to Olaf, I'll mail it
in town. When he reads it he won't bother us--not if I know him. He'd
rather have the land. Besides, I could demand an investigation of his
administration of Cousin Henrik's estate, and that would be bad for a
public man. You've no clothes, I know; but you can sit up tonight, and
we can get everything on the way. Where's your old dash, Clara Vavrika?
What's become of your Bohemian blood? I used to think you had courage
enough for anything. Where's your nerve--what are you waiting for?”

Clara drew back her head, and he saw the slumberous fire in her eyes.
“For you to say one thing, Nils Ericson.”

“I never say that thing to any woman, Clara Vavrika.” He leaned back,
lifted her gently from the ground, and whispered through his teeth: “But
I'll never, never let you go, not to any man on earth but me! Do you
understand me? Now, wait here.”

Clara sank down on a sheaf of wheat and covered her face with her hands.
She did not know what she was going to do--whether she would go or stay.
The great, silent country seemed to lay a spell upon her. The ground
seemed to hold her as if by roots. Her knees were soft under her. She
felt as if she could not bear separation from her old sorrows, from her
old discontent. They were dear to her, they had kept her alive, they
were a part of her. There would be nothing left of her if she were
wrenched away from them. Never could she pass beyond that skyline
against which her restlessness had beat so many times. She felt as if
her soul had built itself a nest there on that horizon at which
she looked every morning and every evening, and it was dear to her,
inexpressibly dear. She pressed her fingers against her eyeballs to shut
it out. Beside her she heard the tramping of horses in the soft earth.
Nils said nothing to her. He put his hands under her arms and lifted her
lightly to her saddle. Then he swung himself into his own.

“We shall have to ride fast to catch the midnight train. A last gallop,
Clara Vavrika. Forward!”

There was a start, a thud of hoofs along the moonlit road, two dark
shadows going over the hill; and then the great, still land stretched
untroubled under the azure night. Two shadows had passed.


                          VII

A year after the flight of Olaf Ericson's wife, the night train was
steaming across the plains of Iowa. The conductor was hurrying through
one of the day coaches, his lantern on his arm, when a lank, fair-haired
boy sat up in one of the plush seats and tweaked him by the coat.

“What is the next stop, please, sir?”

“Red Oak, Iowa. But you go through to Chicago, don't you?” He looked
down, and noticed that the boy's eyes were red and his face was drawn,
as if he were in trouble.

“Yes. But I was wondering whether I could get off at the next place and
get a train back to Omaha.”

“Well, I suppose you could. Live in Omaha?”

“No. In the western part of the State. How soon do we get to Red Oak?”

“Forty minutes. You'd better make up your mind, so I can tell the
baggageman to put your trunk off.”

“Oh, never mind about that! I mean, I haven't got any,” the boy added,
blushing.

“Run away,” the conductor thought, as he slammed the coach door behind
him.

Eric Ericson crumpled down in his seat and put his brown hand to his
forehead. He had been crying, and he had had no supper, and his head was
aching violently. “Oh, what shall I do?” he thought, as he looked dully
down at his big shoes. “Nils will be ashamed of me; I haven't got any
spunk.”

Ever since Nils had run away with his brother's wife, life at home had
been hard for little Eric. His mother and Olaf both suspected him of
complicity. Mrs. Ericson was harsh and faultfinding, constantly wounding
the boy's pride; and Olaf was always setting her against him.

Joe Vavrika heard often from his daughter. Clara had always been fond of
her father, and happiness made her kinder. She wrote him long accounts
of the voyage to Bergen, and of the trip she and Nils took through
Bohemia to the little town where her father had grown up and where she
herself was born. She visited all her kinsmen there, and sent her father
news of his brother, who was a priest; of his sister, who had married a
horse-breeder--of their big farm and their many children. These letters
Joe always managed to read to little Eric. They contained messages for
Eric and Hilda. Clara sent presents, too, which Eric never dared to take
home and which poor little Hilda never even saw, though she loved to
hear Eric tell about them when they were out getting the eggs together.
But Olaf once saw Eric coming out of Vavrika's house--the old man had
never asked the boy to come into his saloon--and Olaf went straight to
his mother and told her. That night Mrs. Ericson came to Eric's room
after he was in bed and made a terrible scene. She could be very
terrifying when she was really angry. She forbade him ever to speak to
Vavrika again, and after that night she would not allow him to go to
town alone. So it was a long while before Eric got any more news of his
brother. But old Joe suspected what was going on, and he carried Clara's
letters about in his pocket. One Sunday he drove out to see a German
friend of his, and chanced to catch sight of Eric, sitting by the cattle
pond in the big pasture. They went together into Fritz Oberlies' barn,
and read the letters and talked things over. Eric admitted that things
were getting hard for him at home. That very night old Joe sat down and
laboriously penned a statement of the case to his daughter.

