A Breath of Prairie and other stories Part 14

"Yes, I know," acquiesced Ichabod.

The agent took a chair behind the battered pine desk, and pointed to another opposite.

"Any way I can help you?" he suggested.

"Yes," answered Maurice. "I'm thinking of taking a homestead."

The agent looked his visitor up and down and back again; then, being native born, his surprise broke forth in idiom.

"Well, I'm jiggered!" he avowed.

It was Ichabod's turn to make observation.

"I believe you; you look it," he corroborated at length.

Again the little man stared; and in the silence following, a hungry-looking bird-dog thrust his thin muzzle in at the door, and sniffed.

"Get out," shouted the owner at the intruder, adding in extenuation: "I'm busy." He certainly was "jiggered."

Ichabod came to the rescue.

"I called to learn how one goes at it to take a claim," he explained.

"The _modus operandi_ isn't exactly clear in my mind."

The agent braced up in his chair.

"I suppose you'll say it's none of my business," he commented, "but as a speculation you'd do a lot better to buy up the claims of poor cusses who have to relinquish, than to settle yourself."

"I'm not speculating. I expect to build a house, and live here."

"As a friend, then, let me tell you you'll never stand it." A stubby thumb made motion up the narrow street. "You see this town. I won't say what it is--you realize for yourself; but bad as it is, it's advanced civilization alongside of the country. You'll have to go ten miles out to get any land that's not taken." He stopped and lit his pipe. "Do you know what it means to live alone ten miles out on the prairie?"

"I've never lived in the country."

"I'll tell you, then, what it means." He put down his pipe and looked out at the open door. His face changed; became softer, milder, younger. His voice, when he spoke, added to the impression of reminiscence, bearing an almost forgotten tone of years ago.

"The prairie!" he apostrophized. "It means the loneliest place on G.o.d's earth. It means that living there, in life you bury yourself, your hopes, your ambitions. It means you work ever to forget the past--and fail. It means self, always; morning, noon, night; until the very solitude becomes an incubus. It means that in time you die, or, from being a man, become as the cattle." The speaker turned for the first time to the tall man before him, his big blue eyes wide open and round, his voice an entreaty.

"Don't move into it, man. It's death and worse than death to such as you! You're too old to begin. One must be born to the life; must never have known another. Don't do it, I say."

Ichabod Maurice, listening, read in that appeal, beneath the words, the wild, unsatisfied tale of a disappointed human life.

"You are dissatisfied, lonesome--There was a time years ago perhaps--"

"I don't know." The glow had pa.s.sed and the face was old again, and heavy. "I remember nothing. I'm dead, dead." He drew a rough map from his pocket and spread it out before him.

"If you'll move close, please, I'll show you the open lands."

For an hour he explained homesteads, preemptions and tree claims, and the method of filing and proving up. At parting, Ichabod held out his hand.

"I thank you for your advice," he said.

The man behind the desk puffed stolidly.

"But don't intend to follow it," he completed.

Instinctively, metaphor sprang to the lips of Ichabod Maurice.

"A small speck of circ.u.mstance, which is near, obliterates much that is in the distance." He turned toward the door. "I shall not be alone."

The little agent smoked on in silence for some minutes, gazing motionless at the doorway through which Ichabod had pa.s.sed out. Again the lean bird-dog thrust in an apologetic head, dutifully awaiting recognition. At length the man shook his pipe clean, and leaned back in soliloquy.

"Man, woman, human nature; habit, solitude, the prairie." He spoke each word slowly, and with a shake of his head. "He's mad, mad; but I pity him"--a pause--"for I know."

The dog whined an interruption from the doorway, and the man looked up.

"Come in, boy," he said, in recognition.

CHAPTER III--THE WONDER OF PRAIRIE

Ichabod and Camilla selected their claim together. A fair day's drive it was from the little town; a half-mile from the nearest neighbor, a Norwegian, without two-score English words in his vocabulary. Level it was, as the surface of a lake or the plane of a railroad bed.

Together, too, they chose the spot for their home. Camilla sobbed over the word; but she was soon dry-eyed and smiling again. Afterwards, side by side, they did much journeying to and from the nearest sawmill--each trip through a day and a night--thirty odd miles away.

The mill was a small, primitive affair, almost lost in the straggling box-elders and soft maples that bordered the muddy Missouri, producing, amid noisy protestations, the most despisable of all lumber on the face of the globe--twisting, creeping, crawling cottonwood.

Having the material on the spot, Ichabod built the house himself, after a plan never before seen of man; joint product of his and Camilla's brains. It took a month to complete; and in the meantime, each night they threw their tired bodies on the brown earth, indifferent to the thin canvas, which alone was spread between them and the stars.

Too utterly weary for immediate sleep, they listened to the sounds of animal life--wholly unfamiliar to ears urban trained--as they stood out distinct by contrast with a silence otherwise absolute as the grave.

... The sharp bark of the coyote, near or far away; soft as an echo, the gently cadenced tremolo of the prairie owl. To these, the mere opening numbers of the nightly concerts, the two exotics would listen wonderingly; then, of a sudden, typical, indescribable, lonely as death, there would boom the cry which, as often as it was repeated, recalled to Ichabod's mind the words of the little man in the land-office, "loneliest sound on earth"--the sound which, once heard, remains forever vivid--the night call of the prairie rooster. Even now, new and fascinating as it all was, at the last wailing cry the two occupants of the tent would reach out in the darkness until their hands met. Not till then would they sleep.

In May, they finished and moved their few belongings into the odd little two-room house. True to instinct, Ichabod had built a fireplace, though looking in any direction until the earth met the sky, not a tree was visible; and Camilla had added a cozy reading corner, which soon developed into a sleeping corner,--out-of-door occupations in sun and wind being insurmountable obstacles to mental effort.

But what matter! One straggling little folio, the local newspaper, made its way into the corner each week--and that was all. They had cut themselves off from the world, deliberately, irrevocably. It was but natural that they should sleep. All dead things sleep!

Month after month slipped by, and the first ripple of local excitement and curiosity born of their advent subsided. Ichabod knew nothing of farming, but to learn was simple. It needed only that he watch what his neighbors were doing, and proceed to do likewise. He learned soon to hold a breaking-plough in the tough prairie sod, and to swear mightily when it balked at an unusually tough root. As well, he came to know the oily feel of flax as he scattered it by hand over the brown breaking. Later he learned the smell of buckwheat blossoms, and the delicate green coloring of sod corn, greener by contrast with its dark background.

Nor was Camilla idle. The dresses she had brought with her, dainty creations of foreign make, soon gave way to domestic productions of gingham and print. In these, the long brown hands neatly gloved, she struggled with a tiny garden, becoming in ratio as pa.s.sed the weeks, warmer, browner, and healthier.

"Are you happy?" asked Ichabod, one day, observing her thus amid the fruits of her hands.

Camilla hesitated. Catching her hand, Ichabod lifted her chin so that their eyes met.

"Tell me, are you happy?" he repeated.

Another pause, though her eyes did not falter.