A SON OF THE MIDDLE BORDER THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED tOXDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Lit TORONTO A SON OF THE MIDDLE BORDER BY HAMLIN GARLAND WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY ALICE BARBER STEPHENS THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1928 .,v.x . ( - * 204 221 234 248 26'; PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA COPYRIGHT, 1914 AND 1917 BY P. F. COLLIER & SON COPYRIGHT, 1917 BY HAMLIN GARLAND Set up and electrotyped. Published August, 1917. Reprinted March, 1925, December, 1925. Reissued, January, 1927, February, 1928. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. HOME FROM THE WAR . . , , i II. THE McCLiNTOCKS 14 III. THE HOME IN THE COULEE 27 IV. FATHER SELLS THE FARM 42 V. THE LAST THRESHING IN THE COULEE 50 VI. DAVID AND ms VIOLIN 59 VII. WlNNESHEIK "WOODS AND PRAIRIE LANDS " 68 VIII. WE MOVE AGAIN 79 IX. OUR FIRST WINTER ON THE PRAIRIE 85 X. THE HOMESTEAD ON THE KNOLL 99 XL SCHOOL LIFE 107 XII. CHORES AND ALMANACS 116 XIII. BOY LIFE ON THE PRAIRIE 125 XIV. WHEAT AND THE HARVEST 144 XV. HARRIET GOES AWAY 161 XVI. WE MOVE TO TOWN 173 XVII. A TASTE OF VILLAGE LIFE 189 XVIII. BACK TO THE FARM 204 XIX. END OF SCHOOL DAYS 221 XX. THE LAND OF THE DAKOTAS 234 XXI. THE GRASSHOPPER AND THE ANT 248 XXII. WE DISCOVER NEW ENGLAND 267 V Contents CHAPTER PAGE XXIII. COASTING DOWN MT. WASHINGTON 279 XXIV. TRAMPING, NEW YORK, WASHINGTON, AND CHICAGO 287 XXV. THE LAND OF THE STRADDLE-BUG 301 XXVI. ON TO BOSTON 318 XXVII, ENTER A FRIEND 333 XXVIII. A VISIT TO THE WEST 353 XXIX. I JOIN THE ANTI-POVERTY BRIGADE 375 XXX. MY MOTHER is STRICKEN 396 ^XXXI. MAIN TRAVELLED ROADS 410 XXXII. THE SPIRIT OF REVOLT 421 XXXIII. THE END OF THE SUNSET TRAIL 433 XXXIV. WE Go TO CALIFORNIA 440 XXXV. THE HOMESTEAD IN THE VALLEY 455 r LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE My father's return from the war Frontispiece Father often invited us to his knees 47 Now came the tender farewells 232 The shadows were long on the grass when father rose to reply 236 "I am sorry to have you go " 426 As he played I was a boy again, lying before the fire 452 Vii A SON OF THE MIDDLE BORDER A Son of the Middle Border CHAPTER I Home from the War AX of this universe known to me in the year 1864 was bounded by the wooded hills of a little Wis consin coulee, and its center was the cottage in which my mother was living alone — my father was in the war. As I project myself back into that mystical age, half lights cover most of the valley. The road before our doorstone begins and ends in vague obscurity — and Granma Green's house at the fork of the trail stands on the very edge of the world in a sinister region peopled with bears and other menacing creatures. Beyond this point all is darkness and terror. It is Sunday afternoon and my mother and her three children, Frank, Harriet and I (all in our best dresses) are visiting the Widow Green, our nearest neighbor, a plump, jolly woman whom we greatly love. The house swarms with stalwart men and buxom women and ^e A Son of the Middle Border are all sitting around the table heaped with the remains of a harvest feast. The women are " telling fortunes " by means of tea-grounds. Mrs. Green is the seeress. After shaking the cup with the grounds at the bottom, she turns it bottom side up in a saucer. Then whirling it three times to the right and three times to the left, she lifts it and silently studies the position of the leaves which cling to the sides of the cup, what time we all wait in breathless suspense for her first word. "A soldier is ccnu'ng to you!" she says to my mother. "See," and she points into the cup. We all crowd near, and T perceive a leaf with a stem sticking up from its body like a bayonet over a man's shoulder. "He is al most home," the widow goes on. Then with sudden dra matic turn she waves her hand toward the road, "Heav ens and earth ! " she cries. "There's Richard now ! " We all turn and look toward the road, and there, in deed, is a soldier with a musket on his back, wearily plodding his way up the low hill just north of the gate. He is too far away for mother to call, and besides I think she must have been a little uncertain, for he did not so much as turn his head toward the house. Trem bling with excitement she hurries little Frank into his wagon and telling Hattie to bring me, sets off up the road as fast as she can draw the baby's cart. It all seems a dream to me and I move dumbly, almost stupidly like one in a mist. . . . We did not overtake the soldier, that is evident, for my next vision is that of a blue-coated figure leaning upon the fence, studying with intent gaze our empty cottage. I cannot, even now, precisely divine why he stood thus, sadly contemplating his silent home, — but so it was. His knapsack lay at his feet, his musket was propped against a post on whose top a cat was dream ing, unmindful of the warrior and his folded hands. a Home from the War He did not hear us until we were close upon him, and even after he turned, my mother hesitated, so thin, sa hollow-eyed, so changed was he. " Richard, is that you?" she quaveringly asked. His worn face lighted up. His arms rose. "Yes, Belle ! Here I am/' he answered. Nevertheless though he took my mother in his arms, I could not relate him to the father I had heard so much about. To me he was only a strange man with big eyes and care-worn face. I did not recognize in him anything I had ever known, but my sister, who was two years older than I, went to his bosom of her own motion. She knew him, whilst I submitted to his caresses rather for the reason that my mother urged me forward than be cause of any affection I felt for him. Frank, however, would not even permit a kiss. The gaunt and grizzled stranger terrified him. "Come here, my little man," my father said. — "My little man!" Across the space of half-a-century I can still hear the sad reproach in his voice. "Won't you come and see your poor old father when he comes home from the war? " "My little man!'9 How significant that phrase seems to me now! The war had in very truth come between this patriot and his sons. I had forgotten him — the baby had never known him. Frank crept beneath the rail fence and stood there, well out of reach, like a cautious kitten warily surveying an alien dog. At last the soldier stooped and drawing from his knapsack a big red apple, held it toward the staring babe, confidently calling, "Now, I guess he'll come to his poor old pap home from the war." The mother apologized. "He doesn't know you, Dick. How could he? He was only nine months old when you went away. He'll go to you by and by." A Son of the Middle Border The babe crept slowly toward the shining lure. My father caught him despite his kicking, and hugged him close. "Now I've got you," he exulted. Then we all went into the little front room and the soldier laid off his heavy army shoes. My mother brought a pillow to put under his head, and so at last he stretched out on the floor the better to rest his tired, aching bones, and there I joined him. "Oh, Belle!" he said, in tones of utter content. "This is what I've dreamed about a million times." Frank and I grew each moment more friendly and soon began to tumble over him while mother hastened to cook something for him to eat. He asked for "hot bis cuits and honey and plenty of coffee." That was a mystic hour — and yet how little I can recover of it! The afternoon glides into evening while the soldier talks, and at last we all go out to the barn to watch mother milk the cow. I hear him ask about the- crops, the neighbors. — The sunlight passes. Mother leads the way back to the house. My father follows carrying little Frank in his arms. He is a "strange man" no longer. Each moment his voice sinks deeper into my remembrance. He is my father — that I feel ringing through the dim halls of my consciousness. Harriet clings to his hand in perfect knowledge and confidence. We eat our bread and milk, the trundle-bed is pulled out, we children clamber in, and I go to sleep to the music of his resonant voice re counting the story of the battles he had seen, and the marches he had made. The emergence of an individual consciousness from the void is, after all, the most amazing fact of human life and I should like to spend much of this first chapter in groping about in the luminous shadow of my infant world because, deeply considered, childish impressions are the Home from the War fundamentals upon which an author's fictional out-put is based; but to linger might weary my reader at the out set, although I count myself most fortunate in the fact that my boyhood was spent in the midst of a charming landscape and during a certain heroic era of western settlement. The men and women of that far time loom large in my thinking for they possessed not only the spirit of adven turers but the courage of warriors. Aside from the nat ural distortion of a boy's imagination I am quite sure that the pioneers of 1860 still retained something broad and fine in their action, something a boy might honorably imitate. The earliest dim scene in my memory is that of a soft warm evening. I am cradled in the lap of my sister Harriet who is sitting on the doorstep beneath a low roof. It is mid-summer and at our feet lies a mat of dark-green grass from which a frog is croaking. The stars are out, and above the high hills to the east a mysterious glow is glorifying the sky. The cry of the small animal at last conveys to my sister's mind a notion of distress, and rising she peers closely along the path. Starting back with a cry of alarm, she calls and my mother hurries out. She, too, examines the ground, and at last points out to me a long striped snake with a poor, shrieking little tree-toad in its mouth. The horror of this scene fixes it in my mind. My mother beats the serpent with a stick. The mangled victim hastens away, and the curtain falls. I must have been about four years old at this time, although there is nothing to determine the precise date. Our house, a small frame cabin, stood on the eastern slope of a long ridge and faced across a valley which seemed very wide to me then, and in the middle of it ky a marsh filled with monsters, from which the Water A Son of the Middle Border People sang night by night. Beyond was a wooded mountain. This doorstone must have been a favorite evening seat for my sister, for I remember many other delicious gloamings. Bats whirl and squeak in the odorous dusk. Night hawks whiz and boom, and over the dark forest wall a prodigious moon miraculously rolls. Fire-flies dart through the grass, and in a lone tree just outside the fence, a whippoorwill sounds his plaintive note. Sweet, very sweet, and wonderful are all these! The marsh across the lane was a sinister menacing place even by day for there (so my sister Harriet warned me) serpents swarmed, eager to bite runaway boys. " And if you step in the mud between the tufts of grass," she said, "you will surely sink out of sight." — At night this teeming bog became a place of dank and horrid mystery. Bears and wolves and wildcats were reported as ruling the dark woods just beyond — only the door yard and the road seemed safe for little men — and even there I wished my mother to be within immediate call. My father who had bought his farm "on time," just before the war, could not enlist among the first volun teers, though he was deeply moved to do so, till his land was paid for — but at last in 1863 on the very day that he made the last payment on the mortgage, he put his name down on the roll and went back to his wife, a soldier. I have heard my mother say that this was one of the darkest moments of her life and if you think about it you will understand the reason why. My sister was only five years old, I was three and Frank was a babe in the cradle. Broken hearted at the thought of the long separation, and scared by visions of battle my mother begged the soldier not to go; but he was of the stern stuff which makes patriots — and besides his name was already on the roll, therefore he went away to joi& 6 Home from the War Grant's army at Vicksburg. "What sacrifice! What folly!" said his pacifist neighbors — "to leave your wife and children for an idea, a mere sentiment ; to put your life in peril for a striped silken rag." But he went. For thirteen dollars a month he marched and fought while his plow rusted in the shed and his cattle called to him from their stalls. My conscious memory holds nothing of my mother's agony of waiting, nothing of the dark days when the baby was ill and the doctor far away — but into my sub-conscious ear her voice sank, and the words Grant, Lincoln, Sherman, "furlough," "mustered out," ring like bells, deep-toned and vibrant. I shared dimly in every emotional utterance of the neighbors who came to call and a large part of what I am is due to the impressions of these deeply passionate and poetic years. Dim pictures come to me. I see my mother at the spinning wheel, I help her fill the candle molds. I hold in my hands the queer carding combs with their crinkly teeth, but my first definite connected recollection is the scene of my father's return at the close of the war. I was not quite five years old, and the events of that day are so commingled with later impressions, — ex periences which came long after — that I cannot be quite sure which are true and which imagined, but the picture as a whole is very vivid and very complete. Thus it happened that my first impressions of life were martial, and my training military, for my father brought back from his two years' campaigning under Sherman and Thomas the temper and the habit of a soldier. He became naturally the dominant figure in my hori zon, and his scheme of discipline impressed itself almost at once upon his children. I suspect that we had fallen into rather free and easy habits under mother's government, for she was too jolly, A Son of the Middle Border too tender-hearted, to engender fear in us even when she threatened us with a switch or a shingle. We soon learned, however, that the soldier's promise of punish ment was swift and precise in its fulfillment. We seldom presumed a second time on his forgetfulness or tolerance. We knew he loved us, for he often took us to his knees of an evening and told us stories of marches and battles,; or chanted war-songs for us, but the moments of his tenderness were few and his fondling did not prevent him from almost instant use of the rod if he thought either of us needed it. His own boyhood had been both hard and short. Born of farmer folk in Oxford County, Maine, his early life had been spent on the soil in and about Lock's Mills with small chance of schooling. Later, as a teamster, and finally as shipping clerk for Amos Lawrence, he had enjoyed three mightily improving years in Boston. He loved to tell of his life there, and it is indicative of his character to say that he dwelt with special joy and pride on the actors and orators he had heard. He could de scribe some of the great scenes and repeat a few of the heroic lines of Shakespeare, and the roll of his deep voice as he declaimed, "Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York," thrilled us — filled us with desire of something far off and wonderful. But best of all we loved to hear him tell of "Logan at Peach Tree Creek," and "Kilpatrick on the Granny White Turnpike." He was a vivid and concise story-teller and his words brought to us (sometimes all too clearly), the tragic happenings of the battle-fields of Atlanta and Nashville. To him Grant, Lincoln, Sherman and Sheridan were among the noblest men of the world, and he would not tolerate any criticism of them. Next to his stories of the war I think we loved best 8 Home from the War to have him picture "the pineries" of Wisconsin, for during his first years in the State he had been both lumberman and raftsman, and his memory held de lightful tales of wolves and bears and Indians. He often imitated the howls and growls and actions of the wild animals with startling realism, and his river narratives were full of unforgettable phrases like "the Jinny Bull Falls," "Old Moosinee" and "running the rapids." He also told us how his father and mother came west by way of the Erie Canal, and in a steamer on the Great Lakes, of how they landed in Milwaukee with Susan, their twelve-year-old daughter, sick with the smallpox; of how a farmer from Monticello carried them in his big farm wagon over the long road to their future home in Green county and it was with deep emotion that he described the bitter reception they encountered in the village. It appears that some of the citizens in a panic of dread were all for driving the Garlands out of town — then uprose old Hugh McClintock, big and gray as a grizzly bear, and put himself between the leader of the mob and its victims, and said, "You shall not lay hands upon them. Shame on ye!" And such was the powef of his mighty arm and such the menace of his flashing eyes that no one went further with the plan of casting the new comers into the wilderness. Old Hugh established them in a lonely cabin on the edge of the village, and thereafter took care of them, nursing grandfather with his own hands until he was well. "And thaVs the way the McClintocks and the Garlands first joined forces," my father often said in ending the tale. "But the name of the man who carried your Aunt Susan in his wagon from Milwaukee to Monticello I never knew." A Son of the Middle Border I cannot understand why that sick girl did not die on that long journey over the rough roads of Wisconsin, and what it all must have seemed to my gentle New England grandmother I grieve to think about. Beau tiful as the land undoubtedly was, such an experience should have shaken her faith in western men and western hospitality. But apparently it did not, for I never heard her allude to this experience with bitterness. In addition to his military character, Dick Garland also carried with him the odor of the pine forest and ex hibited the skill and training of a forester, for in those early days even at the time when I began to remember the neighborhood talk, nearly every young man who could get away from the farm or the village went north, in November, into the pine woods which covered the entire upper part of the State, and my father, who had been a raftsman and timber cruiser and pilot ever since his coming west, was deeply skilled with axe and steering oars. The lumberman's life at that time was rough but. not vicious, for the men were nearly all of native Amer ican stock, and my father was none the worse for his winters in camp. His field of action as lumberman was for several years, in and around Big Bull Falls (as it was then called), near the present town of Wausau, and during that time he had charge of a crew of loggers in winter and in sum mer piloted rafts of lumber down to Dubuque and other points where saw mills were located. He was called at this time, "Yankee Dick, the Pilot." As a result of all these experiences in the woods, he was almost as much woodsman as soldier in his talk, and the heroic life he had led made him very wonderful in my eyes. According to his account (and I have no reason to doubt it) he had been exceedingly expert in running a raft and could ride a canoe like a Chippewa. 10 Home from the War I remember hearing him very forcefully remark, "God forgot to make the man I could not follow." He was deft with an axe, keen of perception, sure of hand and foot, and entirely capable of holding his own with any man of his weight. Amid much drinking he remained temperate, and strange to say never used tobacco in any form. While not a large man he was nearly six feet in height, deep-chested and sinewy, and of dauntless courage. The quality which defended him from attack was the spirit which flamed from his eagle- gray eyes. Terrifying eyes they were, at times, as I had many occasions to note. As he gathered us all around his knee at night before the fire, he loved to tell us of riding the whirlpools of Big Bull Falls, or of how he lived for weeks on a raft with the water up to his knees (sleeping at night in his wet working clothes), sustained by the blood of youth and the spirit of adventure. His endurance even after his return from the war, was marvellous, although he walked a little bent and with a peculiar measured swinging stride — the stride of Sherman's veterans. As I wras born in the first smoke of the great conflict, so all of my early memories of Green's coulee are per meated with the haze of the passing war-cloud. My sol dier dad taught me the manual of arms, and for a year Harriet and I carried broom-sticks, flourished lath sabers, and hammered on dishpans in imitation of of ficers and drummers. Canteens made excellent water- bottles for the men in the harvest fields, and the long blue overcoats which the soldiers brought back with them from the south lent many a vivid spot of color to that far-off landscape. All the children of our valley inhaled with every breath this mingled air of romance and sorrow, history and song, and through those epic days runs a deep-laid con- XI A Son of the Middle Border sciousness of maternal pain. My mother's side of those long months of waiting was never fully delineated, for she was natively reticent and shy of expression. But piece by piece in later years I drew from her the tale of her long vigil, and obtained some hint of the bitter an guish of her suspense after each great battle. It is very strange, but I cannot define her face as I peer back into those childish times, though I can feel her strong arms about me. She seemed large and quite middle-aged to me, although she was in fact a hand some girl of twenty-three. Only by reference to a rare daguerreotype of the time am I able to correct this childish impression. Our farm lay well up in what is called Green's coulee, in a little valley just over the road which runs along the LaCrosse river in western Wisconsin. It contained one hundred and sixty acres of land which crumpled against the wooded hills on the east and lay well upon a ridge to the west. Only two families lived above us, and over the height to the north was the land of the red people, and small bands of their hunters used occasion ally to come trailing down across our meadow on their way to and from LaCrosse, which was their immemorial trading point. Sometimes they walked into our house, always with out knocking — but then we understood their ways. No one knocks at the wigwam of a red neighbor, and we were not afraid of them, for they were friendly, and our mother often gave them bread and meat which they took (always without thanks) and ate with much relish while sitting beside our fire. All this seemed very curious to us, but as they were accustomed to share their food and lodging with one another so they accepted my mother's bounty in the same matter-of-fact fashion. Once two old fellows, while sitting by the fire, watched 12 Home from the War Frank and me bringing in wood for the kitchen stove, and smiled and muttered between themselves thereat. At last one of them patted my brother on the head and called out admiringly, "Small pappoose, heap work- good!" and we were very proud ot the old man's praise. CHAPTER II The M cClin tocks THE members of my mother's family must have been often at our home during my father's mili tary service in the south, but I have no mental pictures of them till after my father's home-coming in '65. Their names were familiar — were, indeed, like bits of old- fashioned song. "Richard" was a fine and tender word in my ear, but "David" and "Luke," "Deborah" and "Samantha," and especially "Hugh," suggested some thing alien as well as poetic. They all lived somewhere beyond the hills which walled our coulee on the east, in a place called Salem, and I was eager to visit them, for in that direction my universe died away in a luminous mist of unexplored distance. I had some notion of its near-by loveliness for I had once viewed it from the top of the tall bluff which stood like a warder at the gate of our valley, and when one bright morning my father said, "Belle, get ready, and we'll drive over to Grandad's," we all became greatly excited. In those days people did not "call," they went "visitin'." The women took their knitting and stayed all the afternoon and sometimes all night. No one owned a carriage. Each family journeyed in a heavy farm wagon with the father and mother riding high on the wooden spring seat while the children jounced up and down on the hay in the bottom of the box or clung desperately to the side-boards to keep from being jolted 14 The McClintocks out. In such wise we started on our trip to the Me* Clintocks'. The road ran to the south and east around the base of Sugar Loaf Bluff, thence across a lovely valley