A Mountain Woman Part 3

"Yes, yes," cried Jim, enthusiastically, "it is different! It is the finest country in the world! You never feel shut in. You can always see off. I feel at home after I get in Nebraska. I'd choke back where you live, with all those little gullies and the trees everywhere. It's a mystery to me how farmers have patience to work there."

Annie opened her eyes. There was evidently more than one way of looking at a question. The farm-houses seemed very low and mean to her, as she looked at them from the window. There were no fences, excepting now and then the inhospitable barbed wire. The door-yards were bleak to her eyes, without the ornamental shrubbery which every farmer in her part of the country was used to tending. The cattle stood unshedded in their corrals. The reapers and binders stood rusting in the dull drizzle.

"How s.h.i.+ftless!" cried Annie, indignantly. "What do these men mean by letting their machinery lie out that way? I should think one winter of lying out would hurt it more than three summers of using."

"It does. But sheds are not easily had. Lumber is dear."

"But I should think it would be economy even then."

"Yes," he said, "perhaps. But we all do that way out here. It takes some money for a man to be economical with. Some of us haven't even that much."

There was a six-mile ride from the station. The horses were waiting, hitched up to a serviceable light wagon, and driven by the "help." He was a thin young man, with red hair, and he blushed vicariously for Jim and Annie, who were really too entertained with each other, and at the idea of the new life opening up before them, to think anything about blus.h.i.+ng. At the station, a number of men insisted on shaking hands with Jim, and being introduced to his wife. They were all bearded, as if shaving were an unnecessary labor, and their trousers were tucked in dusty top-boots, none of which had ever seen blacking. Annie had a sense of these men seeming unwashed, or as if they had slept in their clothes.

But they had kind voices, and their eyes were very friendly. So she shook hands with them all with heartiness, and asked them to drive out and bring their womenkind.

"I am going to make up my mind not to be lonesome," she declared; "but, all the same, I shall want to see some women."

Annie had got safe on the high seat of the wagon, and was balancing her little feet on the inclined foot-rest, when a woman came running across the street, calling aloud,--

"Mr. Lancy! Mr. Lancy! You're not going to drive away without introducing me to your wife!"

She was a thin little woman, with movements as nervous and as graceless as those of a gra.s.shopper. Her dun-colored garments seemed to have all the hue bleached out of them with wind and weather. Her face was brown and wrinkled, and her bright eyes flashed restlessly, deep in their sockets. Two front teeth were conspicuously missing; and her faded hair was blown in wisps about her face. Jim performed the introduction, and Annie held out her hand. It was a pretty hand, delicately gloved in dove color. The woman took it in her own, and after she had shaken it, held it for a silent moment, looking at it. Then she almost threw it from her. The eyes which she lifted to scan the bright young face above her had something like agony in them. Annie blushed under this fierce scrutiny, and the woman, suddenly conscious of her demeanor, forced a smile to her lips.

"I'll come out an' see yeh," she said, in cordial tones. "May be, as a new housekeeper, you'll like a little advice. You've a nice place, an' I wish yeh luck."

"Thank you. I'm sure I'll need advice," cried Annie, as they drove off.

Then she said to Jim, "Who is that old woman?"

"Old woman? Why, she ain't a day over thirty, Mis' Dundy ain't."

Annie looked at her husband blankly. But he was already talking of something else, and she asked no more about the woman, though all the way along the road the face seemed to follow her. It might have been this that caused the tightening about her heart. For some way her vivacity had gone; and the rest of the ride she asked no questions, but sat looking straight before her at the northward stretching road, with eyes that felt rather than saw the brown, bare undulations, rising every now and then clean to the sky; at the side, little famished-looking houses, unacquainted with paint, disorderly yards, and endless reaches of furrowed ground, where in summer the corn had waved.

The horses needed no indication of the line to make them turn up a smooth bit of road that curved away neatly 'mid the ragged gra.s.ses.

