A Breath of Prairie and other stories Part 15

"Happier than I ever thought to be." She touched his sleeve tenderly.

"But not completely so, for--" she was not looking at him now,--"for I love you, and--and--I'm a woman."

They said no more; and though Ichabod went back to his team, it was not to work. For many minutes he stood motionless, a new problem of right and wrong throbbing in his brain.

Fall came slowly, bringing the drowsy, hazy days of so-called Indian Summer. It was the season of thres.h.i.+ng, and all day long to the drowse of the air was added, near and afar, all-pervading through the stillness, the sleepy hum of the separator. Typical voice of the prairie was that busy drone, penetrating to the ears as the ubiquitous odor of the buffalo gra.s.s to the nostril, again bearing resemblance in that, once heard, memory would reproduce the sound until recollection was no more.

Winter followed, and they, who had thought the earth quiet before, found it still now indeed. Even the voice of the prairie-chicken was hushed; only the sharp knife-like cutting of spread wings told of a flock's pa.s.sage at night. The level country, mottled white with occasional drifts, and brown from spots blown bare by the wind, stretched out seemingly interminable, until the line of earth and sky met.

Idle perforce, the two exotics would stand for hours in the suns.h.i.+ne of their open doorway, shading their eyes from the glare and looking out, out into the distance that was as yet only a name--and that the borrowed name of an Indian tribe.

"What a country!" Camilla would say, struck each time anew with a never-ending wonder.

"Yes, what a country," Ichabod would echo, unconscious that he had repeated the same words in the same way a score of times before.

In January, a blizzard settled upon them, and for two days and nights they took turns keeping the big kitchen stove red hot. The West knows no such storms, now. Man has not only changed the face of the earth, but, in so doing, has annihilated that terror of the past--the Dakota blizzard.

In those days, though, it was very real, as Ichabod learned. He had prepared for winter, by hauling a huge pile of cordwood and stacking it, as a protection to windward, the full length of the little cabin, thinking the spot always accessible; but he had builded in ignorance.

The snow first commenced falling in the afternoon. By the next morning the tiny house was buried to the window sashes. Looking out, there could be seen but an indistinct slanting white wall, scarcely ten feet away: a screen through which the sunlight filtered dimly, like the solemn haze of a church. The earth was not silent, now. The falling of the sleet and snow was as the striking of fine shot, and the sound of the wind a steady unceasing moan, resembling the sigh of a big dynamo at a distance.

Slowly, inch by inch, during that day the snow crept up the window panes until, before the coming of darkness without, it fell within.

Banked though they were on three sides, on the fourth side, unprotected, the cold penetrated bitterly,--a cold no living thing could withstand without shelter. Then it was that Ichabod and Camilla feared to sleep, and that the long vigil began.

By the next morning there was no light from the windows. The snow had drifted level with the eaves. Ichabod stood in the narrow window frame, and, lowering the gla.s.s from the top, beat a hole upward with a pole to admit air. Through the tunnel thus formed there filtered the dull gray light of day: and at its end, obstructing, there stood revealed a slanting drab wall,--a condensed milky way.

The storm was yet on, and he closed the window. To get outside for fuel that day was impossible, so with an axe Ichabod chopped a hole through the wall into the big pile, and on wood thus secured sawed steadily in the tiny kitchen, while the kerosene lamp at his side sputtered, and the fire crackled in a silence, like that surrounding a hunted animal in its den.

Many usual events had occurred in the lives of the wandering Ichabod and Camilla, which had been forgotten; but the memory of that day, the overwhelming, incontestible knowledge of the impotency of wee, restless, inconsequent man, they were never to forget.

"Tiny, tiny, mortal!" laughed the storm. "To think you would combat Nature, would defy her, the power of which I am but one of many, many manifestations!" And it laughed again. The two prisoners, listening, their ears to the tunnel, heard the sound, and felt to the full its biting mockery.