and over a high wooded ridge which was so steep that at times we rode above the tree tops. As father stopped the horses to let them rest, we children gazed about us with wondering eyes. Far behind us lay the LaCrosse valley through which a slender river ran, while before us towered wind-worn cliffs of stone. It was an explor ing expedition for us. The top of the divide gave a grand view of wooded hills to the northeast, but father did not wait for us to enjoy that. He started the team on the perilous down ward road without regard to our wishes, and so we bumped and clattered to the bottom, all joy of the scenery swallowed up in fear of being thrown from the wagon. The roar of a rapid, the gleam of a long curving stream, a sharp turn through a pair of bars, and we found ourselves approaching a low unpainted house which stood on a level bench overlooking a river and its meadows. "There it is. That's Grandad's house," said mother, and peering over her shoulder I perceived a group of people standing about the open door, and heard then- shouts of welcome. My father laughed. "Looks as if the whole Mc- Clintock clan was on parade," he said. It was Sunday and all my aunts and uncles were in holiday dress and a merry, hearty, handsome group they were. One of the men helped my mother out and another, a roguish young fellow with a pock-marked face, snatched me from the wagon and carried me under his arm to the threshold where a short, gray-haired smiling IS A Son of the Middle Border woman was standing. "Mother, here's another grand son for you," he said as he put me at her feet. She greeted me kindly and led me into the house, in which a huge old man with a shock of perfectly white hair was sitting with a Bible on his knee. He had a rugged face framed in a circle of gray beard and his glance was absent-minded and remote. "Father," said my grand mother, "Belle has come. Here is one of her boys." Closing his book on his glasses to mark the place of his reading he turned to greet my mother who entered at this moment. His way of speech was as strange as his look and for a few moments I studied him with childish intentness. His face was rough-hewn as a rock but it was kindly, and though he soon turned from his guests and resumed his reading no one seemed to resent it. Young as I was I vaguely understood his mood. He was glad to see us but he was absorbed in something else, something of more importance, at the moment, than the chatter of the family. My uncles who came in a few moments later drew my attention and the white- haired dreamer fades from this scene. The room swarmed with McClintocks. There was William, a black-bearded, genial, quick-stepping giant who seized me by the collar with one hand and lifted me off the floor as if I were a puppy just to see how much I weighed; and David, a tall young man with handsome dark eyes and a droop at the outer corner of his eyelids which gave him in repose a look of melancholy distinc tion. He called me and I went to him readily for I loved him at once. His voice pleased me and I could see that my mother loved him too. From his knee I became acquainted with the girls of the family. Rachel, a demure and sweet-faced young woman, and Samantha, the beauty of the family, won 16 The McClintocks my instant admiration, but Deb, as everybody called her, repelled me by her teasing ways. They were all gay as larks and their hearty clamor, so far removed from the quiet gravity of my grandmother Garland's house, pleased me. I had an immediate sense of being per* fectly at home. There was an especial reason why this meeting should have been, as it was, a joyous hour. It was, in fact, a family reunion after the war. The dark days of sixty- five were over. The Nation was at peace and its warriors mustered out. True, some of those who had gone "down South" had not returned. Luke and Walter and Hugh were sleeping in The Wilderness, but Frank and Richard were safely at home and father was once more the clarion- voiced and tireless young man he had been when he went away to fight. So they all rejoiced, with only a passing tender word for those whose bodies filled a soldier's nameless grave. There were some boys of about my own age, William's sons, and as they at once led me away down into the grove, I can say little of what went on in the house after that. It must have been still in the warm September weather for we climbed the slender leafy trees and swayed and swung on their tip-tops like bobolinks. Perhaps I did not go so very high after all but I had the feeling of being very close to the sky. The blast of a bugle called us to dinner and we all went scrambling up the bank and into the "front room" like a swarm of hungry shotes responding to the call of the feeder. Aunt Deb, however shooed us out into the kitchen. "You can't stay here," she said. "Mother'll feed you in the kitchen." Grandmother was waiting for us and our places were ready, so what did it matter? We had chicken and mashed potato and nice hot biscuit and honey — just as 17 A Son of the Middle Border good as the grown people had and could eat all we wanted without our mothers to bother us. I am quite certain about the honey for I found a bee in one of the cells of my piece of comb, and when I pushed my plate away in dismay grandmother laughed and said, "That is only a little baby bee. You see this is wild honey. Wil liam got it out of a tree and didn't have time to pick all the bees out of it." At this point my memories of this day fuse and flow into another visit to the McClintock homestead which must have taken place the next year, for it is my Jjnal record of my grandmother. I do not recall a single word that she said, but she again waited on us in the kitchen, beaming upon us with love and understanding. I see her also smiling in the midst of the joyous tumult which her children and grandchildren always produced when they met. She seemed content to listen and to serve. She was the mother of seven sons, each a splendid type of sturdy manhood, and six daughters almost equally gifted in physical beauty. Four of the sons stood over six feet in height and were of unusual strength. All of them — men and women alike — were musicians by in^ heritance, and I never think of them without hearing the sound of singing or the voice of the violin. Each of them could play some instrument and some of them could play any instrument. David, as you shall learn, was the finest fiddler of them all. Grandad himself was able to play the violin but he no longer did so. "'Tis the Devil's instrument," he said, but I noticed that he always kept time to it. Grandmother had very little learning. She could read and write of course, and she made frequent pathetic attempts to open her Bible or glance at a newspaper- all to little purpose, for her days were filled from dawn to dark with household duties. 18 The McClintocks I know little of her family history. Beyond the fact that she was born in Maryland and had been always on the border, I have little to record. She was in truth overshadowed by the picturesque figure of her husband who was of Scotch-Irish descent and a most singular and interesting character. He was a mystic as well as a minstrel. He was an "Adventist" — that is to say a believer in the Second Coming of Christ, and a constant student of the Bible, especially of those parts which predicted the heavens rolling together as a scroll, and the destruction of the earth. Notwithstanding his lack of education and his rude exterior, he was a man of marked dignity and so briety of manner. Indeed he was both grave and re mote in his intercourse with his neighbors. He was like Ezekiel, a dreamer of dreams. He loved the Old Testament, particularly those books which consisted of thunderous prophecies and passionate lam entations. The poetry of Isaiah, The visions of The Apocalypse, formed his emotional outlet, his escape into the world of imaginative literature. The songs he loved best were those which described chariots of flaming clouds, the sound of the resurrection trump — or the fields of amaranth blooming "on the other side of Jordan." As I close my eyes and peer back into my obscure childish world I can see him sitting in his straight- backed cane-bottomed chair, drumming on the rungs with his fingers, keeping time to some inaudible tune — or chanting with faintly-moving lips the wondrous words of John or Daniel. He must have been at this time about seventy years of age, but he seemed to me as old as a snow-covered mountain. My belief is that Grandmother did not fully share her husband's faith in The Second Coming but upon 19 A Son of the Middle Border her fell the larger share of the burden of entertainment when Grandad made "the travelling brother" welcome. His was an open house to all who came along the road, and the fervid chantings, the impassioned prayers of these meetings lent a singular air of unreality to the business of cooking or plowing in the fields. I think he loved his wife and children, and yet I never heard him speak an affectionate word to them. He was kind, he was just, but he was not tender. With eyes turned inward, with a mind filled with visions of angel messengers with trumpets at their lips announcing "The Day of Wrath," how could he concern himself with the ordinary affairs of human life? Too old to bind grain in the harvest field, he was occasionally intrusted with the task of driving the reaper or the mower — and generally forgot to oil the bearings. His absent-mindedness was a source of laughter among his sons and sons-in-law. I've heard Frank say: "Dad would stop in the midst of a swath to announce the end of the world." He seldom remembered to put on a hat even in the blazing sun of July and his daughters had to keep an eye on him to be sure he had his vest on right-side out. Grandmother was cheerful in the midst of her toil and discomfort, for what other mother had such a family of noble boys and handsome girls? They all loved her, that she knew, and she was perfectly willing to sacrifice her comfort to promote theirs. Occasionally Samantha or Rachel remonstrated with her for working so hard, but she only put their protests aside and sent them back to their callers, for when the McClintock girls were at home, the horses of their suitors tied before the gate would have mounted a small troop of cavalry. It was well that this pioneer wife was rich in children, for she had little else. I do not suppose she ever knew 20 The McClintocks what it was to have a comfortable well-aired bed-room, even in child-birth. She was practical and a good man ager, and she needed to be, for her husband was as weirdly unworldly as a farmer could be. He was indeed a sa^, husbandman. Only the splendid abundance of the soil and the manual skill of his sons, united to the good management of his wife, kept his family fed and clothed. "What is the use of laying up a store of goods against the early destruction of the world?" he argued. He was bitterly opposed to secret societies, for some reason which I never fully understood, and the only fury I ever knew him to express was directed against these "dens of iniquity." Nearly all his neighbors, like those in our coulee, were^ nativejAmerican as their names indicated. The Dud~ "leys, Elwells, and Griswolds came from Connecticut, the McEldowneys and McKinleys from New York and Ohio, the Baileys and Garlands from Maine. Buoyant, vital, confident, these sons of the border bent to the work of breaking sod and building fence quite in the spirit of sportsmen. They were always racing in those days, rejoicing in their abounding vigor. With them reaping was a game, husking corn a test of endurance and skill, threshing a " bee." It was a Dudley against a McClintock, a Gilfillan against a Garland, and my father's laughing descriptions of the barn-raisings, harvestings and rail-splittings of the valley filled my mind with vivid pictures of manly deeds. Every phase of farm work was carried on by hand. Strength and skill counted high and I had good reason for my idolatry of David and William. With the hearts of woodsmen and fists of sailors they were precisely the type to appeal to the imagination of a boy. Hunters, athletes, skilled horsemen — everything they did was to me heroic. 21 A Son of the Middle Border Frank, smallest of all these sons of Hugh, was not what (in observer would call puny. He weighed nearly one hundred and eighty pounds and never met his match except in his brothers. William could outlift him, David could out-run him and outleap him, but he was more agile than either — was indeed a skilled acrobat. His muscles were prodigious. The calves of his legs would not go into his top boots, and I have heard my father say that once when the "tumbling" in the little country "show" seemed not to his liking, Frank sprang over the ropes into the arena and went around the ring in a series of professional flip-flaps, to the unrestrained delight of the spectators. I did not witness this per formance, I am sorry to say, but I have seen him do somersaults and turn cart-wheels in the dooryard just from the pure joy of living. He could have been a pro fessional acrobat — and he came near to being a pro fessional ball-player. He was always smiling, but his temper was fickle. Anybody could get a fight out of Frank McClintock at any time, simply by expressing a desire for it. To call him a liar was equivalent to contracting a doctor's bill. He loved hunting, as did all his brothers, but was too excitable to be a highly successful shot — whereas William and David were veritable Leather-stockings in their mastery of the heavy, old-fashioned rifle. David was especially dreaded at the turkey shoots of the county. William was over six feet in height, weighed two hun dred and forty pounds, and stood "straight as an Injun." He was one of the most formidable men of the valley — • even at fifty as I first recollect him, he walked with a quick lift of his foot like that of a young Chippewa. To me he was a huge gentle black bear, but I firmly believed he could whip any man in the world — even Uncle David —if he wanted to. I never expected to see him fight, for The McClintocks I could not imagine anybody foolish enough to invite his wrath. Such a man did develop, but not until William was over sixty, gray-haired and ill, and even then it took two strong men to engage him fully, and when it was all over (the contest filled but a few seconds), one assailant could not be found, and the other had to call in a doctor to piece him together again. William did not have a mark — his troubles began when he went home to his quaint little old wife. In some strange way she divined that he had been fighting, and soon drew the story from him. "William McClintock," said she severely, "hain't you old enough to keep your temper and not go brawling around like that and at a school meeting too!" William hung his head. "Well, I dunno! — T suppose my dyspepsy has made me kind o' irritable," he said by way of apology. My father was the historian of most of these exploits on the part of his brothers-in-law, for he loved to exalt their physical prowess at the same time that he deplored their lack of enterprise and system. Certain of their traits he understood well. Others he was never able to comprehend, and I am not sure that they ever quite understood themselves. A deep vein of poetry, of sub-conscious Celtic sadness^ _ran through them all. It was associated with their love" of music and was wordless. Only hints of this endow ment came out now and again, and to the day of his death my father continued to express perplexity, and a kind of irritation at the curious combination of bitterness and jweetness^ sloth and tremendous energy, slovenli ness and exaltation which made Hugh McClintock and his sons the jest and the admiration of those who knew them best. 23 A Son of the Middle Border Undoubtedly to the Elwells and Dudleys, as to most of their definite, practical, orderly and successful New England neighbors, my uncles were merely a good- natured, easy-going lot of " fiddlers," but to me as 1 grew old enough to understand them, they became a group of potential poets, bards and dreamers, inarticu late and moody. They fell easily into somber silence. Even Frank, the most boisterous and outspoken of them all, could be thrown into sudden melancholy by a melody, a line of poetry or a beautiful landscape. The reason for this praise of their quality, if the reason needs to be stated, lies in my feeling of definite indebted ness to them. They furnished much of the charm and poetic suggestion of my childhood. Most of what I have in the way of feeling for music, for rhythm, I derive from my mother's side of the house, for it was almost entirely Celt in every characteristic. She herself was a wordless poet, a sensitive singer of sad romantic songs. Father was by nature an orator and a lover of the drama. So far as I am aware, he never read a poem if he could help it, and yet he responded instantly to music, and was instinctively courtly in manner. His mind was clear, positive and definite, and his utterances fluent. Orderly, resolute and thorough in all that he did, he despised William McClintock's easy-going habits of husbandry, and found David's lack of "push," of business enterprise, deeply irritating. And yet he loved them both and respected my mother for defending them. To me, in those days, the shortcomings of the Me- Clintocks did not appear particularly heinous. All our neighbors were living in log houses and frame shanties built beside the brooks, or set close against the hillsides, and William's small unpainted dwelling seemed a nat ural feature of the landscape, but as the years passed 24 The McCHntocks jtfid other and more enterprising settlers built big barns, and shining white houses, the gray and leaning stables, sagging gates and roofs of my uncle's farm, became a reproach even in my eyes, so that when I visited it for the last time just before our removal to Iowa, I, too, was a little ashamed of it. Its disorder did not diminish my regard for the owner, but I wished he would clean out the stable and prop up the wagon-shed. ^ My grandmother's death came soon after our second visit to the homestead. I have no personal memory of the event, but I heard Uncle David describe it. The setting of the final scene in the drama was humble. The girls were washing clothes in the yard and the silent old mother was getting the mid-day meal. David, as he came in from the field, stopped for a moment with his sisters and in their talk Samantha said: " Mother isn't at all well today." David, looking toward the kitchen, said, "Isn't there some way to keep her from working?" "You know how she is," explained Deborah. "She's worked so long she don't know how to rest. We tried to get her to lie down for an hour but she wouldn't." David was troubled. "She'll have to stop sometime," he said, and then they passed to other things, hearing meanwhile the tread of their mother's busy feet. Suddenly she appeared at the door, a frightened look on her face. "Why, mother! — what is the matter?" asked her daughter. She pointed to her mouth and shook her head, to in dicate that she could not speak. David leaped toward her, but she dropped before he could reach her. Lifting her in his strong arms he laid her on her bed and hastened for the doctor. All in vain! She -5 A Son of the Middle Border sank into unconsciousness and died without a word of farewell. She fell like a soldier in the ranks. Having served uncomplainingly up to the very edge of her evening bivouac, she passed to her final sleep hi silent dignity. CHAPTER HI The Home in the Coulee OUR postoffice was in the village of Onalaska, sit uated at the mouth of the Black River, which came down out of the wide forest lands of the north. It was called a "boom town" for the reason that "booms" or yards for holding pine logs laced the quiet bayou and supplied several large mills with timber. Busy saws clamored from the islands and great rafts of planks and lath and shingles were made up and floated down into the Mississippi and on to southern markets. It was a rude, rough little camp filled with raftsmen, loggers, mill-hands and boomsmen. Saloons abounded and deeds of violence were common, but to me it was a poem. From its position on a high plateau it com manded a lovely southern expanse of shimmering water bounded by purple bluffs. The spires of LaCrosse rose from the smoky distance, and steamships' hoarsely giving voice suggested illimitable reaches of travel. Some day I hoped my father would take me to that shining market-place whereto he carried all our grain. In this village of Onalaska, lived my grandfather and grandmother Garland, and their daughter Susan, whose husband, Richard Bailey, a quiet, kind man, was held in deep affection by us all. Of course he could not quite measure up to the high standards of David and William, even though he kept a store and sold candy, for he could neither kill a bear, nor play the fiddle, nor shoot a gun — • much less turn hand-springs or tame a wild horse, but A Son of the Middle Border we liked him notwithstanding his limitations and were always glad when he came to visit us. Even at - ais time I recognized the wide differences which separated the McClintocks from the Garlands. The fact that my father's people lived to the west and in a town> helped to emphasize the divergence. ~ All the McClintocks were farmers, but grandfather Garland was a carpenter by trade, and a leader in his church which was to him a club, a forum and a commer cial exchange. He was a native of Maine and proud of the fact. His eyes were keen and gray, his teeth fine and white, and his expression stern. His speech was neat and nipping. As a workman he was exact and his tools were always in perfect order. In brief he was a Yankee, as concentrated a bit of New England as was ever trans planted to the border. Hopelessly "sot" in all his eastern ways, he remained the doubter, the critic, all life. We always spoke of him with formal precision as Grandfather Garland, never as "Grandad" or "Gran- pap" as we did in alluding to Hugh McClintock, and his long prayers (pieces of elaborate oratory) wearied us, while those of Grandad, which had the extravagance, the lyrical abandon of poetry, profoundly pleased us. Grandfather's church was a small white building in the edge of the village, Grandad's place of worship was a Vision, a cloudbuilt temple, a house not made with hands. The contrast between my grandmothers was equally wide. Harriet Garland was tall and thin, with a dark and serious face. She was an invalid, and confined to a chair, which stood in the corner of her room. On the walls within reach of her hand hung many small pockets, so ordered that she could obtain her sewing materials without rising. She was always at work when I called, but it was her habit to pause and discover in some one 28 The Home in the Coulee of her receptacles a piece of candy or a stick of "lickerish root" which she gave to me "as a reward for being a good boy." She was always making needle rolls and thimble boxes and no doubt her skill helped to keep the family fed and clothed. Notwithstanding all divergence in the characters of Grandmother Garland and Grandmother McClintock, we held them both in almost equal affection. Serene, patient, bookish, Grandmother Garland brought to us, as to her neighbors in this rude river port, some of the best qualities of intellectual Boston, and from her lips we acquired many of the precepts and proverbs of our Pilgrim forbears. Her influence upon us was distinctly literary. She gloried in New England traditions, and taught us to love the poems of Whittier and Longfellow. It was she who called us to her knee and told us sadly yet benignly of the death of Lincoln, expressing only pity for the misguided assassin. She was a constant advocate of charity, piety, and learning. Always poor, and for many years a cripple, I never heard her complain, and no one, I think, ever saw her face clouded with a frown. Our neighbors in Green's Coulee were all native Amer ican. The first and nearest, Al Randal and his wife and son, we saw often and on the whole liked, but the Whitwells who lived on the farm above us were a con stant source of comedy to my father. Old Port, as he was called, was a mild-mannered man who would have made very little impression on the community, but for his wife, a large and rather unkempt person, who as sumed such man-like freedom of speech that my father was never without an amusing story of her doings. She swore in vigorous pioneer fashion, and dominated her husband by force of lung power as well as by a certain 29 A Son of the Middle Border painful candor. "Port, you're an old fool," she often said to him in our presence. It was her habit to apolo gize to her guests, as they took their seats