Things got no better for Eric. His mother and Olaf felt that, however
closely he was watched, he still, as they said, “heard.” Mrs. Ericson
could not admit neutrality. She had sent Johanna Vavrika packing back to
her brother's, though Olaf would much rather have kept her than Anders'
eldest daughter, whom Mrs. Ericson installed in her place. He was not
so highhanded as his mother, and he once sulkily told her that she might
better have taught her granddaughter to cook before she sent Johanna
away. Olaf could have borne a good deal for the sake of prunes spiced in
honey, the secret of which Johanna had taken away with her.

At last two letters came to Joe Vavrika: one from Nils, enclosing a
postal order for money to pay Eric's passage to Bergen, and one from
Clara, saying that Nils had a place for Eric in the offices of his
company, that he was to live with them, and that they were only waiting
for him to come. He was to leave New York on one of the boats of Nils'
own line; the captain was one of their friends, and Eric was to make
himself known at once.

Nils' directions were so explicit that a baby could have followed them,
Eric felt. And here he was, nearing Red Oak, Iowa, and rocking backward
and forward in despair. Never had he loved his brother so much, and
never had the big world called to him so hard. But there was a lump in
his throat which would not go down. Ever since nightfall he had been
tormented by the thought of his mother, alone in that big house that
had sent forth so many men. Her unkindness now seemed so little, and her
loneliness so great. He remembered everything she had ever done for him:
how frightened she had been when he tore his hand in the corn-sheller,
and how she wouldn't let Olaf scold him. When Nils went away he didn't
leave his mother all alone, or he would never have gone. Eric felt sure
of that.

The train whistled. The conductor came in, smiling not unkindly.
“Well, young man, what are you going to do? We stop at Red Oak in three
minutes.”

“Yes, thank you. I'll let you know.” The conductor went out, and the boy
doubled up with misery. He couldn't let his one chance go like this.
He felt for his breast pocket and crackled Nils' letter to give him
courage. He didn't want Nils to be ashamed of him. The train stopped.
Suddenly he remembered his brother's kind, twinkling eyes, that always
looked at you as if from far away. The lump in his throat softened. “Ah,
but Nils, Nils would _understand_!” he thought. “That's just it about
Nils; he always understands.”

A lank, pale boy with a canvas telescope stumbled off the train to the
Red Oak siding, just as the conductor called, “All aboard!”

The next night Mrs. Ericson was sitting alone in her wooden
rocking-chair on the front porch. Little Hilda had been sent to bed and
had cried herself to sleep. The old woman's knitting was on her lap, but
her hands lay motionless on top of it. For more than an hour she had not
moved a muscle. She simply sat, as only the Ericsons and the mountains
can sit. The house was dark, and there was no sound but the croaking of
the frogs down in the pond of the little pasture.

Eric did not come home by the road, but across the fields, where no one
could see him. He set his telescope down softly in the kitchen shed, and
slipped noiselessly along the path to the front porch. He sat down on
the step without saying anything. Mrs. Ericson made no sign, and the
frogs croaked on. At last the boy spoke timidly.

“I've come back, Mother.”

“Very well,” said Mrs. Ericson.

Eric leaned over and picked up a little stick out of the grass.

“How about the milking?” he faltered.

“That's been done, hours ago.”

“Who did you get?”

“Get? I did it myself. I can milk as good as any of you.”

Eric slid along the step nearer to her. “Oh, Mother, why did you?” he
asked sorrowfully. “Why didn't you get one of Otto's boys?”

“I didn't want anybody to know I was in need of a boy,” said Mrs.
Ericson bitterly. She looked straight in front of her and her mouth
tightened. “I always meant to give you the home farm,” she added.

The boy stared and slid closer. “Oh, Mother,” he faltered, “I don't care
about the farm. I came back because I thought you might be needing me,
maybe.” He hung his head and got no further.