At the end of it, in a clump of puny scrub oaks, stood a square little house, in uncorniced simplicity, with blank, uncurtained windows staring out at Annie, and for a moment her eyes, blurred with the cold, seemed to see in one of them the despairing face of the woman with the wisps of faded hair blowing about her face.

"Well, what do you think of it?" Jim cried, heartily, swinging her down from her high seat, and kissing her as he did so. "This is your home, my girl, and you are as welcome to it as you would be to a palace, if I could give it to you."

Annie put up her hands to hide the trembling of her lips; and she let Jim see there were tears in her eyes as an apology for not replying. The young man with the red hair took away the horses, and Jim, with his arm around his wife's waist, ran toward the house and threw open the door for her to enter. The intense heat of two great stoves struck in their faces; and Annie saw the big burner, erected in all its black hideousness in the middle of the front room, like a sort of household hoodoo, to be constantly propitiated, like the G.o.ds of Greece; and in the kitchen, the new range, with a distracted tea-kettle leaping on it, as if it would like to loose its fetters and race away over the prairie after its cousin, the locomotive.

It was a house of four rooms, and a glance revealed the fact that it had been provided with the necessaries.

"I think we can be very comfortable here," said Jim, rather doubtfully.

Annie saw she must make some response. "I am sure we can be more than comfortable, Jim," she replied. "We can be happy. Show me, if you please, where my room is. I must hang my cloak up in the right place so that I shall feel as if I were getting settled."

It was enough. Jim had no longer any doubts. He felt sure they were going to be happy ever afterward.

It was Annie who got the first meal; she insisted on it, though both the men wanted her to rest. And Jim hadn't the heart to tell her that, as a general thing, it would not do to put two eggs in the corn-cake, and that the beefsteak was a great luxury. When he saw her about to break an egg for the coffee, however, he interfered.

"The sh.e.l.ls of the ones you used for the cake will settle the coffee just as well," he said. "You see we have to be very careful of eggs out here at this season."

"Oh! Will the sh.e.l.ls really settle it? This is what you must call prairie lore. I suppose out here we find out what the real relations of invention and necessity are--eh?"

Jim laughed disproportionately. He thought her wonderfully witty. And he and the help ate so much that Annie opened her eyes. She had thought there would be enough left for supper. But there was nothing left.

For the next two weeks Jim was able to be much with her; and they amused themselves by decorating the house with the bright curtainings that Annie had brought, and putting up shelves for a few pieces of china. She had two or three pictures, also, which had come from her room in her old home, and some of those useless dainty things with which some women like to litter the room.

"Most folks," Jim explained, "have to be content with one fire, and sit in the kitchen; but I thought, as this was our honeymoon, we would put on some lugs."

Annie said nothing then; but a day or two after she ventured,--

"Perhaps it would be as well now, dear, if we kept in the kitchen. I'll keep it as bright and pleasant as I can. And, anyway, you can be more about with me when I'm working then. We'll lay a fire in the front-room stove, so that we can light it if anybody comes. We can just as well save that much."

Jim looked up brightly. "All right," he said. "You're a sensible little woman. You see, every cent makes a difference. And I want to be able to pay off five hundred dollars of that mortgage this year."

So, after that, they sat in the kitchen; and the fire was laid in the front room, against the coming of company. But no one came, and it remained unlighted.

Then the season began to show signs of opening,--bleak signs, hardly recognizable to Annie; and after that Jim was not much in the house.

The weeks wore on, and spring came at last, dancing over the hills. The ground-birds began building, and at four each morning awoke Annie with their sylvan opera. The creek that ran just at the north of the house worked itself into a fury and bl.u.s.tered along with much noise toward the great Platte which, miles away, wallowed in its vast sandy bed. The hills flushed from brown to yellow, and from mottled green to intensest emerald, and in the superb air all the winds of heaven seemed to meet and frolic with laughter and song.