at her abun dant table, "Wai, now, folks, I'm sorry, but there ain't a blank thing in this house fit for a dawg to eat — " ex pecting of course to have everyone cry out, "Oh, Mrs. Whitwell, this is a splendid dinner!" which they gener ally did. But once my father took her completely aback by rising resignedly from the table — "Come, Belle," said he to my mother, "let's go home. I'm not going to eat food not fit for a dog." The rough old woman staggered under this blow, but quickly recovered. "Dick Garland, you blank fool. Sit down, or I'll fetch you a swipe with the broom." In spite of her profanity and ignorance she wasjiggoji jneighbor and in time of trouble no one was readiejrto relieve any distress in the coulee. However, it was upon Mrs. Randal and the widow Green that my mother called for aid, and I do not think Mrs. Whitwell was ever quite welcome even at our quilting bees, for her (Vloud voice silenced every other, and my mother did not enjoy her vulgar stories. — Yes, I can remember several quilting bees, and I recall molding candles, arid that our "company light" was a large kerosene lamp, in the glass globe of which a strip of red flannel was coiled. Probably this was merely a device to lengthen out the wick, but it made a memorable spot of color in the room — just as the watch-spring gong in the clock gave off a sound of fairy music to my ear. I don't know why the ring of that coil had such a wondrous appeal, but I often climbed upon a chair to rake its spirals with a nail in order that I might float away on its "dying fall." ' Life was primitive in all the homes of the coulee. Money was hard to get. We always had plenty to eat, but little in the way of luxuries. We had few toys 30 The Home in the Coulee except those we fashioned for ourselves, and our gar ments were mostly homemade. I have heard my father say, "Belle could go to town with me, buy the calicoi for a dress and be wearing it for supper" — but I fearl that even this did not happen very often. Her "dress* up" gowns, according to certain precious old tintypes, indicate that clothing was for her only a sort of uni form, — and yet I will not say this made her unhappy. Her face was always smiling. She knit all our socks, made all our shirts and suits. She even carded and spun wool, in addition to her housekeeping, and found time to help on our kites and bows and arrows. Month by month the universe in which I lived light ened and widened. In my visits to Onalaska, I dis covered the great Mississippi River, and the Minnesota Bluffs. The light of knowledge grew stronger. I began to perceive forms and faces which had been hidden in the dusk of babyhood. I heard more and more of La- Crosse, and out of the mist filled lower valley the boom ing roar of steamboats suggested to me distant countries and the sea. My father believed in service. At seven years of age, I had regular duties. I brought firewood to the kitchen and broke nubbins for the calves and shelled corn for the chickens. I have a dim memory of helping him (and grandfather) split oak-blocks into rafting pins in the kitchen. This seems incredible to me now, and yet it must have been so. In summer Harriet and I drove the cows to pasture, and carried "switchel" to the men in the hay-fields by means of a jug hung in the middle of a long stick. Haying was a delightful season to us, for the scythes of the men occasionally tossed up clusters of beautiful strawberries, which we joyfully gathered. I remember A Son of the Middle Border with especial pleasure the delicious shortcakes which my mother made of the wild fruit which we picked in the warm odorous grass along the edge of the meadow. ^ Harvest time also brought a pleasing excitement (something unwonted, something like entertaining visi tors) which compensated for the extra work demanded of us. The neighbors usually came in to help and life was a feast. There was, however, an ever-present menace in our ;lives, the snake! During mid-summer months blue racers and rattlesnakes swa,rmed and the terror of them often chilled our childish hearts. Once Harriet and I, with little Frank in his cart, came suddenly upon a monster diamond-back rattler sleeping by the roadside. In our mad efforts to escape, the car was overturned and the baby scattered in the dust almost within reach of the snake. As soon as she realized what had happened, Harriet ran back bravely, caught up the child and brought him safely away. Another day, as I was riding on the load of wheat- sheaves, one of the men, in pitching the grain to the wagon lifted a rattlesnake with his fork. I saw it writhing in the bottom of the sheaf, and screamed out, "A snake, a snake!" It fell across the man's arm but slid harmlessly to the ground, and he put a tine through it. As it chanced to be just dinner time he took it with him to the house and fastened it down near the door of a coop in which an old hen and her brood of chickens were confined. I don't know why he did this but it threw the mother hen into such paroxysms of fear that she dashed herself again and again upon the slats of her house. It appeared that she comprehended to the full the terrible power of the writhing monster. Perhaps it was this same year that one of the men dia- 32 The Home in the Coulee covered another enormous yellow-back in the barn yard, one of the largest ever seen on the farm — and killed it just as it was moving across an old barrel. I cannot now understand why it tried to cross the barrel, but I distinctly visualize the brown and yellow band it made as it lay for an instant just before the bludgeon fell upon it, crushing it and the barrel together. He was thicker than my leg and glistened in the sun with sinister splendor. As he hung limp over the fence, a warning to his fellows, it was hard for me to realize that death still lay in his square jaws and poisonous fangs. Innumerable garter-snakes infested the marsh, and black snakes inhabited the edges of the woodlands, but we were not so much afraid of them. We accepted them as unavoidable companions in the wild. They would run from us. Bears and wildcats we held in real terror, *, though they were considered denizens of the darkness and hence not likely to be met with if one kept to the daylight. The "hoop snake'7 was quite as authentic to us as the blue racer, although no one had actually seen one.',) Den Green's cousin's uncle had killed one in Michigan, and a man over the ridge had once been stung by one that came rolling down the hill with his tail in his mouth. But Den's cousin's uncle, when he saw the one coming toward him, had stepped aside quick as lightning, and the serpent's sharp fangs had buried themselves so deep in the bark of a tree, that he could not escape. Various other of the myths common to American "•• boyhood, were held in perfect faith by Den and Ellis and Ed, myths which made every woodland path an ambush and every marshy spot a place of evil. Horse hairs would turn to snakes if left in the spring, and a serpent's tail would not die till sundown. Once on the high hillside, I started a stone rolling, 33 A Son of the Middle Border which as it went plunging into a hazel thicket, thrust out a deer, whose flight seemed fairly miraculous to me. He appeared to drift along the hillside like a bunch of thistle-down, and I took a singular delight in watching him disappear. Once my little brother and I, belated in our search for the cows, were far away on the hills when night suddenly came upon us. I could not have been more than eight years old and Frank was five. This incident reveals the fearless use our father made of us. True, we were hardly a mile from the house, but there were many serpents on the hillsides and wildcats in the cliffs, and eight is pretty young for such a task. We were following the cows through the tall grass and bushes, in the dark, when father came to our rescue, and I do not recall being sent on a similar expedition thereafter. I think mother protested against the danger of it. Her notions of our training were less rigorous. I never hear a cow-bell of a certain timbre that I do Jiot relive in some degree the terror and despair of that hour on the mountain, when it seemed that my world had suddenly slipped away from me. Winter succeeds summer abruptly in my memory. Behind our house rose a sharp ridge down which we used to coast. Over this hill, fierce winds blew the snow, and wonderful, diamonded drifts covered the yard, and sometimes father was obliged to dig deep trenches in order to reach the barn. On winter evenings he shelled corn by drawing the cars across a spade resting on a wash tub, and we chil dren built houses of the cobs, while mother sewed carpet rags or knit our mittens. Quilting bees of an afternoonJ were still recognized social functions and the spread \ quilt on its frame made a gorgeous tent under which my brother and I camped on our way to "Colorado." Ihe Home in the Coulee Lath swords and tin-pan drums remained a part of our equipment for a year or two. One stormy winter day, Edwin Randal, riding borne in a sleigh behind his uncle, saw me in the yard and, pick ing an apple from an open barrel beside which he was standing, threw it at me. It was a very large apple, and as it struck the drift it disappeared leaving a round deep hole. Delving there I recovered it, and as I brushed the rime from its scarlet skin it seemed the most beautiful thing in this world. From this vividly remembered de light, I deduce the fact that apples were not very plenti ful in our home. My favorite place in winter time was directly under the kitchen stove. It was one of the old-fashioned high- stepping breed, with long hind legs and an arching belly, and as the oven was on top, the space beneath the arch offered a delightful den for a cat, a dog or small boy, and I was usually to be found there, lying on my stomach, spelling out the "continued" stories which came to us in the county paper, for I was born with a hunger for print. We had few books in our house. Aside from the Bible I remember only one other, a thick, black volume filled with gaudy pictures of cherries and plums, and por traits of ideally fat and prosperous sheep, pigs and cows. It must have been a Farmer's Annual o State agricultural report, but it contained in the mi of its dry prose, occasional poems like "/ remember, I remember" "The Old Armchair" and other pieces of a domestic or rural nature. I was especially moved by The Old Armchair, and although some of the words and expressions were beyond my comprehension, I fully understood the defiant tenderness of the lines: I love it, I love it, and who shall dare To chide me for loving the old armchair? 35 A Son of the Middle Border I fear the horticultural side of this volume did not interest me, but this sweetly-sad poem tinged even the gaudy pictures of prodigious plums and shining apples with a literary glamor. The preposterously plump cattle probably affected me as only another form of ro mantic fiction. The volume also had a pleasant smell, not so fine an odor as the Bible, but so delectable that I loved to bury my nose in its opened pages. What caused this odor I cannot tell — perhaps it had been used to press flowers or sprigs of sweet fern. Harriet's devotion to literature, like my own, was a nuisance. If my mother wanted a pan of chips she had to wrench one of us from a book, or tear us from a paper. If she pasted up a section of Harper's Weekly behind the washstand in the kitchen, I immediately discovered a special interest in that number, and likely enough for got to wash myself. When mother saw this (as of course she very soon did), she turned the paper upside down, and thereafter accused me, with some justice, of stand ing on my head in order to continue my tale. "In fact/' she often said, "it is easier for me to do my errands my self than to get either of you young ones to move." The first school which we attended was held in a neigh boring farm-house, and there is very little to tell con cerning it, but at seven I began to go to the public school in Onalaska and memory becomes definite, for the wide river which came silently out of the unknown north, carrying endless millions of pine logs, and the clamor of saws in the island mills, and especially the men walking the rolling logs with pike-poles in their hands filled me with a wordless joy. To be one of these brave and graceful ''drivers" seemed almost as great an honor as to be a Captain in the army. Some of the boys of my acquaintance were sons of these hardy boomsmen, and related wonderful stories of their fathers' exploits — 36 The Home in the Coulee stories which we gladly believed. We all intended to be rivermen when we grew up. The quiet water below the booms harbored enormous fish at that time, and some of the male citizens who were too lazy to work in the mills got an easy living by capturing cat-fish, and when in liquor joined the river- men in their drunken frays. My father's tales of the exploits of some of these redoubtable villains filled my mind with mingled admiration and terror. No one used the pistol, however, and very few the knife. Phys ical strength counted. Foot and fist were the weapons which ended each contest and no one was actually slain in these meetings of rival crews. In the midst of this tumult, surrounded by this coarse, unthinking life, my Grandmother Garland's home stood, a serene small sanctuary of lofty womanhood, a temple of New England virtue. From her and from my great aunt Bridges who lived in St. Louis, I received my first literary instruction, a partial off-set to the vulgar yet heroic influence of the raftsmen and mill hands. The school-house, a wooden two story building, oc cupied an unkempt lot some distance back from the river and near a group of high sand dunes which pos sessed a sinister allurement to me. They had a mys terious desert quality, a flavor as of camels and Arabs. Once you got over behind them it seemed as if you were in another world, a far-off arid land where no water ran and only sear, sharp-edged grasses grew. Some of these mounds were miniature peaks of clear sand, so steep and dry that you could slide all the way down from top to bottom, and do no harm to your Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes. On rainy days you could dig caves in their sides. But the mills and the log booms were after all much more dramatic and we never failed to hurry away to the river if we had half an hour to spare. The " drivers," 37 A Son of the Middle Border so brave and skilled, so graceful, held us in breathless admiration as they leaped from one rolling log to another, or walked the narrow wooden bridges above the deep and silently sweeping waters. The piles of slabs, the mounds of saw-dust, the intermittent, ferocious snarl of the saws, the slap of falling lumber, the never ending fires eating up the refuse — all these sights and sounds made a return to school difficult. Even the life around the threshing machine seemed a little tame in comparison with the life of the booms. We were much at the Greens', our second-door neigh bors to the south, and the doings of the men-folks fill large space in my memory. Ed, the oldest of the boys, a man of twenty-three or four, was as prodigious in his way as my Uncle David. He was mighty with the axe. His deeds as a railsplitter rivaled those of Lincoln. The number of cords of wood he could split in a single day was beyond belief. It was either seven or eleven, I forget which — I am perfectly certain of the number of buckwheat pancakes he could eat for I kept count on several occasions. Once he ate nine the size of a dinner plate together with a suitable number of sausages — • but what would you expect of a man who could whirl g six pound axe all day in a desperate attack on the forest, without once looking at the sun or pausing for breath? However, he fell short of my hero in other ways. He looked like a fat man and his fiddling was only middling, therefore, notwithstanding his prowess with the axe and the maul, he remained subordinate to David, and though they never came to a test of strength we were perfectly sure that David was the finer man. His supple grace and his unconquerable pride made him altogether admirable. Den, the youngest of the Greens, was a boy about three years my senior, and a most attractive lad. I met him some years ago in California, a successful doctor, and we The Home in the Coulee talked of the days when I was his slave and humbly carried his powder horn and game bag. Ellis Usher, 'who lived in Sand Lake and often hunted with Den, is an editor in Milwaukee and one of the political leaders of his state. In those days he had a small opinion oi me. No doubt I was a nuisance. The road which led from our farm to the village school crossed a sandy ridge and often in June our path became so hot that it burned the soles of our feet. If we went! out of the road there were sand-burrs and we lost a great! deal of time picking needles from our toes. How we hated those sand-burrs! — However, on these sand bar rens many luscious strawberries grew. They were not large, but they gave off a delicious odor, and it some times took us a long time to reach home. There was a recognized element of danger in this road. Wildcats were plentiful around the limestone cliffs, and bears had been seen under the oak trees. In fact a place on the hillside was often pointed out with awe as "the place where Al Randal killed the bear." Our way led past the village cemetery also, and there was to me something vaguely awesome in that silent bivouac of the dead. Among the other village boys in the school were two lads named Gallagher, one of whom, whose name was Matt, became my daily terror. He was two years older than I and had all of a city gamin's cunning and self- command. At every intermission he sidled close to me, walking round me, feeling my arms, and making much of my muscle. Sometimes he came behind and lifted me to see how heavy I was, or called attention to my strong hands and wrists, insisting with the most terrifying can dor of conviction, "I'm sure you can lick me." We never quite came to combat, and finally he gave up this baiting for a still more exquisite method of torment. 39 A Son of the Middle Border My sister and I possessed a dog named Rover, a meek little yellow, bow-legged cur of mongrel character, but with the frankest, gentlest and sweetest face, it seemed to us, in all the world. He was not allowed to accom pany us to school and scarcely ever left the yard, but Matt Gallagher in some way discovered my deep affec tion for this pet and thereafter played upon my fears with a malevolence which knew no mercy. One day he said, "Me and brother Dan are going over to your place to get a calf that's in your pasture. We're going to get excused fifteen minutes early. We'll get there before you do and we'll fix that dog of yours! — There won't be nothin' left of him but a grease spot when we are done with him." These words, spoken probably in jest, instantly filled my heart with an agony of fear. I saw in imagination just how my little playmate would come running out to meet his cruel foes, his brown eyes beaming with love and trust, — I saw them hiding sharp stones behind their backs while snapping their left-hand fingers to lure him within reach, and then I saw them drive their murdering weapons at his head. I could think of nothing else. I could not study, I could only sit and stare out of the window with tears running down my cheeks, until at last, the teacher ob serving my distress, inquired, "What is the matter?" And I, not knowing how to enter upon so terrible a tale, whined out, "I'm sick, I want to go home." "You may go," said the teacher kindly. Snatching my cap from beneath the desk where I had concealed it at recess, I hurried out and away over the sand-lot on the shortest way home. No stopping now for burrs! — I ran like one pursued. I shall never forget as long as I live, the pain, the paric, the frenzy of that race against time. The hot sand burned my feet, my 40 The Home in the Coulee side ached, my mouth was dry, and yet I ran on and on and on, looking back from moment to moment, seeing pursuers in every moving object. At last I came in sight of home, and Rover frisked out to meet me just as I had expected him to do, his tail wagging, his gentle eyes smiling up at me. Gasping, unable to utter a word, I frantically dragged the dog into the house and shut the door. "What is the matter?" asked my mother. I could not at the moment explain even to her what had threatened me, but her calm sweet words at last gave my story vent. Out it came in torrential flow. "Why, you poor child!" she said. "They were only fooling — they wouldn't dare to hurt your dog!" This was probably true. Matt had spoken without any clear idea of the torture he was inflicting. It is often said, "How little is required to give a child ,, I joy," but men — and women too — sometimes forget how little it takes to give a child pain. G CHAPTER IV Father Sells the Farm REEN'S COULEE was a delightful place for boys. It offered hunting and coasting and many other engrossing sports, but my father, as the seasons went by, became thoroughly dissatisfied with its disadvantages. More and more he resented the stumps and ridges which interrupted his plow. Much of his quarter-section re mained unbroken. There were ditches to be dug in the marsh and young oaks to be uprooted from the forest, and he was obliged to toil with unremitting severity. There were times, of course, when field duties did not press, but never a day came when the necessity for twelve hours' labor did not exist. Furthermore, as he grubbed or reaped he remem bered the glorious prairies he had crossed on his ex ploring trip into Minnesota before the war, and the oftener he thought of them the more bitterly he resented his up-tilted, horse-killing fields, and his complaining words sank so deep into the minds of his sons that for years thereafter they were unable to look upon any rise of ground as an object to be admired. //T\ It irked him beyond measure to force his reaper along \ j a steep slope, and he loathed the irregular little patches V J running up the ravines behind the timbered knolls, and so at last like many another of his neighbors he began to look away to the west as a fairer field for conquest. He no more thought of going east than a liberated eagle dreams of returning to its narrow cage. He loved to 42 Father Sells the Farm talk of Boston, to boast of its splendor, but to live there, to earn his bread there, was unthinkable. Beneath the sunset lay the enchanted land of opportunity and his liberation came unexpectedly. Sometime in the spring of 1868, a merchant from LaCrosse, a plump man who brought us candy and was very cordial and condescending, began negotiations for our farm, and in the discussion of plans which followed, my conception of the universe expanded. I began to understand that "Minnesota" was not a bluff but a wide land of romance, a prairie, peopled with red men, which lay far beyond the big river. And then, one day, I heard my father read to my mother a paragraph from the county paper which ran like this, "It is reported that Richard Garland has sold his farm in Green's Coulee to our popular grocer, Mr. Speer. Mr. Speer intends to make of it a model dairy farm." This intention seemed somehow to reflect a ray of glory upon us, though I fear it did not solace my mother, as she contemplated the loss of home and kindred. She was not by nature an emigrant, — few women are. She was content with the pleasant slopes, the kindly neigh bors of Green's Coulee. Furthermore, most of her brothers and sisters still lived just across the ridge in the valley of the Neshonoc, and the thought of leaving them for a wild and unknown region was not pleasant. To my father, on the contrary, change was alluring. Iowa was now the place of the rainbow, and the pot of gold. He was eager to push on toward it, confident the outcome. His spirit was reflected in one of th songs which we children particularly enjoyed hearing our mother sing, a ballad which consisted of a dialogue between a husband and wife on this very subject of emi gration. The words as well as its wailing melody still stir me deeply, for they lay hold of my sub-conscious 43 A Son of the Middle Border memory — embodying admirably the debate which went on in our home as well as in the homes of other farmers ,;in the valley, — only, alas! our mothers did not prevail. It begins with a statement of unrest on the part of the husband who confesses that he is about to give up his plow and his cart — Away to Colorado a journey I'll go, For to double my fortune as other men do, While here I must labor each day in the field And the winter consumes all the summer doth yield. To this the wife replies: Dear husband, I've noticed with a sorrowful heart