“Very well,” said Mrs. Ericson. Her hand went out from her suddenly
and rested on his head. Her fingers twined themselves in his soft, pale
hair. His tears splashed down on the boards; happiness filled his heart.




THE TROLL GARDEN




Flavia and Her Artists

As the train neared Tarrytown, Imogen Willard began to wonder why she
had consented to be one of Flavia's house party at all. She had not felt
enthusiastic about it since leaving the city, and was experiencing a
prolonged ebb of purpose, a current of chilling indecision, under
which she vainly sought for the motive which had induced her to accept
Flavia's invitation.

Perhaps it was a vague curiosity to see Flavia's husband, who had been
the magician of her childhood and the hero of innumerable Arabian fairy
tales. Perhaps it was a desire to see M. Roux, whom Flavia had announced
as the especial attraction of the occasion. Perhaps it was a wish to
study that remarkable woman in her own setting.

Imogen admitted a mild curiosity concerning Flavia. She was in the habit
of taking people rather seriously, but somehow found it impossible to
take Flavia so, because of the very vehemence and insistence with which
Flavia demanded it. Submerged in her studies, Imogen had, of late years,
seen very little of Flavia; but Flavia, in her hurried visits to New
York, between her excursions from studio to studio--her luncheons with
this lady who had to play at a matinee, and her dinners with that singer
who had an evening concert--had seen enough of her friend's handsome
daughter to conceive for her an inclination of such violence and
assurance as only Flavia could afford. The fact that Imogen had shown
rather marked capacity in certain esoteric lines of scholarship, and
had decided to specialize in a well-sounding branch of philology at
the Ecole des Chartes, had fairly placed her in that category of
“interesting people” whom Flavia considered her natural affinities, and
lawful prey.

When Imogen stepped upon the station platform she was immediately
appropriated by her hostess, whose commanding figure and assurance of
attire she had recognized from a distance. She was hurried into a high
tilbury and Flavia, taking the driver's cushion beside her, gathered up
the reins with an experienced hand.

“My dear girl,” she remarked, as she turned the horses up the street, “I
was afraid the train might be late. M. Roux insisted upon coming up by
boat and did not arrive until after seven.”

“To think of M. Roux's being in this part of the world at all, and
subject to the vicissitudes of river boats! Why in the world did he come
over?” queried Imogen with lively interest. “He is the sort of man who
must dissolve and become a shadow outside of Paris.”

“Oh, we have a houseful of the most interesting people,” said Flavia,
professionally. “We have actually managed to get Ivan Schemetzkin. He
was ill in California at the close of his concert tour, you know, and he
is recuperating with us, after his wearing journey from the coast. Then
there is Jules Martel, the painter; Signor Donati, the tenor; Professor
Schotte, who has dug up Assyria, you know; Restzhoff, the Russian
chemist; Alcee Buisson, the philologist; Frank Wellington, the novelist;
and Will Maidenwood, the editor of _Woman_. Then there is my second
cousin, Jemima Broadwood, who made such a hit in Pinero's comedy last
winter, and Frau Lichtenfeld. _Have_ you read her?”

Imogen confessed her utter ignorance of Frau Lichtenfeld, and Flavia
went on.

“Well, she is a most remarkable person; one of those advanced German
women, a militant iconoclast, and this drive will not be long enough to
permit of my telling you her history. Such a story! Her novels were the
talk of all Germany when I was there last, and several of them have been
suppressed--an honor in Germany, I understand. 'At Whose Door' has been
translated. I am so unfortunate as not to read German.”

“I'm all excitement at the prospect of meeting Miss Broadwood,”
 said Imogen. “I've seen her in nearly everything she does. Her stage
personality is delightful. She always reminds me of a nice, clean,
pink-and-white boy who has just had his cold bath, and come down all
aglow for a run before breakfast.”

“Yes, but isn't it unfortunate that she will limit herself to those
minor comedy parts that are so little appreciated in this country? One
ought to be satisfied with nothing less than the best, ought one?” The
peculiar, breathy tone in which Flavia always uttered that word “best,”
 the most worn in her vocabulary, always jarred on Imogen and always made
her obdurate.

“I don't at all agree with you,” she said reservedly. “I thought
everyone admitted that the most remarkable thing about Miss Broadwood is
her admirable sense of fitness, which is rare enough in her profession.”

Flavia could not e

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