O Pioneers!, Willa Cather [simple ebook reader txt] 📗

chickens are laying right on through the cold weather and bringing in a little money. I wish we could keep his mind off such things, but I don’t have much time to be with him now.”

“I wonder if he’d like to have me bring my magic lantern over some evening?”

Alexandra turned her face toward him. “Oh, Carl! Have you got it?”

“Yes. It’s back there in the straw. Didn’t you notice the box I was carrying? I tried it all morning in the drugstore cellar, and it worked ever so well, makes fine big pictures.”

“What are they about?”

“Oh, hunting pictures in Germany, and Robinson Crusoe and funny pictures about cannibals. I’m going to paint some slides for it on glass, out of the Hans Andersen book.”

Alexandra seemed actually cheered. There is often a good deal of the child left in people who have had to grow up too soon. “Do bring it over, Carl. I can hardly wait to see it, and I’m sure it will please father. Are the pictures colored? Then I know he’ll like them. He likes the calendars I get him in town. I wish I could get more. You must leave me here, mustn’t you? It’s been nice to have company.”

Carl stopped the horses and looked dubiously up at the black sky. “It’s pretty dark. Of course the horses will take you home, but I think I’d better light your lantern, in case you should need it.”

He gave her the reins and climbed back into the wagon box, where he crouched down and made a tent of his overcoat. After a dozen trials he succeeded in lighting the lantern, which he placed in front of Alexandra, half covering it with a blanket so that the light would not shine in her eyes. “Now, wait until I find my box. Yes, here it is. Good night, Alexandra. Try not to worry.” Carl sprang to the ground and ran off across the fields toward the Linstrum homestead. “Hoo, hoo‑o‑o‑o!” he called back as he disappeared over a ridge and dropped into a sand gully. The wind answered him like an echo, “Hoo, hoo‑o‑o‑o‑o‑o!” Alexandra drove off alone. The rattle of her wagon was lost in the howling of the wind, but her lantern, held firmly between her feet, made a moving point of light along the highway, going deeper and deeper into the dark country.

II

On one of the ridges of that wintry waste stood the low log house in which John Bergson was dying. The Bergson homestead was easier to find than many another, because it overlooked Norway Creek, a shallow, muddy stream that sometimes flowed, and sometimes stood still, at the bottom of a winding ravine with steep, shelving sides overgrown with brush and cottonwoods and dwarf ash. This creek gave a sort of identity to the farms that bordered upon it. Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening. The houses on the Divide were small and were usually tucked away in low places; you did not see them until you came directly upon them. Most of them were built of the sod itself, and were only the unescapable ground in another form. The roads were but faint tracks in the grass, and the fields were scarcely noticeable. The record of the plow was insignificant, like the feeble scratches on stone left by prehistoric races, so indeterminate that they may, after all, be only the markings of glaciers, and not a record of human strivings.

In eleven long years John Bergson had made but little impression upon the wild land he had come to tame. It was still a wild thing that had its ugly moods; and no one knew when they were likely to come, or why. Mischance hung over it. Its Genius was unfriendly to man. The sick man was feeling this as he lay looking out of the window, after the doctor had left him, on the day following Alexandra’s trip to town. There it lay outside his door, the same land, the same lead-colored miles. He knew every ridge and draw and gully between him and the horizon. To the south, his plowed fields; to the east, the sod stables, the cattle corral, the pond⁠—and then the grass.

Bergson went over in his mind the things that had held him back. One winter his cattle had perished in a blizzard. The next summer one of his plow horses broke its leg in a prairie dog hole and had to be shot. Another summer he lost his hogs from cholera, and a valuable stallion died from a rattlesnake bite. Time and again his crops had failed. He had lost two children, boys, that came between Lou and Emil, and there had been the cost of sickness and death. Now, when he had at last struggled out of debt, he was going to die himself. He was only forty-six, and had, of course, counted upon more time.

Bergson had spent his first five years on the Divide getting into debt, and the last six getting out. He had paid off his mortgages and had ended pretty much where he began, with the land. He owned exactly six hundred and forty acres of what stretched outside his door; his own original homestead and timber claim, making three hundred and twenty acres, and the half-section adjoining, the homestead of a younger brother who had given up the fight, gone back to Chicago to work in a fancy bakery and distinguish himself in a Swedish athletic club. So far John had not attempted to cultivate the second half-section, but used it for pasture land, and one of his sons rode herd there in open weather.

John Bergson had the Old World belief that land, in itself, is desirable. But this land was an enigma. It was like a horse that no one knows how to break to harness, that runs wild and kicks