That you long have neglected your plow and your cart, Your horses, sheep, cattle at random do run, And your new Sunday jacket goes every day on. Oh, stay on your farm and you'll suffer no loss, For the stone that keeps rolling will gather no moss. But the husband insists: Oh, wife, let us go; Oh, don't let us wait; I long to be there, and I long to be great, While you some fair lady and who knows but I May be some rich governor long 'fore I die, Whilst here I must labor each day in the field, And the winter consumes all the summer doth yield. But wife shrewdly retorts: Dear husband, remember those lands are so dear They will cost you the labor of many a year. Your horses, sheep, cattle will all be to buy, You will hardly get settled before you must die. Oh, stay on the farm, — etc. The husband then argues that as in that country the lands are all cleared to the plow, and horses and cattle not very dear, they would soon be rich. Indeed, "we will 44 Father Sells the Farm feast on fat venison one-half of the year." Thereupon the wife brings in her final argument: Oh, husband, remember those lands of delight Are surrounded by Indians who murder by night. Your house will be plundered and burnt to the ground While your wife and your children lie mangled around. This fetches the husband up with a round turn: Oh, wife, you've convinced me, I'll argue no more, I never once thought of your dying before. I love my dear children although they are small And you, my dear wife, I love greatest of all. Refrain (both together) We'll stay on the farm and we'll suffer no loss For the stone that keeps rolling will gather no moss. This song was not an especial favorite of my father. Its minor strains and its expressions of womanly doubts and fears were antipathetic to his sanguine, buoyant, self-confident nature. He was inclined to ridicule the conclusions of its last verse and to say that the man was a molly-coddle — or whatever the word of contempt was in those days. As an antidote he usually called for "O'er the hills in legions, boys," which exactly expressed his love of exploration and adventure. This ballad which dates back to the conquest of the Allegheny mountains opens with a fine uplif ting note, Cheer up, brothers, as we go O'er the mountains, westward ho, Where herds of deer and buffalo Furnish the fare. and the refrain is at once a bugle call and a vision: } Then o'er the hills in legions, boys, Fair freedom's star Points to the sunset regions, boys, Ha, ha, ha-ha! 45 A Son of the Middle Border and when my mother's clear voice rose on the notes of that exultant chorus, our hearts responded with a surge of emotion akin to that which sent the followers of Daniel Boone across the Blue Ridge, and lined the trails of Kentucky and Ohio with the canvas-covered wagons of the pioneers. A little farther on in the song came these words, When we've wood and prairie land, Won by our toil, We'll reign like kings in fairy land, Lords of the soil I which always produced in my mind the picture of a noble farm-house in a park-like valley, just as the line, "We'll have our rifles ready, boys," expressed the bold ness and self-reliance of an armed horseman. The significance of this song in the lives of the McClin- tocks and the Garlands cannot be measured. It was the marching song of my Grandfather's generation and un doubtedly profoundly influenced my father and my juncles in all that they did. It suggested shining moun tains, and grassy vales, swarming with bear and elk. It called to green savannahs and endless flowery glades. It voiced as no other song did, the pioneer impulse throb bing deep in my father's blood. That its words will not bear close inspection today takes little from its power. Unquestionably it was a directing force in the lives of at least three generations of my pioneering race. Its strains will be found running through this book from first to last, for its pictures continued to allure my father on and on toward "the sunset regions," and its splendid faith carried him through many a dark vale of discon tent. Our home was a place of song, notwithstanding the severe toil which was demanded of every hand, for often 46 Father often invited us to his knees. P. 47 Father Sells the Farm of an evening, especially in winter time, father took his seat beside the fire, invited us to his knees, and called on mother to sing. These moods were very sweet to us and we usually insisted upon his singing for us. True, he hardly knew one tune from another, but he had a hearty resounding chant which delighted us, and one of the ballads which we especially like to hear him repeat was called Down the Ohio. Only one verse survives in my memory: The river is up, the channel is deep, The winds blow high and strong. The flash of the oars, the stroke we keep, As we row the old boat along, Down the 0-h-i-o. Mother, on the contrary, was gifted with a voice of great range and sweetness, and from her we always de manded Nellie Wildwood, Lily Dale, Lorena or some of Root's stirring war songs. We loved her noble, musical tone, and yet we always enjoyed our father's tuneless roar. There was something dramatic and moving in each of his ballads. He made the words mean so much. It is a curious fact that nearly all of the ballads which the McClintocks and other of these powerful young sons of the border loved to sing were sad. Nellie Wild- wood, Minnie Minturn, Belle Mahone, Lily Dale were all concerned with dead or dying maidens or with mocking birds still singing o'er their graves. Weeping willows and funeral urns ornamented the cover of each mournful ballad. Not one smiling face peered forth from the pages of The Home Diadem. Lonely like a withered tree, What is all the world to me? Light and life were all in thee, Sweet Belle Mahone, 47 A Son of the Middle Border wailed stalwart David and buxom Deborah, and ready tears moistened my tanned plump cheeks. Perhaps it was partly by way of contrast that the jocund song of Freedom's Star always meant so much to me, but however it came about, I am perfectly certain that it was an immense subconscious force in the life of my father as it had been in the westward marching of the McClintocks. In my own thinking it became at once a vision and a lure. The only humorous songs which my uncles knew were negro ditties, like Camp Town Racetrack and Jordan am a Hard Road to Trabbel but in addition to the sad ballads I have quoted, they joined my mother in The Pirate's Serenade, Erin's Green Shore, Bird of the Wilderness, and the memory of their mellow voices creates a golden dusk between me and that far-off cottage. During the summer of my eighth year, I took a part in haying and harvest, and I have a painful recollection of raking hay after the wagons, for I wore no shoes and the stubble was very sharp. I used to slip my feet along close to the ground, thus bending the stubble away from me before throwing my weight on it, otherwise walking was painful. If I were sent across the field on an errand I always sought out the path left by the broad wheels of the mowing machine and walked therein with a most delicious sense of safety. It cannot be that I was required to work very hard or very steadily, but it seemed to me then, and afterward, as if I had been made one of the regular hands and that I toiled the whole day through. I rode old Josh for the hired man to plow corn, and also guided the lead horse on the old McCormick reaper, my short legs sticking out at right angles from my body, and I carried water to the field. It appears that the blackbirds were very thick that 48 Father Sells the Farm year and threatened, in August, to destroy the corn. They came in gleeful clouds, settling with multitudinous clamor upon the stalks so that it became the duty of Den Green to scare them away by shooting at them, and I was permitted to follow and pick up the dead birds and carry them as "game." There was joy and keen excitement in this warfare. Sometimes when Den fired into a flock, a dozen or more came fluttering down. At other times vast swarms rose at the sound of the gun with a rush of wings which sounded like a distant storm. Once Den let me fire the gun, and I took great pride in this until I came upon several of the shining little creatures bleeding, dying in the grass. Then my heart was troubled and I repented of my cruelty. Mrs. Green put the birds into potpies but my mother would not do so. "I don't believe in such game," she said. "It's bad enough to shoot the poor things without eating them." Once we came upon a huge mountain rattlesnake and Den killed it with a shot of his gun. How we escaped being bitten is a mystery, for we explored every path of the hills and meadows in our bare feet, our trousers rolled to the knee. We hunted plums and picked black berries and hazel nuts with very little fear of snakes, and yet we must have always been on guard. We loved our valley, and while occasionally we yielded to the lure of "Freedom's star," we were really content with Green's Coulee and its surrounding hills. CHAPTER V The Last Threshing in the Coulee K'E on a Wisconsin farm, even for the women, had its compensations. There were times when the daily routine of lonely and monotonous housework gave place to an agreeable bustle, and human intercourse lightened the toil. In the midst of the slow progress of the fall's plowing, the gathering of the threshing crew was a most dramatic event to my mother, as to us, for it not only brought unwonted clamor, it fetched her brothers William and David and Frank, who owned and ran a threshing machine, and their coming gave the house an air of festivity which offset the burden of extra work which fell upon us all. In those days the grain, after being brought in and stacked around the barn, was allowed to remain until October or November when all the other work was fin ished. Of course some men got the machine earlier, for all could not thresh at the same time, and a good part of every man's fall activities consisted in "changing works" with his neighbors, thus laying up a stock of unpaid labor against the home job. Day after day, therefore, father or the hired man shouldered a fork and went to help thresh, and all through the autumn months, the ceaseless ringing hum and the bow-ouw, ouw-woo, boo-oo- oom of the great balance wheels on the separator and the deep bass purr of its cylinder could be heard in every valley like the droning song of some sullen and gigantic autumnal insect. Last Threshing in the Coulee I recall with especial clearness the events of that last threshing in the coulee. — I was eight, my brother was six. For days we had looked forward to the coming of "the threshers," listening with the greatest eagerness to father's report of the crew. At last he said, "Well, Belle, get ready. The machine will be here tomorrow." All day we hung on the gate, gazing down the road, watching, waiting for the crew, and even after supper, we stood at the windows still hoping to hear the rattle of the ponderous separator. Father explained that the men usually worked all day at one farm and moved after dark, and we were just starting to "climb the wooden hill" when we heard a far-off faint halloo. "There they are," shouted father, catching up his old square tin lantern and hurriedly lighting the candle within it. "That's Frank's voice." The night air was sharp, and as we had taken off our boots we could only stand at the window and watch father as he piloted the teamsters through the gate. The light threw fantastic shadows here and there, now lighting up a face, now bringing out the separator which seemed a weary and sullen monster awaiting its den. The men's voices sounded loud in the still night, caus ing the roused turkeys in the oaks to peer about on their perches, uneasy silhouettes against the sky. We would gladly have stayed awake to greet our be loved uncles, but mother said, "You must go to sleep in order to be up early in the morning," and reluctantly we turned away. Lying thus in our cot under the sloping raftered roof we could hear the squawk of the hens as father wrung their innocent necks, and the crash of the "sweeps" being unloaded sounded loud and clear and strange. We longed to be out there, but at last the dance of lights A Son of the Middle Border and shadows on the plastered wall died away, and we fell into childish dreamless sleep. We were awakened at dawn by the ringing beat of the iron mauls as Frank and David drove the stakes to hold the "power" to the ground. The rattle of trace chains, the clash of iron rods, the clang of steel bars, intermixed with the laughter of the men, came sharply through the frosty air, and the smell of sizzling sausage from the kitchen warned us that our busy mother was hurrying the breakfast forward. Knowing that it was time to get up, although it was not yet light, I had a sense of being awakened into a romantic new world, a world of heroic action. As we stumbled down the stairs, we found the lamp-lit kitchen empty of the men. They had finished their coffee and were out in the stack-yard oiling the machine and hitching the horses to the power. Shivering yet entranced by the beauty of the frosty dawn we crept out to stand and watch the play. The frost lay white on every surface, the frozen ground rang like iron under the steel-shod feet of the horses, and the breath of the men rose up in little white puffs of steam. Uncle David on the feeder's stand was impatiently awaiting the coming of the fifth team. The pitchers were climbing the stacks like blackbirds, and the straw- stackers were scuffling about the stable door. — Finally, just as the east began to bloom, and long streamers of red began to unroll along the vast gray dome of sky Uncle Frank, the driver, lifted his voice in a "Chippewa war-whoop." On a still morning like this his signal could be heard for miles. Long drawn and musical, it sped away over the fields, announcing to all the world that the McClin- tocks were ready for the day's race. Answers came back faintly from the frosty fields where dim figures of lag- 52 Last Threshing in the Coulee gard hands could be seen hurrying over the plowed ground, the last team came clattering in and was hooked into its place, David called "All right!" and the cylinder began to hum. In those days the machine was either a "J. I. Case" or a "Buffalo Pitts," and was moved by five pairs of horses attached to a "power" staked to the ground, round which they travelled pulling at the ends of long levers or sweeps, and to me the force seemed tremendous. "Tumbling rods" with "knuckle joints" carried the motion to the cylinder, and the driver who stood upon a square platform above the huge, greasy cog-wheels (round which the horses moved) was a grand figure in my eyes. Driving, to us, looked like a pleasant job, but Uncle Frank thought it very tiresome, and I can now see that it was. To stand on that small platform all through the long hours of a cold November day, when the cutting wind roared down the valley sweeping the dust and leaves along the road, was work. Even I perceived that it was far pleasanter to sit on the south side of the stack and watch the horses go round. It was necessary that the "driver" should be a man of judgment, for the horses had to be kept at just the right speed, and to do this he must gauge the motion of the cylinder by the pitch of its deep bass song. The three men in command of the machine, were set apart as "the threshers." — William and David alter nately "fed" or "tended," that is, one of them "fed" the grain into the howling cylinder while the other, oil can in hand, watched the sieves, felt of the pinions and so kept the machine in good order. The feeder's position was the high place to which all boys aspired, and on this day I stood in silent admiration of Uncle David's easy powerful attitudes as he caught each bundle in the crook A Son of the Middle Border of his arm and spread it out into a broad, smooth band of yellow straw on which the whirling teeth caught and tore with monstrous fury. He was the ideal man in my eyes, grander in some ways than my father, and to be able to stand where he stood was the highest honor in the world. It was all poetry for us and we wished every day were threshing day. The wind blew cold, the clouds went flying across the bright blue sky, and the straw glistened in the sun. With jarring snarl the circling zone of cogs dipped into the sturdy greasy wheels, and the single trees and pulley-chains chirped clear and sweet as crickets. The dust flew, the whip cracked, and the men working swiftly to get the sheaves to the feeder or to take the straw away from the tail-end of the machine, were like warriors, urged to desperate action by battle cries. The stackers wallowing to their waists in the fluffy straw-pile seemed gnomes acting for our amuse ment. The straw-pile! What delight we had in that! What joy it was to go up to the top where the men were sta tioned, one behind the other, and to have them toss huge forkfuls of the light fragrant stalks upon us, laugh ing to see us emerge from our golden cover. We were especially impressed by the bravery of Ed Green who stood in the midst of the thick dust and flying chaff close to the tail of the stacker. His teeth shone like a negro's out of his dust-blackened face and his shirt was wet with sweat, but he motioned for "more straw" and David, accepting the challenge, signalled for more speed. Frank swung his lash and yelled at the straining horses, the sleepy growl of the cylinder rose to a howl and the wheat came pulsing out at the spout in such a stream that the carriers were forced to trot on their path to and from the granary in order to keep the grain from piling 54 Last Threshing in the Coulee up around the measurer. — There was a kind of splendid rivalry in this backbreaking toil — for each sack weighed ninety pounds. We got tired of wallowing in the straw at last, and went down to help Rover catch the rats which were being uncovered by the pitchers as they reached the stack bottom. — The horses, with their straining, out stretched necks, the loud and cheery shouts, the whistling of the driver, the roar and hum of the great wheel, the flourishing of the forks, the supple movement of brawny arms, the shouts of the men, all blended with the wild sound of the wind in the creaking branches of the oaks, forming a glorious poem in our unforgetting minds. At last the call for dinner sounded. The driver began to call, "Whoa there, boys! Steady, Tom," and to hold his long whip before the eyes of the more spirited of the teams in order to convince them that he really meant "stop." The pitchers stuck their forks upright in the stack and leaped to the ground. Randal, the band-cutter, drew from his wrist the looped string of his big knife, the stackers slid down from the straw-pile, and a race began among the teamsters to see whose span would be first unhitched and at the watering trough. What joyous rivalry it seemed to us ! — Mother and Mrs. Randal, wife of our neighbor, who was "changing works," stood ready to serve the food as soon as the men were seated. — The table had been lengthened to its utmost and pieced out with boards, and planks had been laid on stout wooden chairs at either side. The men came in with a rush, and took seats wherever they could find them, and their attack on the boiled po tatoes and chicken should have been appalling to the women, but it was not. They enjoyed seeing them eat. Ed Green was prodigious. One cut at a big potato, fol- 55 A Son of the Middle Border Jowed by two stabbing motions, and it was gone. — Twa bites laid a leg of chicken as bare as a slate pencil. To us standing in the corner waiting our turn, it seemed that every "smitch" of the dinner was in danger, for the others were not far behind Ed and Dan. At last even the gauntest of them filled up and left the room and we were free to sit at "the second table" and eat, while the men rested outside. David and William, however, generally had a belt to sew or a bent tooth to take out of the "concave." This seemed of grave dignity to us and we respected their self-Gacrificing labor. Nooning was brief. As soon as the horses had finished their oats, the roar and hum of the machine began again and continued steadily all the afternoon, till by and by the sun grew big and red, the night began to fall, and the wind died out. This was the most impressive hour of a marvellous day. Through the falling dusk, the machine boomed steadily with a new sound, a solemn roar, rising at in tervals to a rattling impatient yell as the cylinder ran momentarily empty. The men moved now in silence, looming dim and gigantic in the half-light. The straw- pile mountain high, the pitchers in the chaff, the feeder on his platform, and especially the driver on his power, seemed almost super-human to my childish eyes. Gray dust covered the handsome face of David, changing it into something both sad and stern, but Frank's cheery voice rang out musically as he called to the weary horses, "Come on, Tom! Hup there, Dan!" The track in which they walked had been worn into two deep circles and they all moved mechanically round and round, like parts of a machine, dull-eyed and covered with sweat. At last William raised the welcome cry, "All done!"