Sometimes the mornings were so beautiful that, the men being afield and Annie all alone, she gave herself up to an ecstasy and kneeled by the little wooden bench outside the door, to say, "Father, I thank Thee,"

and then went about her work with all the poem of nature rhyming itself over and over in her heart.

It was on such a day as this that Mrs. Dundy kept her promise and came over to see if the young housekeeper needed any of the advice she had promised her. She had walked, because none of the horses could be spared. It had got so warm now that the fire in the kitchen heated the whole house sufficiently, and Annie had the rooms clean to exquisiteness. Mrs. Dundy looked about with envious eyes.

"How lovely!" she said.

"Do you think so?" cried Annie, in surprise. "I like it, of course, because it is home, but I don't see how you could call anything here lovely."

"Oh, you don't understand," her visitor went on. "It's lovely because it looks so happy. Some of us have--well, kind o' lost our grip."

"It's easy to do that if you don't feel well," Annie remarked sympathetically. "I haven't felt as well as usual myself, lately. And I do get lonesome and wonder what good it does to fix up every day when there is no one to see. But that is all nonsense, and I put it out of my head."

She smoothed out the clean lawn ap.r.o.n with delicate touch. Mrs. Dundy followed the movement with her eyes.

"Oh, my dear," she cried, "you don't know nothin' about it yet! But you will know! You will!" and those restless, hot eyes of hers seemed to grow more restless and more hot as they looked with infinite pity at the young woman before her.

Annie thought of these words often as the summer came on, and the heat grew. Jim was seldom to be seen now. He was up at four each morning, and the last ch.o.r.e was not completed till nine at night. Then he threw himself in bed and lay there log-like till dawn. He was too weary to talk much, and Annie, with her heart aching for his fatigue, forbore to speak to him. She cooked the most strengthening things she could, and tried always to look fresh and pleasant when he came in. But she often thought her pains were in vain, for he hardly rested his sunburned eyes on her. His skin got so brown that his face was strangely changed, especially as he no longer had time to shave, and had let a rough beard straggle over his cheeks and chin. On Sundays Annie would have liked to go to church, but the horses were too tired to be taken out, and she did not feel well enough to walk far; besides, Jim got no particular good out of walking over the hills unless he had a plough in his hand.

Harvest came at length, and the crop was good. There were any way from three to twenty men at the house then, and Annie cooked for all of them.

Jim had tried to get some one to help her, but he had not succeeded.

Annie strove to be brave, remembering that farm-women all over the country were working in similar fas.h.i.+on. But in spite of all she could do, the days got to seem like nightmares, and sleep between was but a brief pause in which she was always dreaming of water, and thinking that she was stooping to put fevered lips to a running brook. Some of these men were very disgusting to Annie. Their manners were as bad as they could well be, and a coa.r.s.e word came naturally to their lips.

"To be master of the soil, that is one thing," said she to herself in sickness of spirit; "but to be the slave of it is another. These men seem to have got their souls all covered with muck." She noticed that they had no idea of amus.e.m.e.nt. They had never played anything. They did not even care for base-ball. Their idea of happiness appeared to be to do nothing; and there was a good part of the year in which they were happy,--for these were not for the most part men owning farms; they were men who hired out to help the farmer. A good many of them had been farmers at one time and another, but they had failed. They all talked politics a great deal,--politics and railroads. Annie had not much patience with it all. She had great confidence in the course of things.

She believed that in this country all men have a fair chance. So when it came about that the corn and the wheat, which had been raised with such incessant toil, brought them no money, but only a loss, Annie stood aghast.

"I said the rates were ruinous," Jim said to her one night, after it was all over, and he had found out that the year's slavish work had brought him a loss of three hundred dollars; "it's been a conspiracy from the first. The price of corn is all right. But by the time we set it down in Chicago we are out eighteen cents a bushel. It means ruin. What are we going to do? Here we had the best crop we've had for years--but what's the use of talking! They have us in their grip."

"I don't see how it is," Annie protested. "I should think it would be for the interest of the roads to help the people to be as prosperous as possible."