Next day the siege was raised, and the sun smiled as only the sun can smile upon miles and miles of dazzling snow crystals. Ichabod climbed out--by way of the window route--and worked for hours with a shovel before he had a channel from the tiny, submerged shanty to the light of day beyond. Then together he and Camilla stood side by side in the doorway, as they had done so many times before, looking about them at the boundless prairie, drifted in waves of snow like the sea: the wonder of it all, ever new, creeping over them.

"What a country!" voiced Camilla.

"What a country, indeed," echoed Ichabod.

"Lonely and mysterious as Death."

"Yes, as Death or--Life."

CHAPTER IV--A REVELATION

Time, unchanging automaton, moved on until late spring. Paradox of nature, the warm brown tints of chilly days gave place under the heat of slanting suns to the cool green of summer. All at once, sudden as though autochthonal, there appeared meadow-larks and blackbirds: dead weeds or man-erected posts serving in lieu of trees as vantage points from which to sing. Ground squirrels whistled cheerily from newly broken fields and roadways. Coveys of quail, tame as barn-yard fowls, played about the beaten paths, and ran pattering in the dust ahead of each pa.s.sing team. Again, from its winter's rest, lonely, uncertain as to distance, came the low, booming call of the prairie rooster. Nature had awakened, and the joy of that awakening was upon the land.

Of a morning in May the faded, dust-covered day-coach drew in at the tiny prairie village. A little man alighted. He stood a moment on the platform, his hands deep in his pockets, a big black cigar between his teeth, and looked out over the town. The coloring of the short straggling street was more weather-stained than a year ago, yet still very new, and the newcomer smiled as he looked; a big broad smile that played about his lips, turning up the corners of his brown moustache, showing a flash of white teeth, and lighting a pair of big blue eyes which lay, like a woman's, beneath heavy lashes. In youth, that smile would have been a grin; but it was no grin now. The man was far from youth, and about the mouth and eyes were deep lines, which told of one who knew of the world.

Slowly the smile disappeared, and as it faded the little man puffed harder at the cigar. Evidently something he particularly wished to explain would not become clear to his mind.

"Of all places," he soliloquized, "to have chosen--this!"

He started up the street, over the irregular warping sidewalk.

"Hotel, sir-r?" The formula was American, the trilling r's distinctly German.

The traveller turned at the sound, to make acquaintance with Hans Becher; for it was Hans Becher, very much metamorphosed from the retiring German of a year ago. He made the train regularly now.

The small man nodded and held out his grip; together they walked up the street. In front of the hotel they stopped, and the stranger pulled out his watch.

"Is there a livery here?" he asked.

"Yes; at the street end--the side to the left hand."

"Thanks. I'll be back with you this evening."

Hans Becher stared, open-mouthed, as the man moved off.

"You will not to dinner return?"

The little man stopped, and smiled without apparent reason.

"No. Keep the grip. I expect to lunch," again he smiled without provocation, "elsewhere. By the way," he added, as an afterthought, "can you tell me where Mr. Maurice--Ichabod Maurice--lives?"

The German nodded violent confirmation of a direction indicated by his free hand.

"Straight out, eight miles. Little house with _paint_"--strong emphasis on the last--"_white_ paint."

"Thanks."

Hans saw the escape of an opportunity.

"They are friends of yours, perhaps?"--he grasped at it.

The little man did not turn, but the smile that seemed almost a habit, sprang to his face.

"Yes, they're--friends of mine," he corroborated.

Hans, personification of knowledge, stood bobbing on the doorstep, until the trail of smoke vanished from sight, then brought the satchel inside and set it down hard.

"Her brother has come," he announced to the wide-eyed Minna.

"_Wessen Bruder?_" Minna was obviously excited, as attested by the lapse from English.

"Are we not now Americans naturalized?" rebuked Hans, icily. Suddenly he thawed. "Whose brother! The brother of Camilla Maurice, to be sure."

Minna scrutinized the bag, curiously.