— 56 Last Threshing in the Coulee the men threw down their forks. Uncle Frank began to call in a gentle, soothing voice, "Whoa, lads! Steady, boys! Whoa, there!" But the horses had been going so long and so steadily that they could not at once check their speed. They kept moving, though slowly, on and on till their owners slid from the stacks and seizing the ends of the sweeps, held them. Even then, after the power was still, the cylinder kept its hum, till David throwing a last sheaf into its open maw, choked it into silence. Now came the sound of dropping chains, the clang of iron rods, and the thud of hoofs as the horses walked with laggard gait and weary down-falling heads to the barn. The men, more subdued than at dinner, washed with greater care, and combed the chaff from their beards. The air was still and cool, and the sky a deep cloudless blue starred with faint fire. Supper though quiet was more dramatic than dinner had been. The table lighted with kerosene lamps, the clean white linen, the fragrant dishes, the women flying about with steaming platters, all seemed very cheery and very beautiful, and the men who came into the light and warmth of the kitchen with aching muscles and empty stomachs, seemed gentler and finer than at noon. They were nearly all from neighboring farms, and my mother treated even the few hired men like visitors, and the talk was all hearty and good tempered though a little subdued. One by one the men rose and slipped away, and father withdrew to milk the cows and bed down the horses, leaving the women and the youngsters to eat what was left and "do up the dishes/ After we had eaten our fill Frank and I also went out to the barn (all wonderfully changed now to our minds by the great stack of straw) , there to listen to David and 57 A Son of the Middle Border father chatting as they rubbed their tired horses. — Tha lantern threw a dim red light on the harness and on the rumps of the cattle, but left mysterious shadows in the corners. I could hear the mice rustling in the straw of the roof, and from the farther end of the dimly-lighted shed came the regular strim-stram of the streams of milk falling into the bottom of a tin pail as the hired hand milked the big roan cow. All this was very momentous to me as I sat on the oat box, shivering in the cold air, listening with all my ears, and when we finally went toward the house, the stars were big and sparkling. The frost had already begun to glisten on the fences and well-curb, and high in the air, dark against the sky, the turkeys were roosting un easily, as if disturbed by premonitions of approaching Thanksgiving. Rover pattered along by my side on the crisp grass and my brother clung to my hand. How bright and warm it was in the kitchen with mother putting things to rights while father and my uncles leaned their chairs against the wall and talked of the west and of moving. "I can't get away till after New Year's," father said. "But I'm going. I'll never put in another crop on these hills." With speechless content I listened to Uncle William's stories of bears and Indians, and other episodes of fron tier life, until at last we were ordered to bed and the glorious day was done. Oh, those blessed days, those entrancing nights! How fine they were then, and how mellow they are now, for the slow-paced years have dropped nearly fifty other golden mists upon that far-off valley. From this distance I cannot understand how my father brought himself to leave that lovely farm and those good and noble friends. CHAPTER VI David and His Violin MOST of the events of our last autumn in Green's Coulee have slipped into the fathomless gulf, but the experiences of Thanksgiving day, which followed closely on our threshing day, are in my treasure house. Like a canvas by Rembrandt only one side of the figures therein is defined, the other side melts away into shad ow — a luminous shadow, through which faint light pulses, luring my wistful gaze on and on, back into the vanished world where the springs of my life lie hidden. It is a raw November evening. Frank and Harriet and I are riding into a strange land in a clattering farm wagon. Father and mother are seated before us on the spring seat. The ground is frozen and the floor of the carriage pounds and jars. We cling to the iron-lined sides of the box to soften the blows. It is growing dark. Before us (in a similar vehicle) my Uncle David is lead ing the way. I catch momentary glimpses of him out lined against the pale yellow sky. He stands erect, holding the reins of his swiftly-moving horses in his powerful left hand. Occasionally he shouts back to my father, whose chin is buried in a thick buffalo-skin coat. Mother is only a vague mass, a figure wrapped in shawls. The wind is keen, the world gray and cheerless. My sister is close beside me in the straw. Frank is asleep. I am on my knees looking ahead. Suddenly with rush of wind and clatter of hoofs, we enter the gloom of a forest and the road begins to climb. I see the hills 59 A Son of the Middle Border on the right. I catch the sound of wheels on a bridge. I am cold. I snuggle down under the robes and the gurgle of ice-bound water is fused with my dreams. I am roused at last by Uncle David's pleasant voice, "Wake up, boys, and pay y'r lodging!" I look out and perceive him standing beside the wheel. I see a house and I hear the sound of Deborah's voice from the warmly- lighted open door. I climb down, heavy with cold and sleep. As I stand there my uncle reaches up his arms to take my mother down. Not knowing that she has a rheumatic elbow, he squeezes her playfully. She gives a sharp screamr and his team starts away on a swift run around the curve of the road toward the gate. Dropping my mother, he dashes across the yard to intercept the runaways. We all stand in silence, watching the flying horses and the wonderful race he is making toward the gate. He runs with magnificent action, his head thrown high. As the team dashes through the gate his outflung left hand catches the end-board of the wagon, — he leaps into the box, and so passes from our sight. We go into the cottage. It is a small building with four rooms and a kitchen on the ground floor, but in the sitting room we come upon an open fireplace, — the first I had ever seen, and in the light of it sits Grand father McClintock, the glory of the flaming logs gilding the edges of his cloud of bushy white hair. He does not rise to greet us, but smiles and calls out, "Come in! Come in! Draw a cheer. Sit ye down." A clamor of welcome fills the place. Harriet and I are put to warm before the blaze. Grandad takes Frank upon his knee and the cutting wind of the gray outside world is forgotten. This house in which the McClintocks were living at this time, belonged to a rented farm. Grandad had 60 Last Threshing in the Coulee sold the original homestead on the LaCrosse River, and David who had lately married a charming young Cana dian girl, was the head of the family. Deborah, it seems, was also living with him and Frank was there — as a visitor probably. The room in which we sat was small and bare but to me it was very beautiful, because of the fire, and by reason of the merry voices which filled my ears with music. Aunt Rebecca brought to us a handful of crackers and told us that we were to have oyster soup for supper. This gave us great pleasure even in anticipation, for oysters were a delicious treat in those days. "Well, Dick/' Grandad began, "so ye're plannin' to go west, air ye?" "Yes, as soon as I get all my grain and hogs marketed I'm going to pull out for my new farm over in Iowa." "Ye'd better stick to the old coulee," warned my grandfather, a touch of sadness in his voice. "Ye'll find none better." My father was disposed to resent this. "That's ail very well for the few who have the level land in the middle of the valley," he retorted, "but how about those of us who are crowded against the hills? You should see the farm I have in Winneshiek ! Not a hill on it big enough for a boy to coast on. It's right on the edge of Looking Glass Prairie, and I have a spring of water, and a fine grove of trees just where I want them, not where they have to be grubbed out." "But ye belong here," repeated Grandfather. "You were married here, your children were born here. Ye'li find no such friends in the west as you have here in Neshonoc. And Belle will miss the family." My father laughed. "Oh, you'll all come along. Dave has the fever already. Even William is likely to catch it." 61 A Son of the Middle Border Old Hugh sighed deeply. "I hope ye're wrong," he said. "I'd like to spend me last days here with me sons and daughters around me, sich as are left to me," here his voice became sterner. "It's the curse of our country, • — this constant moving, moving. I'd have been better off had I stayed in Ohio, though this valley seemed very beautiful to me the first time I saw it." At this point David came in, and everybody shouted, "Did you stop them? " referring of course to the runaway team. "I did," he replied with a smile. "But how about the oysters. I'm holler as a beech log." The fragrance of the soup thoroughly awakened even little Frank, and when we drew around the table, each face shone with the light of peace and plenty, and all our elders tried to forget that this was the last Thanks giving festival which the McClintocks and Garlands would be able to enjoy in the old valley. How good those oysters were! They made up the entire meal, — excepting mince pie which came as a closing sweet. Slowly, one by one, the men drew back and returned to the sitting room, leaving the women to wash up the dishes and put the kitchen to rights. David seized the opportunity to ask my father to tell once again of the trip he had made, of the lands he had seen, and the farm he had purchased, for his young heart was also fired with desire of exploration. The level lands toward the sunset allured him. In his visions the wild meadows were filled with game, and the free lands needed only to be tickled with a hoe to laugh into harvest. He said, "As soon as Dad and Frank are settled on a farm here, I'm going west also. I'm as tired of climbing these hills as you are. I want a place of my own — and besides, from all you say of that wheat country out there, a threshing machine would pay wonderfully well,'* 62 David and His Violin As the women came in, my father called out, "Come, Belle, sing 'O'er the Hills in Legions Boys! ' — Dave get out your fiddle — and tune us all up." David tuned up his fiddle and while he twanged on the strings mother lifted her voice in our fine old marching song. Cheer up, brothers, as we go, O'er the mountains, westward ho — and we all joined in the jubilant chorus — Then o'er the hills in legions, boys, Fair freedom's star Points to the sunset regions, boys, Ha, ha, ha-ha! — My father's face shone with the light of the explorer, the pioneer. The words of this song appealed to him as the finest poetry. It meant all that was fine and hopeful and buoyant in American life, to him — but on my mother's sweet face a wistful expression deep ened and in her fine eyes a reflective shadow lay. To \ her this song meant not so much the acquisition of a new home as the loss of all her friends and relatives. She sang it submissively, not exultantly, and 1 think the other women were of the same mood though their faces , were less expressive to me. To all of the pioneer wives of the past that song had meant deprivation, suffering, loneliness, heart-ache. From this they passed to other of my father's favorite songs, and it is highly significant to note that even in this choice of songs he generally had his way. He was the dominating force. "Sing ' Nellie Wild wood,'" he said, and they sang it. — This power of getting his will respected was due partly to his military training but 63 A Son of the Middle Border more to a distinctive trait in him. He was a man of power, of decision, a natural commander of men. They sang "Minnie Minturn" to his request, and the refrain, — I have heard the angels warning, I have seen the golden shore — meant much to me. So did the line, But I only hear the drummers As the armies march away. Aunt Deb was also a soul of decision. She called out, "No more of these sad tones," and struck up "The Year of Jubilo," and we all shouted till the walls shook with the exultant words: OF massa run — ha-ha! De darkies stay, — ho-ho! It must be now is the kingdom a-comin' In the year of Jubilo. At this point the fire suggested an old English ballad which I loved, and so I piped up, "Mother, sing, 'Pile the Wood on Higher I'" and she complied with pleasure, for this was a song of home, of the unbroken fire-side circle. Oh, the winds howl mad outdoors, The snow clouds hurry past, The giant trees sway to and fro Beneath the sweeping blast. and we children joined in the chorus: Then we'll gather round the fire And we'll pile the wood on higher, Let the song and jest go round; What care we for the storm, When the fireside is so warm, And pleasure here is found? 64 David and His Violin Never before did this song mean so much to me as at this moment when the winds were actually howling outdoors, and Uncle Frank was in very truth piling the logs higher. It seemed as though my stuffed bosom could not receive anything deeper and finer, but it did, for father was saying, "Well, Dave, now for some tunes." This was the best part of David to me. He could make any room mystical with the magic of his bow. True, his pieces were mainly venerable dance tunes, cotillions, hornpipes, — melodies which had passed from fiddler to fiddler until they had become veritable folk songs, — pieces like "Money Musk," "Honest John," "Haste to the Wedding," and many others whose names I have forgotten, but with a gift of putting into even the simplest song an emotion which subdued us and silenced us, he played on, absorbed and intent. From these familiar pieces he passed to others for which he had no names, melodies strangely sweet and sad, full of longing crks, voicing something which I dimly felt but could not understand. At the moment he was the somber Scotch Highlander, the true Celt, and as he bent above his instrument his black ey<5s glowing, his fine head drooping low, my heart bowed down in worship of his skill. He was my hero, the handsomest, most romantic figure in all my world. He played, "Maggie, Air Ye Sleepin," and the wind outside went to my soul. Voices wailed to me out of the illimitable hill-land forests, voices that pleaded: Oh, let me in, for loud the linn Goes roarin' o'er the moorland craggy. He appeared to forget us, even his young wife. His eyes looked away into gray storms. Vague longing ached in his throat. Life was a struggle, love a torment. He stopped abruptly, and put the violin into its box, 65 A Son of the Middle Border fumbling with the catch to hide his emotion and my father broke the tense silence with a prosaic word. "Well, well! Look here, it's time you youngsters were asleep. Beckie, where are you going to put these chil dren?" Aunt Rebecca, a trim little woman with brown eyes, looked at us reflectively, "Well, now, I don't know. I guess we'll have to make a bed for them on the floor." This was done, and for the first time in my life, I slept before an open fire. As I snuggled into my blankets with my face turned to the blaze, the darkness of the night and the denizens of the pineland wilderness to the north had no terrors for me. I was awakened in the early light by Uncle David building the fire, and then came my father's call, and the hurly burly of jovial greeting from old and young. The tumult lasted till breakfast was called, and every body who could find place sat around the table and at tacked the venison and potatoes which formed the meal. I do not remember our leave-taking or the ride home ward. I bring to mind only the desolate cold of our own kitchen into which we tramped late in the afternoon, sitting in our wraps until the fire began to roar within its iron cage. Oh, winds of the winter night! Oh, firelight and the shine of tender eyes! How far away you seem tonight! So faint and far, Each dear face shineth as a star. Oh, you by the western sea, and you of the south beyond the reach of Christmas snow, do not your hearts hunger, like mine tonight for that Thanksgiving Day among the trees? For the glance of eyes undimmed of tears, for the hair untouched with gray? 66 David and His Violin It all lies in the unchanging realm of the past — this land of my childhood. Its charm, its strange dominion cannot return save in the poet's reminiscent dream. No money, no railway train can take us back to it. It did not in truth exist — it was a magical world, born of the vibrant union of youth and firelight, of music and the voice of moaning winds — a union which can never come again to you or me, father, uncle, brother, till the coulee meadows bloom again unscarred of spade or plow. CHAPTER Winnesheik "Woods and Prairie Lands" OUR last winter in the Coulee was given over to preparations for our removal but it made very little impression on my mind which was deeply engaged on my school work. As it was out of the question for us to attend the village school the elders arranged for a neighborhood school at the home of John Roche, who had an unusually large living room. John is but a shadowy figure in this chronicle but his daughter In diana, whom we called "Ingie, " stands out as the big girl of my class. Books were scarce in this house as well as in our own. I remember piles of newspapers but no bound volumes other than the Bible and certain small Sunday school books. All the homes of the valley were equally barren. My sister and I jointly possessed a very limp and soiled cloth edition of " Mother Goose." Our stories all came to us by way of the conversation of our elders. No one but grandmother Garland ever deliberately told us a tale — except the hired girls, and their romances were of such dark and gruesome texture that we often went to bed shivering with fear of the dark. Suddenly, unexpectedly, miraculously, I came into possession of two books, one called Beauty and The \^ Beast, and the other Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp. "These volumes mark a distinct epoch in my life. The grace of the lovely Lady as she stood above the cringing 68 "Woods and Prairie Lands" Beast gave me my first clear notion of feminine dignity and charm. On the magic Flying Carpet I rose into the wide air of Oriental romance. I attended the building of towered cities and the laying of gorgeous feasts. I carried in my hand the shell from which, at the word of command, the cool clear water gushed. My feet were shod with winged boots, and on my head was the Cap of Invisibility. My body was captive in our snow-bound little cabin but my mind ranged the golden palaces of Persia — so much I know. Where the wonder-working romances came from I cannot now tell but I think they were Christmas presents, for Christmas came this year with unusual splendor. The sale of the farm had put into my father's hands a considerable sum of money and I assume that some small part of this went to make our holiday glorious. In one of my stockings was a noble red and blue tin horse with a flowing mane and tail, and in the other was a monkey who could be made to climb a stick. Harriet had a new china doll and Frank a horn and china dog, and all the corners of our stockings were stuffed with nuts and candies. I hope mother got something beside the pota toes and onions which I remember seeing her pull out and unwrap with delightful humor — an old and rather pathetic joke but new to us. The snow fell deep in January and I have many glori ous pictures of the whirling flakes outlined against the darkly wooded hills across the marsh. Father was busy with his team drawing off wheat and hogs and hay, and often came into the house at night, white with the storms through which he had passed. My trips to school were often interrupted by the cold, and the path which my sister and I trod was along the ever-deepening furrows made by the bob-sleighs of the farmers. Often when we met a team or were overtaken by one, we were forced 69 A Son of the Middle Border out of the road into the drifts, and I can feel to this moment, the wedge of snow which caught in the tops of my tall boots and slowly melted into my gray socks. We were not afraid of the drifts, however. On the contrary mother had to fight to keep us from wallowing beyond our depth. I had now a sled which was my in separable companion. I could not feed the hens or bring in a pan of chips without taking it with me. My heart swelled with pride and joy whenever I regarded it, and yet it was but a sober-colored thing, a frame of hickory built by the village blacksmith in exchange for a cord of wood — delivered. I took it to school one dayv but Ed Roche abused it, took it up and threw it into the deep snow among the weeds. — Had I been large enough, I would have killed that boy with pleasure, but being small and fat and numb with cold I merely rescued my treasure as quickly as I could and hurried home to pour my indignant story into my mother's sympathetic ears. I seldom spoke of my defeats to my father for he had once said, "Fight your own battles, my son. If I hear of your being licked by a boy of anything like your own size, I'll give you another when you get home." He didn't believe in molly-coddling, you will perceive. His was a stern school, the school of self-reliance and resolution. Neighbors came in now and again to talk of our migra tion, and yet in spite of all that, in spite of our song, in spite of my father's preparation I had no definite pre monition of coming change, and when the day of depar ture actually dawned, I was as surprised, as unprepared as though it had all happened without the slightest warning. So long as the kettle sang on the hearth and the clock ticked on its shelf, the idea of "moving" was pleasantly diverting, but when one raw winter day I saw the faithful 70 "Woods and Prairie Lands" clock stuffed with rags and laid on its back in a box, and the chairs and dishes being loaded into a big sleigh, I began to experience something very disturbing and very uncomfortable. "O'er the hills in legions, boys," did not sound so inspiring to me then. "The woods and prairie lands" of Iowa became of less account to me than the little cabin in which I had lived all my short life. Harriet and I wandered around, whining and shivering, our own misery augmented by the worried look on mother's face. It was February, and she very properly resented leaving her home for a long, cold ride into an unknown world, but as a dutiful wife she worked hard and silently in packing away her treasures, and clothing her children for the journey. At last the great sleigh-load of bedding and furniture stood ready at the door, the stove, still warm with cheerful service, was lifted in, and the time for saying good-bye to our coulee home had come. "Forward march!" shouted father and led the way with the big bob-sled, followed by cousin Jim and our little herd of kine, while mother and the children brought up the rear in a "pung" drawn by old Josh, a flea-bit gray. — It is probable that at the moment the master himself was slightly regretful. A couple of hours' march brought us to LaCrosse, the great city whose wonders I had longed to confront. It stood on the bank of a wide river and had all the value of a sea-port to me for in summer-time great hoarsely bellowing steamboats came and went from its quay, and all about it rose high wooded hills. Halting there, we overlooked a wide expanse of snow-covered ice in the midst of which a dark, swift, threatening current of open water ran. Across this chasm stretching from one ice-field to another lay a flexible narrow bridge over A Son of the Middle Border which my father led the way toward hills of the western shore. There was something especially terrifying in the boiling heave of that black flood, and I shivered with terror as I passed it, having vividly in my mind certain grim stories of men whose teams had broken through and been swept beneath the ice never to re appear. It was a long ride to my mother, for she too was in terror of the ice, but at last the Minnesota bank was reached, La Crescent was passed, and our guide entering a narrow valley began to climb the snowy hills. All that was familiar was put behind; all that was strange and dark, all that was wonderful and unknown, spread out before us, and as we crawled along that slippery, slanting road, it seemed that we were entering on a new and marvellous world. We lodged that night in Hokah, a little town in a deep valley. The tavern stood near a river which flowed over its dam with resounding roar and to its sound I slept. Next day at noon we reached Caledonia, a town high on the snowy prairie. Caledonia! For years that word was a poem in my ear, part of a marvellous and epic march. Actually it consisted of a few frame houses and a grocery store. But no matter. Its name shall ring like a peal of bells in this book. It grew colder as we rose, and that night, the night of the second day, we reached Hesper and entered a long stretch of woods, and at last turned in towards a friendly light shining from a low house beneath a splendid oak. As we drew near my father raised a signal shout, "Hallo-o-o the House! " and a man in a long gray coat came out. "Is that thee, friend Richard?" he called, and my father replied, "Yea, neighbor Barley, here we are!" I do not know how this stranger whose manner of 72 "Woods and JPrairie Lands" speech was so peculiar, came to be there, but he was and in answer to my question, father replied, "Barley is a Quaker," an answer which explained nothing at that time. Being too sleepy to pursue the matter, or to re^ mark upon anything connected with the exterior, I dumbly followed Harriet into the kitchen which was still in possession of good Mrs. Barley. Having filled our stomachs with warm food mother put us to bed, and when we awoke late the next day the Barleys were gone, our own stove was in its place, and our faithful clock was ticking calmly on the shelf. So far as we knew, mother was again at home and entirely content. This farm, which was situated two miles west of the village of Hesper, immediately won our love. It was a glorious place for boys. Broad-armed white oaks stood about the yard, and to the east and north a deep forest invited to exploration. The house was of logs and for that reason was much more attractive to us than to our mother. It was, I suspect, both dark and cold. I know the roof was poor, for one morning I awoke to find a miniature peak of snow on the floor at my bedside. It was only a rude little frontier cabin, but it was perfectly satisfactory to me. Harriet and I learned much in the way of woodcraft during the months which followed. Night by night the rabbits, in countless numbers printed their tell-tale rec ords in the snow, and quail and partridges nested be neath the down-drooping branches of the red oaks. Squirrels ran from tree to tree and we were soon able to distinguish and name most of the tracks made by the birds and small animals, and we took a never-failing delight in this study of the wild. In most of my excur sions my sister was my companion. My brother was too small. 73 \ A Son of the Middle Border All my memories of this farm are of the fiber of poetry. The silence of the snowy aisles of the forest, the whirring flight of partridges, the impudent bark of squirrels, the quavering voices of owls and coons, the music of the winds in the high trees, — all these impressions unite in my mind like parts of a woodland symphony. I soon learned to distinguish the raccoon's mournful call from the quavering cry of the owl, and I joined the hired man in hunting rabbits from under the piles of brush in the clearing. Once or twice some ferocious, larger animal, possibly a panther, hungrily yowled in the impenetrable thickets to the north, but this only lent a still more enthralling interest to the forest. To the east, an hour's walk through the timber, stood the village, built and named by the " Friends" who had a meeting house not far away, and though I saw much of them, I never attended their services. Our closest neighbor was a gruff loud-voiced old Nor wegian and from his children (our playmates) we learned many curious facts. All Norwegians, it appeared, ate from wooden plates or wooden bowls. Their food was soup which they called "bean swaagen" and they were all yellow haired and blue-eyed. Harriet and I and one Lars Peterson gave a great deal of time to an attempt to train a yoke of yearling calves to draw our handsled. I call it an attempt, for we hardly got beyond a struggle to overcome the stub born resentment of the stupid beasts, who very naturally objected to being forced into service before their time. Harriet was ten, I was not quite nine, and Lars was only twelve, hence we spent long hours in yoking and unyoking our unruly span. I believe we did actually haul several loads of firewood to the kitchen door, but at last Buck and Brin "turned the yoke" and broke it, and that ended our teaming. 74 f "Woods and Prairie Lands" The man from whom we acquired our farm had in some way domesticated a flock of wild geese, and though they must have been a part of the farm-yard during the winter, they made no deep impression on my mind till in the spring when as the migratory instinct stirred in their blood they all rose on the surface of the water in a little pool near the barn and with beating wings lifted their voices in brazen clamor calling to their fellows driving by high overhead. At tunes their cries halted the flocks in their arrowy flight and brought them down to mix indistingujshably with the captive birds. The wings of these had been clipped but as the weeks went on their pinions grew again and one morning when I went out to see what had happened to them, I found the pool empty and silent. We all missed their fine voices and yet we could not blame them for a reassertion of their freeborn nature. They had gone back to their summer camping grounds on the lakes of the far north. Early in April my father hired a couple of raw Nor wegians to assist in clearing the land, and although neither of these immigrants could speak a word of English, I was greatly interested in them. They slept in the granary but this did not prevent them from com municating to our house-maid a virulent case of small pox. Several days passed before my mother realized what ailed the girl. The discovery must have horrified her, for she had been through an epidemic of this dread disease in Wisconsin, and knew its danger. It was a fearsome plague in those days, much more fatal than now, and my mother with three unvaccinated children, a helpless handmaid to be nursed, was in de spair when father developed the disease and took to his bed. Surely it must have seemed to her as though the Lord had visited upon her more punishment than be longed to her, for to add the final touch, in the midst of 75 A Son of the Middle Border all her other afflictions she was expecting the birth of another child. I do not know what we would have done had not a noble woman of the neighborhood volunteered to come in and help us. She was not a friend, hardly an ac quaintance, and yet she served us like an angel of mercy. Whether she still lives or not I cannot say, but I wish to acknowledge here the splendid heroism which brought Mary Briggs, a stranger, into our stricken home at a time when all our other neighbors beat their horses into a mad gallop whenever forced to pass our gate. Young as I was I realized something of the burden which had fallen upon my mother, and when one night I was awakened from deep sleep by hearing her calling out in pain, begging piteously for help, I shuddered in my bed, realizing with childish, intuitive knowledge that she was passing through a cruel convulsion which could not be softened or put aside. I went to sleep again at last, and when I woke, I had a little sister. Harriet and I having been vaccinated, escaped with what was called the "verylide" but father was ill for several weeks. Fortunately he was spared, as we all were, the "pitting" which usually follows this dreaded disease, and in a week or two we children had forgotten all about it. Spring was upon us and the world was waiting to be explored. One of the noblest features of this farm was a large spring which boiled forth from the limestone rock about eighty rods north of the house, and this was a wonder- spot to us. There was something magical in this never- failing fountain, and we loved to play beside its waters. One of our delightful tasks was riding the horses to water at this spring, and I took many lessons in horse manship on these trips. As the seeding time came on, enormous flocks of "Woods and Prairie Lands'" pigeons, in clouds which almost filled the sky, made it necessary for some one to sentinel the new-sown grain, and although I was but nine years of age, my father put a double-barrelled shotgun into my hands, and sent me out to defend the fields. This commission filled me with the spirit of the soldier. Proudly walking my rounds I menaced the flocks as they circled warily over my head, taking shot at them now and again as they came near enough, feeling as duty bound and as martial as any Roman sentry standing guard over a city. Up to this time I had not been al lowed to carry arms, although I had been the companion of Den Green and Ellis Usher on their hunting expedi tions in the coulee — now with entire discretion over my weapon, I loaded it, capped it and fired it, marching with sedate and manly tread, while little Frank at my heels, served as subordinate in his turn. The pigeons passed after a few days, but my warlike duties continued, for the ground-squirrels, called "goph ers" by the settlers, were almost as destructive of the seed corn as the pigeons had been of the wheat. Day after day I patrolled the edge of the field listening to the saucy whistle of the striped little rascals, tracking them to their burrows and shooting them as they lifted their heads above the ground. I had moments of being sorry for them, but the sight of one digging up the seed, silenced my complaining conscience and I continued to slay. The school-house of this district stood out upon the prairie to the west a mile distant, and during May we trudged our way over a pleasant road, each carrying a small tin pail filled with luncheon. Here I came in con tact with the Norwegian boys from the colony to the north, and a bitter feud arose (or existed) between the "Yankees," as they called us, and "the Norskies," as n A Son of the Middle Border we called them. Often when we met on the road, showers of sticks and stones filled the air, and our hearts burned with the heat of savage conflict. War usually broke out at the moment of parting. Often after a fairly amicable half-mile together we suddenly split into hostile ranks, and warred with true tribal frenzy as long as we could find a stone or a clod to serve as missile. I had no per sonal animosity in this, I was merely a Pict willing to destroy my Angle enemies. As I look back upon my life on that woodland farm, it all seems very colorful and sweet. I am re-living days when the warm sun, falling on radiant slopes of grass, lit the meadow phlox and tall tiger lilies into flaming torches of color. I think of blackberry thickets and odorous grapevines and cherry trees and the delicious nuts which grew in profusion throughout the forest to the north. This forest which seemed endless and was of enchanted solemnity served as our wilderness. We explored it at every opportunity. We loved every day for the color it brought, each season for the wealth of its experience, and we welcomed the thought of spending all our years in this beautiful home where the wood and the prairie of our song did actually meet and mingle. CHAPTER We Move Again ONE day there came into our home a strange man who spoke in a fashion new to me. He was a middle-aged rather formal individual, dressed in a rough gray suit, and father alluded to him privately as "that English duke." I didn't know exactly what he meant by this, but our visitor's talk gave me a vague notion of "the old country." "My home," he said, "is near Manchester. I have come to try farming in the American wilderness." He was kindly, and did his best to be democratic, but we children stood away from him, wondering what he was doing in our house. My mother disliked him from the start for as he took his seat at our dinner table, he drew from his pocket a case in which he earned a silver fork and spoon and a silver-handled knife. Our cutlery was not good enough for him! Every family that we knew at that time used three- tined steel forks and my mother naturally resented the implied criticism of her table ware. I heard her say to my father, "If our ways don't suit your English friend he'd better go somewhere else for his meals." This fastidious pioneer also carried a revolver, for he believed that having penetrated far into a dangerous country, he was in danger, and I am not at all sure but that he was right, for the Minnesota woods at this time were filled with horse-thieves and counterfeiters, and it was known that many of these landhunting 79 A Son of the Middle Border Englishmen carried large sums of gold on their per sons. We resented our guest still more when we found that he was trying to buy our lovely farm and that father was already half -persuaded. We loved this farm. We loved the log house, and the oaks which sheltered it, and we especially valued the glorious spring and the plum trees which stood near it, but father was still dreaming of the free lands of the farther west, and early in March he sold to the Englishman and moved us all to a rented place some six miles directly west, in the township of Burr Oak. This was but a temporary lodging, a kind of camping place, for no sooner were his fields seeded than he set forth once again with a covered wagon, eager to explore the open country to the north and west of us. The wood and prairie land of Winnishiek County did not satisfy him, although it seemed to me then, as it does now, the fulfillment of his vision, the realization of our song. For several weeks he travelled through southern Minnesota and northern Iowa, always in search of the perfect farm, and when he returned, just before harvest, he was able to report that he had purchased a quarter section of "the best land in Mitchell County" and that after harvest we would all move again. If my mother resented this third removal she made no comment which I can now recall. I suspect that she went rather willingly this time, for her brother David wrote that he had also located in Mitchell County, not two miles from the place my father had decided upon for our future home, and Samantha, her younger sister, had settled in Minnesota. The circle in Neshonoc seemed about to break up. A mighty spreading and shifting was going on all over the west, and no doubt my mother accepted her part in it without especial protest. 80 We Move Again Our life in Burr Oak township that summer was joyous for us children. It seems to have been almost all sunshine and play. As I reflect upon it I relive many delightful excursions into the northern woods. It ap pears that Harriet and I were in continual harvest of nuts and berries. Our walks to school were explorations and we spent nearly every Saturday and Sunday in minute study of the country-side, devouring everything which was remotely edible. We gorged upon May- apples until we were ill, and munched black cherries until we were dizzy with their fumes. We clambered high trees to collect baskets of wild grapes which our mother could not use, and we garnered nuts with the insatiable greed of squirrels. We ate oak-shoots, fern- roots, leaves, bark, seed-balls, — everything! — not be cause we were hungry but because we loved to experi ment, and we came home, only when hungry or worn out or in awe of the darkness. It was a delightful season, full of the most satisfying companionship and yet of the names of my playmates I can seize upon only two — the others have faded from the tablets of my memory. I remember Ned who per mitted me to hold his plow, and Perry who taught me how to tame the half-wild colts that filled his father's pasture. Together we spent long days lassoing — or rather snaring — the feet of these horses and subduing them to the halter. We had many fierce struggles but came out of them all without a serious injury. Late in August my father again loaded our household goods into wagons, and with our small herd of cattle following, set out toward the west, bound once again to overtake the actual line of the middle border. This journey has an unforgettable epic charm as I look back upon it. Each mile took us farther and farther into the unsettled prairie until in the afternoon of the 81 A Son of the Middle Border \ second day, we came to a meadow so wide that its western rim touched the sky without revealing a sign of man's habitation other than the road in which we travelled. The plain was covered with grass tall as ripe wheat and when my father stopped his team and came back to us and said, "Well, children, here we are on The Big Prairie," we looked about us with awe, so endless seemed this spread of wild oats and waving blue-joint. Far away dim clumps of trees showed, but no chimney was in sight, and no living thing moved save our own cattle and the hawks lazily wheeling in the air. My heart filled with awe as well as wonder. The majesty of this primeval world exalted me. I felt for the first time the poetry of the unplowed spaces. It seemed that the "herds of deer and buffalo" of our song might, at any moment, present themselves, — but they did not, and my father took no account even of the marsh fowl. "Forward march!" he shouted, and on we went. Hour after hour he pushed into the west, the heads of his tired horses hanging ever lower, and on my mother's face the shadow deepened, but her chieftain's voice cheerily urging his team lost nothing of its clarion resolu tion. He was in his element. He loved this shelterless sweep of prairie. This westward march entranced him, I think he would have gladly kept on until the snowy wall of the Rocky Mountains met his eyes, for he was a natural explorer. Sunset came at last, but still he drove steadily on through the sparse settlements. Just at nightfall we came to a beautiful little stream, and stopped to let the horses drink. I heard its rippling, reassuring song on the pebbles. Thereafter all is dim and vague to me until my mother called out sharply, "Wake up, children! Here we are!" Si We Move Again Struggling to my feet I looked about me. Nothing could be seen but the dim form of a small house. — On every side the land melted into blackness, silent arid without boundary. Driving into the yard, father hastily unloaded one of the wagons and taking mother and Harriet and Jessie drove away to spend the night with Uncle David who had preceded us, as I now learned, and was living on a farm not far away. My brother and I were left to camp as best we could with the hired man. Spreading a rude bed on the floor, he told us to "hop in" and in ten minutes we were all fast asleep. The sound of a clattering poker awakened me next morning and when I opened my sleepy eyes and looked out a new world displayed itself before me. The cabin faced a level plain with no tree in sight. A mile away to the west stood a low stone house and immediately in front of us opened a half-section of un- fenced sod. To the north, as far as I could see, the land billowed like a russet ocean, with scarcely a roof to fleck its lonely spread. — I cannot say that I liked or disliked it. I merely marvelled at it, and while I wandered about the yard, the hired man scorched some cornmeal mush in a skillet and this with some butter and gingerbread, made up my first breakfast in Mitchell County. An hour or two later father and mother and the girls returned and the work of setting up the stove and getting the furniture in place began. In a very short time the experienced clock was voicing its contentment on a new shelf, and the kettle was singing busily on its familiar stove. Once more and for the sixth time since her marriage, Belle Garland adjusted herself to a pioneer environment, comforted no doubt by the knowledge that David and Deborah were near and that her father was A Son of the Middle Border coming soon. No doubt she also congratulated herself on the fact that she had not been carried beyond the Missouri River — and that her house was not " surrounded by Indians who murder by night." A few hours later, while my brother and I were on the roof of the house with intent to peer "over the edge of the prairie" something grandly significant happened. Upon a low hill to the west a herd of horses suddenly appeared running swiftly, led by a beautiful sorrel pony with shining white mane. On they came, like a platoon of cavalry rushing down across the open sod which lay before our door. The leader moved with lofty and graceful action, easily out-stretching all his fellows. Forward they swept, their long tails floating in the wind like banners, — on in a great curve as if scenting danger in the smoke of our fire. The thunder of their feet filled me with delight. Surely, next to a herd of buffalo this squadron of wild horses was the most satisfactory evi dence of the wilderness into which we had been thrust. Riding as if to intercept the leader, a solitary herder now appeared, mounted upon a horse which very evi dently was the mate of the leader. He rode magnifi cently, and under him the lithe mare strove resolutely to overtake and head off the leader. — All to no purpose! The halterless steeds of the prairie snorted derisively at their former companion, bridled and saddled, and carrying the weight of a master. Swiftly they thundered across the sod, dropped into a ravine, and disappeared in a cloud of dust. Silently we watched the rider turn and ride slowly homeward. The plain had become our new domain, the horseman our ideal. CHAPTER IX Our First Winter on the Prairie TT^OR a few days my brother and I had little to do Jj other than to keep the cattle from straying, and we used our leisure in becoming acquainted with the region round about. It burned deep into our memories, this wide, sunny, windy country. The sky so big, and the horizon line so low and so far away, made this new world of the plain more majestic than the world of the Coulee. — The grasses and many of the flowers were also new to us. On the uplands the herbage was short and dry and the plants stiff and woody, but in the swales the wild oat shook its quivers of barbed and twisted arrows, and the crow's foot, tall and sere, bowed softly under the feet of the wind, while everywhere, in the lowlands as well as on the ridges, the bleaching white antlers of by-gone herbiv- ora lay scattered, testifying to "the herds of deer and buffalo" which once fed there. We were just a few years too late to see them. To the south the sections were nearly all settled upon, for in that direction lay the county town, but to the north and on into Minnesota rolled the unplowed sod, the feeding ground of the cattle, the home of foxes and wolves, and to the west, just beyond the highest ridges, we loved to think the bison might still be seen. The cabin on this rented farm was a mere shanty, a shell of pine boards, which needed re-enforcing to make it habitable and one day my father said, "Well, Hamlin, 8* A Son of the Middle Border I guess you'll have to run the plow- team this fall. I must help neighbor Button wall up the house and I can't afford to hire another man." This seemed a fine commission for a lad of ten, and I drove my horses into the field that first morning with a manly pride which added an inch to my stature. I took my initial "round" at a "land" which stretched from one side of the quarter section to the other, in confident mood. I was grown up! But alas! my sense of elation did not last long. To guide a team for a few minutes as an experiment was one thing — to plow all day like a hired hand was another. It was not a chore, it was a job. It meant moving to and fro hour after hour, day after day, with no one to talk to but the horses. It meant trudging eight or nine miles in the forenoon and as many more in the afternoon, with less than an hour off at noon. It meant dragging the heavy implement around the corners, and it meant also many ship-wrecks, for the thick, wet stubble matted with wild buckwheat often rolled up between the coulter and the standard and threw the share completely out of the ground, making it necessary for me to halt the team and jerk the heavy plow backward for a new start. Although strong and active I was rather short, even for a ten-year-old, and to reach the plow handles I was obliged to lift my hands above my shoulders; and so with the guiding lines crossed over my back and my worn straw hat bobbing just above the cross-brace I must have made a comical figure. At any rate nothing like it had been seen in the neighborhood and the people on the road to town looking across the field, laughed and called to me, and neighbor Button said to my father in my hearing, "That chap's too young to run a plow," a judgment which pleased and flattered me greatly. Harriet cheered me by running out occasionally to 86 Our First Winter on the Prairie meet me as I turned the nearest corner, and sometimes Frank consented to go all the way around, chatting breathlessly as he trotted along behind. At other times he was prevailed upon to bring to me a cookie and a glass of milk, a deed which helped to shorten the forenoon. And yet, notwithstanding all these ameliorations, plowing became tedious. The flies were savage, especially in the middle of the day, and the horses, tortured by their lances, drove badly, twisting and turning in their despairing rage. Their tails were continually getting over the lines, and in stopping to kick their tormentors from their bellies they often got astride the traces, and in other ways made trouble for me. Only in the early morning or when the sun sank low at night were they able to move quietly along their ways. The soil was the kind my father had been seeking, a smooth dark sandy loam, which made it possible for a lad to do the work of a man. Often the share would go the entire "round" without striking a root or a pebble as big as a walnut, the steel running steadily with a crisp craunching ripping sound which I rather liked to hear. In truth work would have been quite tolerable had it not been so long drawn out. Ten hours of it even on a fine day made about twice too many for a boy. Meanwhile I cheered myself in every imaginable way. I whistled. I sang. I studied the clouds. I gnawed the beautiful red skin from the seed vessels which hung upon the wild rose bushes, and I counted the prairie chickens as they began to come together in winter flocks running through the stubble in search of food. I stopped now and again to examine the lizards unhoused by the share, tormenting them to make them sweat their milky drops (they were curiously repulsive to me), and I measured the little granaries of wheat which the mice 82 A Son of the Middle Border and gophers had deposited deep under the ground, storehouses which the plow had violated. My eyes dwelt enviously upon the sailing hawk, and on the passing of ducks. The occasional shadowy figure of a prairie wolf made me wish for Uncle David and his rifle. On certain days nothing could cheer me. When the bitter wind blew from the north, and the sky was filled with wild geese racing southward, with swiftly-hurrying clouds, winter seemed about to spring upon me. The horses' tails streamed in the wind. Flurries of snow covered me with clinging flakes, and the mud "gummed " my boots and trouser legs, clogging my steps. At such times I suffered from cold and loneliness — all sense of being a man evaporated. I was just a little boy, longing for the leisure of boyhood. Day after day, through the month of October and deep into November, I followed that team, turning over two acres of stubble each day. I would not believe this without proof, but it is true! At last it grew so cold that in the early morning everything was white with frost and I was obliged to put one hand in my pocket to keep it warm, while holding the plow with the other, but I didn't mind this so much, for it hinted at the close of autumn. I've no doubt facing the wind in this way was excellent discipline, but I didn't think it necessary then and my heart was sometimes bitter and rebellious. The soldier did not intend to be severe. As he had always been an early riser and a busy toiler it seemed perfectly natural and good discipline, that his sons should also plow and husk corn at ten years of age. He often told of beginning life as a "bound boy" at nine, and these stories helped me to perform my own tasks without whining. I feared to voice my weakness. At last there came a morning when by striking my heel upon the ground I convinced my boss that the soil 88 Our First Winter on the Prairie was frozen too deep for the mold-board to break. "All right," he said, "you may lay off this forenoon." Oh, those beautiful hours of respite! With time to play or read I usually read, devouring anything I could lay my hands upon. Newspapers, whether old or new, or pasted on the wall or piled up in the attic, — anything in print was wonderful to me. One enthralling book, borrowed from Neighbor Button, was The Female Spy, a Tale of the Rebellion. Another treasure was a story called Cast Ashore, but this volume unfortunately was badly torn and fifty pages were missing so that I never knew, and do not know to this day, how those indomi table shipwrecked seamen reached their English homes. I dimly recall that one man carried a pet monkey on his back and that they all lived on "Bustards." Finally the day came when the ground rang like iron under the feet of the horses, and a bitter wind, raw and gusty, swept out of the northwest, bearing gray veils of sleet. Winter had come! Work in the furrow had ended. The plow was brought in, cleaned and greased to prevent its rusting, and while the horses munched their hay in well-earned holiday, father and I helped farmer Button husk the last of his corn. Osman Button, a quaint and interesting man of middle age, was a native of York State and retained many of the traditions of his old home strangely blent with a store of vivid memories of Colorado, Utah and California, for he had been one of the gold-seekers of the early fifties. He loved to spin yarns of "When I was in gold camps," and he spun them well. He was short and bent and spoke in a low voice with a curious nervous sniff, but his diction was notably precise and clear. He was a man of judgment, and a citizen of weight and influence. From O. Button I got my first definite notion of Bret Harte's country, and of the long journey A Son of the Middle Border which they of the ox team had made in search of El dorado. His family "mostly boys and girls" was large, yet they all lived in a low limestone house which he had built (he said) to serve as a granary till he should find time to erect a suitable dwelling. In order to make the point dramatic, I will say that he was still living in the " gran ary" when last I called on him thirty years later! A warm friendship sprang up between him and my father, and he was often at our house but his gaunt and silent wife seldom accompanied him. She was kindly and hospitable, but a great sufferer. She never laughed, and seldom smiled, and so remains a pathetic figure in all my memories of the household. The younger Button children, Eva and Cyrus, became our companions in certain of our activities, but as they were both very sedate and slow of motion, they seldom joined us in our livelier sports. They were both much older than their years. Cyrus at this time was almost as venerable as his father, although his years were, I suppose, about seventeen. Albert and Lavinia, we heard, were much given to dancing and parties. One night as we were all seated around the kerosene lamp my father said, "Well, Belle, I suppose we'll have to take these young ones down to town and fit 'em out for school." These words so calmly uttered filled our minds with visions of new boots, new caps and new books, and though we went obediently to bed we hardly slept, so excited were we, and at breakfast next morning not one of us could think of food. All our desires con verged upon the wondrous expedition — our first visit to town. Our only carriage was still the lumber wagon but it had now two spring seats, one for father, mother and Jessie, and one for Harriet, Frank and myself. No 90 Our First Winter on the Prairie one else had anything better, hence we had no sense of being poorly out-fitted. We drove away across the frosty prairie toward Osage — moderately comfortable and perfectly happy. Osage was only a little town, a village of perhaps twelve hundred inhabitants, but to me as we drove down its Main Street, it was almost as impressive as LaCrosse had been. Frank clung close to father, and mother led Jessie, leaving Harriet and me to stumble over nail-kegs and dodge whiffle trees what time our eyes absorbed jars of pink and white candy, and sought out boots and buckskin mittens. Whenever Harriet spoke she whis pered, and we pointed at each shining object with cau tious care. — Oh! the marvellous exotic smells! Odors of salt codfish and spices, calico and kerosene, apples and ginger-snaps mingle in my mind as I write. Each of us soon carried a candy marble in his or her cheek (as a chipmunk carries a nut) and Frank and I stood like sturdy hitching posts whilst the storekeeper with heavy hands screwed cotton-plush caps upon our heads, — but the most exciting moment, the crowning joy of the day, came with the buying of our new boots. — If only father had not insisted on our taking those which were a size too large for us! They were real boots. No one but a Congressman wore " gaiters" in those days. War fashions still domi nated the shoe-shops, and high-topped cavalry boots were all but universal. They were kept in boxes under the counter or ranged in rows on a shelf and were of all weights and degrees of fineness. The ones I selected had red tops with a golden moon in the center but my brother's taste ran to blue tops decorated with a golden flag. Oh! that deliciously oily new smell! My heart glowed every time I looked at mine. I was especially pleased because they did not have copper toes. Copper A Son of the Middle Border toes belonged to little boys. A youth who had plowed seventy acres of land could not reasonably be expected to dress like a child. — How smooth and delightfully stiff they felt on my feet. Then came our new books, a McGuffey reader, a Mitchell geography, a Ray's arithmetic, and a slate. The books had a delightful new smell also, and there was singular charm in the smooth surface of the un marked slates. I was eager to carve my name in the frame. At last with our treasures under the seat (so near that we could feel them), with our slates and books in our laps we jolted home, dreaming of school and snow. To wade in the drifts with our fine high-topped boots was now our desire. It is strange but I cannot recall how my mother looked on this trip. Even my father's image is faint and vague (I remember only his keen eagle-gray terrifying eyes), but I can see every acre of that rented farm. I can tell you exactly how the house looked. It was an unpainted square cottage and stood bare on the sod at the edge of Dry Run ravine. It had a small lean-to on the eastern side and a sitting room and bedroom below. Overhead was a low unplastered chamber in which we children slept. As it grew too cold to use the summer kitchen we cooked, ate and lived in the square room which oc cupied the entire front of the two story upright, and which was, I suppose, sixteen feet square. As our attic was warmed only by the stove-pipe, we older children of a frosty morning made extremely simple and hurried toilets. On very cold days we hurried down stairs to dress beside the kitchen fire. Our furniture was of the rudest sort. I cannot recall a single piece in our house or in our neighbors' houses that had either beauty or distinction. It was all cheap and worn, for this was the middle border, and nearly all 02 Our First Winter on the Prairie our neighbors had moved as we had done in covered wagons. Farms were new, houses were mere shanties, and money was scarce. "War times" and "war prices" were only just beginning to change. Our clothing was all cheap and ill fitting. The women and children wore home-made "cotton flannel" underclothing for the most part, and the men wore rough, ready-made suits over which they drew brown denim blouses or overalls to keep them clean. Father owned a fine buffalo overcoat (so much of his song's promise was redeemed) and we possessed two buffalo robes for use in our winter sleigh, but mother had only a sad coat and a woolen shawl. How she kept warm I cannot now understand — I think she stayed at home on cold days. All of the boys wore long trousers, and even my eight year old brother looked like a miniature man with his full-length overalls, high-topped boots and real sus penders. As for me I carried a bandanna in my hip pocket and walked with determined masculine stride. My mother, like all her brothers and sisters, was musical and played the violin — or fiddle, as we called it, — • and I have many dear remembrances of her playing. Napoleon's March, Money Musk, The Devil's Dream and half-a-dozen other simple tunes made up her reper toire. It was very crude music of course but it added to the love and admiration in which her children always held her. Also in some way we had fallen heir to a Prince melodeon — one that had belonged to the McClin- tocks, but only my sister played on that. Once at a dance in neighbor Button's house, mother took the "dare" of the fiddler and with shy smile played The Fisher's Hornpipe or some other simple melody and was mightily cheered at the close of it, a brief perform- 93 A Son of the Middle Border ance which she refused to repeat. Afterward she and my father danced and this seemed a very wonderful performance, for to us they were "old" — far past such frolicking, although he was but forty and she thirty- one! At this dance I heard, for the first time, the local pro fessional fiddler, old Daddy Fairbanks, as quaint a char acter as ever entered fiction, for he was not only butcher and horse doctor but a renowned musician as well. Tall, gaunt and sandy, with enormous nose and sparse pro jecting teeth, he was to me the most enthralling figure at this dance and his queer "Calls" and his "York State" accent filled us all with delight. "Ally man left," "Chassay by your pardners," "Dozy-do" were some of the phrases he used as he played Honest John and Haste to the Wedding. At times he sang his calls in high nasal chant, "First lady lead to the right, deedle, deedle dum-dum — gent foller after — dally-deedle-do-do— three hands round" — and everybody laughed with frank enjoyment of his words and action. It was a joy to watch him "start the set." With fiddle under his chin he took his seat in a big chair on the kitchen table in order to command the floor. "Farm on, farm on!" he called disgustedly. "Lively now!" and then, when all the couples were in position, with one mighty No. 14 boot uplifted, with bow laid to strings he snarled, "Already — GELANG!" and with a thundering crash his foot came down, "Honors TEW your pardners — • right and left FOUR!" And the dance was on! I suspect his fiddlin' was not even "middling" but he beat time fairly well and kept the dancers somewhere near to rhythm, and so when his ragged old cap went round he often got a handful of quarters for his toil. He always ate two suppers, one at the beginning of the party and another at the end. He had a high respect 94 Our First Winter on the Prairie for the skill of my Uncle David and was grateful to him and other better musicians for their noninterference with his professional engagements. The school-house which was to be the center of our social life stood on the bare prairie about a mile to the southwest and like thousands of other similar buildings in the west, had not a leaf to shade it in summer nor a branch to break the winds of savage winter. "There's been a good deal of talk about setting out a wind-break," neighbor Button explained to us, "but nothing has as yet been done." It was merely a square pine box painted a glaring white on the outside and a desolate drab within; at least drab was the original color, but the benches were mainly so greasy and hacked that original inten tions were obscured. It had two doors on the eastern end and three windows on each side. A long square stove (standing on slender legs in a puddle of bricks), a wooden chair, and a rude table in one corner, for the use of the teacher, completed the movable furniture. The walls were roughly plastered and the windows had no curtains. It was a barren temple of the arts even to the resi dents of Dry Run, and Harriet and I, stealing across the prairie one Sunday morning to look in, came away vaguely depressed. We were fond of school and never missed a day if we could help it, but this neighborhood center seemed small and bleak and poor. With what fear, what excitement we approached the door on that first day, I can only faintly indicate. All the scholars were strange to me except Albert and Cyrus Button, and I was prepared for rough treatment. How ever, the experience was not so harsh as I had feared. True, Rangely Field did throw me down and wash my face in snow, and Jack Sweet tripped me up once or twice, but I bore these indignities with such grace and 95 A Son of the Middle Border could command, and soon made a place for myself among the boys. Burton Babcock was my seat-mate, and at once be came my chum. You will hear much of him in this chronicle. He was two years older than I and though pale and slim was unusually swift and strong for his age. He was a silent lad, curiously timid in his classes and not at ease with his teachers. I cannot recover much of that first winter of school. It was not an experience to remember for its charm. Not one line of grace, not one touch of color relieved the room's bare walls or softened its harsh windows. Per haps this very barrenness gave to the poetry in our readers an appeal that seems magical, certainly it threw over the faces of Frances Babcock and Mary Abbie Gammons a lovelier halo. — They were "the big girls" of the school, that is to say, they were seventeen or eighteen years old, — and Frances was the special terror of the teacher, a pale and studious pigeon-toed young man who was preparing for college. In spite of the cold, the boys played open air games all winter. "Dog and Deer," "Dare Gool" and "Fox and Geese" were our favorite diversions, and the wonder is that we did not all die of pneumonia, for we battled so furiously during each recess that we often came in wet with perspiration and coughing so hard that for several minutes recitations were quite impossible. — But we were a hardy lot and none of us seemed the worse for our colds. There was not much chivalry in the school — quite the contrary, for it was dominated by two or three big rough boys and the rest of us took our tone from them. To protect a girl, to shield her from remark or indignity required a good deal of bravery and few of us were strong enough to do it. Girls were foolish, 96 Our First Winter on the Prairie ridiculous creatures, set apart to be laughed at or preyed upon at will. To shame them was a great joke. — How far I shared in these barbarities I cannot say but that I did share in them I know, for I had very little to do with my sister Harriet after crossing the school-house yard. She kept to her tribe as I to mine. This winter was made memorable also by a "revival" which came over the district with sudden fury. It began late in the winter — fortunately, for it ended all dancing and merry-making for the time. It silenced Daddy Fairbanks' fiddle and subdued my mother's glorious voice to a wail. A cloud of puritanical gloom settled upon almost every household. Youth and love became furtive and hypocritic. The evangelist, one of the old-fashioned shouting, hysterical, ungrammatical, gasping sort, took charge of the services, and in his exhortations phrases descriptive of lakes of burning brimstone and ages of endless torment abounded. Some of the figures of speech and violent gestures of the man still linger in my mind, but I will not set them down on paper. They are too dreadful to perpetuate. At times he roared with such power that he could have been heard for half a mile. And yet we went, night by night, mother, father, Jessie, all of us. It was our theater. Some of the rough est characters in the neighborhood rose and professed repentance, for a season, even old Barton, the profanest man in the township, experienced a "change of heart." We all enjoyed the singing, and joined most lustily in the tunes. Even little Jessie learned to sing Heavenly Wings , There is a Fountain filled with Bloody and Old Hundred. As I peer back into that crowded little school-room, smothering hot and reeking with lamp smoke, and recall the half-lit, familiar faces of the congregation, it all has 97 A Son of the Middle Border the quality of a vision, something experienced in an other world. The preacher, leaping, sweating, roaring till the windows rattle, the mothers with sleeping babes in their arms, the sweet, strained faces of the girls, the immobile wondering men, are spectral shadows, figures encountered in the phantasmagoria of disordered sleep. 98 CHAPTER X The Homestead on the Knoll SPRING came to us that year with such sudden beauty, such sweet significance after our long and depressing winter, that it seemed a release from prison, and when at the close of a warm day in March we heard, pulsing down through the golden haze of sunset, the mellow boom, boom, boom of the prairie cock our hearts quickened, for this, we were told, was the certain sign of spring. Day by day the call of this gay herald of spring was taken up by others until at last the whole horizon was ringing with a sunrise symphony of exultant song. 11 Boom, boom, boom!" called the roosters; "cutta, cutta, wha-whoop-squaw, squawk! " answered the hens as they fluttered and danced on the ridges — and mingled with their jocund hymn we heard at last the slender, wistful piping of the prairie lark. With the coming of spring my duties as a teamster returned. My father put me in charge of a harrow, and with old Doll and Queen — quiet and faithful span — I drove upon the field which I had plowed the previous October, there to plod to and fro behind my drag, while in the sky above rny head and around me on the mellow ing soil the life of the season thickened. Aided by my team I was able to study at close range the prairie roosters as they assembled for their parade. They had regular "stamping grounds" on certain ridges, where the soil was beaten smooth by the pressure of 99 A Son of the Middle Border their restless feet. I often passed within a few yards of them. — I can see them now, the cocks leaping and strutting, with trailing wings and down-thrust Leads, displaying their bulbous orange-colored neck ornaments yhile the hens flutter and squawk in silly delight. All ihe charm and mystery of that prairie world comes ba-ck io me, and I ache with an illogical desire to recover it and hold it, and preserve it in some form for my chil dren. — It seems an injustice that they should miss it, and yet it is probable that they are getting an equal joy of life, an equal exaltation from the opening flowers of the single lilac bush in our city back-yard or from an occasional visit to the lake in Central Park. Dragging is even more wearisome than plowing, in some respects, for you have no handles to assist you and your heels sinking deep into the soft loam bring such unwonted strain upon the tendons of your legs that you can scarcely limp home to supper, and it seems that you cannot possibly go on another day, — but you do — at least I did. There was something relentless as the weather in the way my soldier father ruled his sons, and yet he was neither hard-hearted nor unsympathetic. The fact is easily explained. His own boyhood had been task-filled and he saw nothing unnatural in the regular employment of his children. Having had little play-time himself, he considered that we were having a very comfortable boyhood. Furthermore the country was new and labor scarce. Every hand and foot must count under such conditions. There are certain ameliorations to child-labor on a farm. Air and sunshine and food are plentiful. I never lacked for meat or clothing, and mingled with my records of toil are exquisite memories of the joy I took in following the changes in the landscape, in the notes 100 The Homestead on the Knoll of birds, and in the play of small animals on the sunny soil. There were no pigeons on the prairie but. enormous flocks of ducks came sweeping nordiwai d, alighting at sunset to feed in the fields of stubble. They. c?n?e in countless myriads and often when they settle d;to-e^: th they covered acres of meadow like some prodigious cataract from the sky. When alarmed they rose with a sound like the rumbling of thunder. At times the lines of their cloud-like flocks were so unending that those in the front rank were lost in the northern sky, while those in the rear were but dim bands beneath the southern sun. — I tried many times to shoot some of them, but never succeeded, so wary were they. Brant and geese in formal flocks followed and to watch these noble birds pushing their arrowy lines straight into the north always gave me special joy. On fine days they flew high — so high they were but faint lines against the shining clouds. I learned to imitate their cries, and often caused the leaders to turn, to waver in their course as I uttered my resounding call. The sand-hill crane came last of all, loitering north in lonely easeful flight. Often of a warm day, I heard his sovereign cry falling from the azure dome, so high, so far his form could not be seen, so close to the sun that my eyes could not detect his solitary, majestic circling sweep. He came after the geese. He was the herald of summer. His brazen, reverberating call will forever remain associated in my mind with mellow, pulsating earth, springing grass and cloudless glorious May-time skies. As my team moved to and fro over the field, ground sparrows rose in countless thousands, flinging themselves against the sky like grains of wheat from out a sower's 101 A Son of the Middle Border hand, and their chatter fell upon me like the voices of fairy sprites, invisible and multitudinous. Long swift narrpw flocks of a bird we called "the prairie-pigeon" swooped aver the swells on sounding wing, winding so close to the ground, they seemed at times like slender air-borne "Seipents,— and always the brown lark whistled as if to cheer my lonely task. Back and forth across the wide field I drove, while the sun crawled slowly up the sky. It was tedious work and I was always hungry by nine, and famished at ten. Thereafter the sun appeared to stand still. My chest caved in and my knees trembled with weakness, but when at last the white flag fluttering from a chamber window summoned to the mid-day meal, I started with strength miraculously renewed and called, "Dinner!" to the hired hand. Unhitching my team, with eager haste I climbed upon old Queen, and rode at ease toward the barn. Oh, it was good to enter the kitchen, odorous with fresh biscuit and hot coffee! We all ate like dragons, devouring potatoes and salt pork without end, till mother mildly remarked, "Boys, boys! Don't ' founder7 your selves!" From such a meal I withdrew torpid as a gorged snake, but luckily I had half an hour in which to get my courage back, — and besides, there was always the stirring power of father's clarion call. His energy appeared super human to me. I was in awe of him. He kept track of everything, seemed hardly to sleep and never com plained of weariness. Long before the nooning was up, (or so it seemed to me) he began to shout: "Time's upt boys. Grab a root!" And so, lame, stiff and sore, with the sinews of my legs shortened, so that my knees were bent like an old man's, I hobbled away to the barn and took charge of my team. 102 The Homestead on the Knoll Once in the field, I felt better. A subtle change, a mel lower charm came over the afternoon earth. The ground was warmer, the sky more genial, the wind more amiable, and before I had finished my second "round" my joints were moderately pliable and my sinews relaxed. Nevertheless the temptation to sit on the corner of the harrow and dream the moments away was very great, and sometimes as I laid my tired body down on the tawny, sunlit grass at the edge of the field, and gazed up at the beautiful clouds sailing by, I wished for leisure to explore their purple valleys. — The wind whispered in the tall weeds, and sighed in the hazel bushes. The dried blades touching one another in the passing winds, spoke to me, and the gophers, glad of escape from their dark, underground prisons, chirped a cheery greeting. Such respites were strangely sweet. So day by day, as I walked my monotonous round upon the ever mellowing soil, the prairie spring unrolled its beauties before me. I saw the last goose pass on to the north, and watched the green grass creeping up the sunny slopes. I answered the splendid challenge of the loitering crane, and studied the ground sparrow building her grassy nest. The prairie hens began to seek seclu sion in the swales, and the pocket gopher, busily mining the sod, threw up his purple-brown mounds of cool fresh earth. Larks, blue-birds and king-birds followed the robins, and at last the full tide of May covered the world with luscious green. Harriet and Frank returned to school but I was too valuable to be spared. The unbroken land of our new farm demanded the plow and no sooner was the planting on our rented place finished than my father began the work of fencing and breaking the sod of the homestead which lay a mile to the south, glowing like a garden under the summer sun. One day late in May my uncle David 103 A Son of the Middle Border (who had taken a farm not far away), drove over with four horses hitched to a big breaking plow and to gether with my father set to work overturning the primeval sward whereon we were to be "lords of the soil." I confess that as I saw the tender plants and shining flowers bow beneath the remorseless beam, civilization seemed a sad business, and yet there was something epic, something large-gestured and splendid in the " breaking" season. Smooth, glossy, almost unwrinkled the thick ribbon of jet-black sod rose upon the share and rolled away from the mold-board's glistening curve to tuck itself upside down into the furrow behind the horse's heels, and the picture which my uncle made, gave me pleasure in spite of the sad changes he was making. The land was not all clear prairie and every ounce of David's great strength was required to guide that eighteen-inch plow as it went ripping and snarling through the matted roots of the hazel thickets, and sometimes my father came and sat on the beam in order to hold the coulter to its work, while the giant driver braced himself to the shock and the four horses strained desperately at their traces. These contests had the quality of a wrestling match but the men always won. My own job was to rake and burn the brush which my father mowed with a heavy scythe. — Later we dug post- holes and built fences but each day was spent on the new land. Around us, on the swells, gray gophers whistled, and the nesting plover quaveringly called. Blackbirds clucked in the furrow and squat badgers watched with jealous eye the plow's inexorable progress toward their dens. The weather was perfect June. Fleecy clouds sailed like snowy galleons from west to east, the wind 104 The Homestead on the Knoll was strong but kind, and we worked in a glow of satisfied ownership. Many rattlesnakes (" massasaugas " Mr. Button called them), inhabited the moist spots and father and I killed several as we cleared the ground. Prairie wolves lurked in the groves and swales, but as foot by foot and rod by rod, the steady steel rolled the grass and the hazel brush under, all of these wild things died or hurried away, never to return. Some part of this tragedy I was able even then to understand and regret. At last the wide " quarter section" lay upturned, black to the sun and the garden that had bloomed and fruited for millions of years, waiting for man, lay torn and ravaged. The tender plants, the sweet flowers, the fragrant fruits, the busy insects, all the swarming lives which had been native here for untold centuries were utterly destroyed. It was sad and yet it was not all loss, even to my thinking, for I realized that over this desola tion the green wheat would wave and the corn silks shed their pollen. It was not precisely the romantic valley of our song, but it was a rich and promiseful plot and my father seemed entirely content. Meanwhile, on a little rise of ground near the road, neighbor Gammons and John Bowers were building our next home. It did not in the least resemble the founda tion of an everlasting family seat, but it deeply excited us all. It was of pine and had the usual three rooms below and a long garret above and as it stood on a plain, bare to the winds, my father took the precaution of lining it with brick to hold it down. It was as good as most of the dwellings round about us but it stood naked on the sod, devoid of grace as a dry goods box. Its walls were rough plaster, its floor of white pine, its furni ture poor, scanty and worn. There was a little picture on the face of the clock, a chromo on the wall, and a A Son of the Middle Border printed portrait of General Grant — nothing more. It was home by reason of my mother's brave and cheery presence, and the prattle of Jessie's clear voice filled it with music. Dear child, — with her it was always spring! ic6 CHAPTER XI School Life OUR new house was completed during July but we did not move into it till in September. There was much to be done in way of building sheds, granaries and corn-cribs and in this work father was both car penter and stone-mason. An amusing incident comes to my mind in connection with the digging of our well. Uncle David and I were "tending mason," and father was down in the well laying or trying to lay the curbing. It was a tedious and difficult job and he was about to give it up in despair when one of our neighbors, a quaint old Englishman named Barker, came driving along. He was one of these men who take a minute inquisitive interest in the affairs of others; therefore he pulled his team to a halt and came in. Peering into the well he drawled out, " Hello, Gar land. Wat ye doin' down there?" "Tryin' to lay a curb," replied my father lifting a gloomy face, "and I guess it's too complicated for me." ' "No thin' easier," retorted the old man with a wink at my uncle, "jest putt two a-top o' one and one a-toppo two — and the big eend out," — and with a broad grin on his red face he went back to his team and drove away. My father afterwards said, "I saw the whole process in a flash of light. He had given me all the rule I needed. I laid the rest of that wall without a particle of trouble." 107 A Son of the Middle Border Many times after this Barker stopped to offer advice but he never quite equalled the startling success of his rule for masonry. The events of this harvest, even the process of moving into the new house, are obscured in my mind by the clouds of smoke which rose from calamitous fires all over the west. It was an unprecedentedly dry season so that not merely the prairie, but many weedy cornfields burned. I had a good deal of time to meditate upon this for I was again the plow-boy. Every day I drove away from the rented farm to the new land where I was cross- cutting the breaking, and the thickening haze through which the sun shone with a hellish red glare, produced in me a growing uneasiness which became terror when the news came to us that Chicago was on fire. It seemed to me then that the earth was about to go up in a flaming cloud just as my grandad had so often prophesied. This general sense of impending disaster was made keenly personal by the destruction of uncle David's stable with all his horses. This building like most of the barns of the region was not only roofed with straw but banked with straw, and it burned so swiftly that David was trapped in a stall while trying to save one of his teams. He saved himself by burrowing like a gigantic mole through the side of the shed, and so, hat- less, covered with dust and chaff, emerged as if from a fiery burial after he had been given up for dead. This incident combined with others so filled my child ish mind that I lived in apprehension of similar disaster. I feared the hot wind which roared up from the south, and I never entered our own stable in the mid dle of the day without a sense of danger. Then came the rains — the blessed rains — and put an end to my fears. In a week we had forgotten all the "conflagrations" 108 School Life except that in Chicago. There was something grandiose and unforgettable in the tales which told of the madly fleeing crowds in the narrow streets. These accounts pushed back the walls of my universe till its far edge included the ruined metropolis whose rebuilding was of the highest importance to us, for it was not only the source of all our supplies, but the great central market to which we sent our corn and hogs and wheat. My world was splendidly romantic. It was bounded on the west by THE PLAINS with their Indians and buf falo; on the north by THE GREAT WOODS, filled with thieves and counterfeiters; on the south by OSAGE AND CHICAGO; and on the east by HESPER, ONALASKA and BOSTON. A luminous trail ran from Dry Run Prairie to Neshonoc — all else was " chaos and black night." For seventy days I walked behind my plow on the new farm while my father finished the harvest on the rented farm and moved to the house on the knoll. It was lonely work for a boy of eleven but there were frequent breaks in the monotony and I did not greatly suffer. I disliked cross-cutting for the reason that the unrotted sods would often pile up in front of the coulter and make me a great deal of trouble. There is a certain pathos in the sight of that small boy tugging and kicking at the stubborn turf in the effort to free his plow. Such misfortunes loom large in a lad's horizon. One of the interludes, and a lovely one, was given over to gathering the hay from one of the wild meadows to the north of us. Another was the threshing from the shock on the rented farm. This was the first time we had seen this done and it interested us keenly. A great many teams were necessary and the crew of men was correspondingly large. Uncle David was again the thresher with a fine new separator, and I would have enjoyed the season with almost perfect contentment 109 A Son of the Middle Border had it not been for the fact that I was detailed to hold sacks for Daddy Fairbanks who was the measurer. Our first winter had been without much wind but our second taught us the meaning of the word " blizzard" which we had just begun to hear about. The winds of Wisconsin were "gentle zephyrs" com pared to the blasts which now swept down over the plain to hammer upon our desolate little cabin and pile the drifts around our sheds and granaries, and even my pioneer father was forced to admit that the hills of Green's Coulee had their uses after all. One such storm which leaped upon us at the close of a warm and beautiful day in February lasted for two days and three nights, making life on the open prairie impossible even to the strongest man. The thermometer fell to thirty degrees below zero and the snow-laden air moving at a rate of eighty miles an hour pressed upon the walls of our house with giant power. The sky of noon was darkened, so that we moved in a pallid half- light, and the windows thick with frost shut us in as if with gray shrouds. Hour after hour those winds and snows in furious battle, howled and roared and whistled around our frail shelter, slashing at the windows and piping on the chimney, till it seemed as if the Lord Sun had been wholly blotted out and that the world would never again be warm. Twice each day my father made a desperate sally toward the stable to feed the imprisoned cows and horses or to replenish our fuel — for the remainder of the long pallid day he sat beside the fire with gloomy face. Even his indomitable spirit was awed by the fury of that storm. ( So long and so continuously did those immitigable winds howl in our ears that their tumult persisted, in imagination, when on the third morning, we thawed 210 S chool Life holes in the thickened rime of the window panes and looked forth on a world silent as a marble sea and flam ing with sunlight. My own relief was mingled with sur prise — surprise to find the landscape so unchanged. True, the yard was piled high with drifts and the barns were almost lost to view but the far fields and the dark lines of Burr Oak Grove remained unchanged. We met our school-mates that day, like survivors of shipwreck, and for many days we listened to gruesome stories of disaster, tales of stages frozen deep in snow with all their passengers sitting in their seats, and of herders with their silent flocks around them, lying stark as granite among the hazel bushes in which they had sought shelter. It was long before we shook off the awe with which this tempest filled our hearts. The school-house which stood at the corner of our new farm was less than half a mile away, and yet on many of the winter days which followed, we found it quite far enough. Hattie was now thirteen, Frank nine and I a little past eleven but nothing, except a blizzard such as I have described, could keep us away from school. Fac ing the cutting wind, wallowing through the drifts, bat tling like small intrepid animals, we often arrived at the door moaning with pain yet unsubdued, our ears frosted, our toes numb in our boots, to meet others in similar case around the roaring hot stove. Often after we reached the school-house another form of suffering overtook us in the " thawing out" process. Our fingers and toes, swollen with blood, ached and itched, and our ears burned. Nearly all of us carried sloughing ears and scaling noses. Some of the pupils came two miles against these winds. The natural result of all this exposure was of course, chilblains! Every foot in the school was more or less touched with this disease to which our elders alluded in A Son of the Middle Border as if it were an amusing trifle, but to us it was no joke. After getting thoroughly warmed up, along about the middle of the forenoon, there came into our feet a most intense itching and burning and aching, a sensation so acute that keeping still was impossible, and all over the room an uneasy shuffling and drumming arose as we pounded our throbbing heels against the floor or scraped our itching toes against the edge of our benches. The teacher understood and was kind enough to overlook this disorder. The wonder is that any of us lived through that win ter, for at recess, no matter what the weather might be we flung ourselves out of doors to play "fox and geese" or e'dare goal," until, damp with perspiration, we responded to the teacher's bell, and came pouring back into the entry ways to lay aside our wraps for another hour's study. Our readers were almost the only counterchecks to the current of vulgarity and baseness which ran through the talk of the older boys, and I wish to acknowl edge my deep obligation to Professor McGuffey, who ever he may have been, for the dignity and literary grace of his selections. From the pages of his reader? I learned to know and love the poems of Scott, Byron, Southey, Wordsworth and a long line of the English masters. I got my first taste of Shakespeare from the selected scenes which I read in these books. With terror as well as delight I rose to read LochieVs Warning, The Battle of Waterloo or The Roman Captive. Marco Bozzaris and William Tell were alike glorious to me. I soon knew not only my own reader, the fourth, but all the selections in the fifth and sixth as well. I could follow almost word for word the recitations of the older pupils and at such times I forgot my squat little body and my mop of hair, and became imaginatively a 112 School Life page in the train of Ivanhoe, or a bowman hi the army of Richard the Lion Heart battling the Saracen in the Holy Land. With a high ideal of the way in which these grand se lections should be read, I was scared almost voiceless when it came my turn to read them before the class. "STRIKE FOR YOUR ALTARS AND YOUR FIRES. STRIKE FOR THE GREEN GRAVES OF YOUR SIRES — GOD AND YOUR NATIVE LAND," always reduced me to a trembling breathlessness. The sight of the emphatic print was a call to the best that was in me and yet I could not meet the test. Excess of desire to do it just right often brought a ludicrous gasp and I often fell back into my seat in dis grace, the titter of the girls adding to my pain. Then there was the famous passage, "Did ye not hear it?" and the careless answer, "No, it was but the wind or the car rattling o'er the stony street." — I knew exactly how those opposing emotions should be expressed but to do it after I rose to my feet was impossible. Bur ton was even more terrified than I. Stricken blind as well as dumb he usually ended by helplessly staring at the words which, I conceive, had suddenly become a blur to him. No matter, we were taught to feel the force of these poems and to reverence the genius that produced them, and that was worth while. Falstaff and Prince Hal, Henry and his wooing of Kate, Wolsey and his downfall, Shylock and his pound of flesh all became a part of our thinking and helped us to measure the large figures of our own literature, for Whittier, Bryant and Longfellow also had place in these volumes. It is probable that Professor McGuffey, being a Southern man, did not value New England writers as highly as my grand mother did, nevertheless Thanatopsis was there and The Village Blacksmith, and extracts from The Deer "3 A Son of the Middle Border Slayer and The Pilot gave us a notion that in Cooper we had a novelist of weight and importance, one to put beside Scott and Dickens. A by-product of my acquaintance with one of the older boys was a stack of copies of the New York Weekly, a paper filled with stories of noble life in England and hair-breadth escapes on the plain, a shrewd mixture, designed to meet the needs of the entire membership of a prairie household. The pleasure I took in these tales should fill me with shame, but it doesn't — I rejoice in the memory of it. I soon began, also, to purchase and trade "Beadle's Dime Novels" and, to tell the truth, I took an exquisite delight in Old Sleuth and Jack Harkaway. My taste was catholic. I ranged from Lady Gwendolin to Buckskin Bill and so far as I can now distinguish one was quite as enthralling as the other. It is impossible for any print to be as magical to any boy these days as those weeklies were to me in 1871. One day a singular test was made of us all. Through some agency now lost to me my father was brought to subscribe for The Hearth and Home or some such paper for the farmer, and in this I read my first chronicle of everyday life. In the midst of my dreams of lords and ladies, queens and dukes, I found myself deeply concerned with back woods farming, spelling schools, protracted meetings and the like familiar homely scenes. This serial (which involved my sister and myself in many a spat as to who should read it first) was The Hoosier Schoolmaster, by Edward Eggleston, and a perfectly successful attempt to interest western readers in a story of the middle border. To us "Mandy" and "Bud Means," "Ralph Hart- sook," the teacher, "Little Shocky" and sweet patient "Hannah," were as real as Cyrus Button and Daddy 114 School Life Fairbanks. We could hardly wait for the next numbel of the paper, so concerned were we about " Hannah" and " Ralph." We quoted old lady Means and we made bets on "Bud" in his fight with the villainous drover. I hardly knew where Indiana was in those days, but Eggleston's characters were near neighbors. The illustrations were dreadful, even in my eyes, but the artist contrived to give a slight virginal charm to Hannah and a certain childish sweetness to Shocky, so that we accepted the more than mortal ugliness of old man Means and his daughter Mirandy (who simpered over her book at us as she did at Ralph), as a just inter pretation of their worthlessness. This book is a milestone in my literary progress as it is in the development of distinctive western fiction, and years afterward I was glad to say so to the aged author who lived a long and honored life as a teacher and writer of fiction. It was always too hot or too cold in our school room and on certain days when a savage wind beat and clamored at the loose windows, the girls, humped and shivering, sat upon their feet to keep them warm, and the younger children with shawls over their shoulders sought permission to gather close about the stove. Our dinner pails (stored in the entry way) were often frozen solid and it was necessary to thaw out our mince pie as well as our bread and butter by putting it on the stove. I recall, vividly, gnawing, dog-like, at the mollified outside of a doughnut while still its frosty heart made my teeth ache. [ Happily all days were not like this. There were after noons when the sun streamed warmly into the room, when long icicles formed on the eaves, adding a touch of grace to the desolate building, moments when the jingling bells of passing wood-sleighs expressed the natural cheer and buoyancy of our youthful hearts. US CHAPTER XII Chores and Almanacs farmyard would have been uninhabitable during this winter had it not been for the long ricks of straw which we had piled up as a shield against the prairie winds. Our horse-barn, roofed with hay and banked with chaff, formed the west wall of the cowpen, and a long low shed gave shelter to the north. In this triangular space, in the lee of shed and straw- rick, the cattle passed a dolorous winter. Mostly they burrowed in the chaff, or stood about humped and shivering — only on sunny days did their arching backs subside. Naturally each animal grew a thick coat of long hair, and succeeded in coming through to grass again, but the cows of some of our neighbors were less fortunate. Some of them got so weak that they had to be " tailed" up as it was called. This meant that they were dying of hunger and the sight of them crawling about filled me with indignant wrath. I could not under stand how a man, otherwise kind, could let his stock suffer for lack of hay when wild grass was plentiful. One of my duties, and one that I dreaded, was pump ing water for our herd. This was no light job, especially on a stinging windy morning, for the cows, having only dry fodder, required an enormous amount of liquid, and as they could only drink while the water was fresh from the well, some one must work the handle till the last calf had absorbed his fill — and this had to be done when 116 Chores and Almanacs the thermometer was thirty below, just the same as at any other time. And this brings up an almost forgotten phase of bovine psychology. The order in which the cows drank as well as that in which they entered the stable was carefully determined and rigidly observed. There was always one old dowager who took precedence, all the others gave way before her. Then came the second in rank who feared the leader but insisted on ruling all the others, and so on down to the heifer. This order, once estab lished, was seldom broken (at least by the females of the herd, the males were more unstable) even when the leader grew old and almost helpless. We took advantage of this loyalty when putting them into the barn. The stall furthest from the door belonged to "old Spot," the second to " Daisy" and so on, hence all I had to do was to open the door and let them in — for if any rash young thing got out of her proper place she was set right, very quickly, by her superiors. Some farms had ponds or streams to which their flocks were driven for water but this to me was a melan choly winter function, and sometimes as I joined Burt or Cyrus in driving the poor humped and shivering beasts down over the snowy plain to a hole chopped in the ice, and watched them lay their aching teeth to the frigid draught, trying a dozen times to temper their mouths to the chill I suffered with them. As they streamed along homeward, heavy with their sloshing load, they seemed the personification of a desolate and abused race. Winter mornings were a time of trial for us all. It required stern military command to get us out of bed before daylight, in a chamber warmed only by the stove pipe, to draw on icy socks and frosty boots and go to the milking of cows and the currying of horses. Other boys did not rise by candle-light but I did, not because 717 A Son of the Middle Border x I was eager to make a record but for the very good reason that my commander believed in early rising. I groaned and whined but I rose — and always I found mother in the kitchen before me, putting the ket tle on. It ought not to surprise the reader when I say that my morning toilet was hasty — something less than "a, lick and a promise." I couldn't (or didn't) stop to wash my face or comb my hair; such refinements seem useless in an attic bed-chamber at five in the morning of a December day — I put them off till breakfast time. Getting up at five A. M. even in June was a hardship, in winter it was a punishment. Our discomforts had their compensations! As we came back to the house at six, the kitchen was always cheery with the smell of browning flap-jacks, sizzling sausages and steaming coffee, and mother had plenty of hot water on the stove so that in "half a jiffy," with shining faces and sleek hair we sat down to a noble feast. By this time also the eastern sky was gorgeous with light, and two misty "sun dogs" dimly loomed, watching at the gate of the new day. Now that I think of it, father was the one who took the brunt of our "revellee." He always built the fire in the kitchen stove before calling the family. Mother, silent, sleepy, came second. Sometimes she was just combing her hair as I passed through the kitchen, at other times she would be at the biscuit dough or stirring the pan-cake batter — but she was always there! "What did you gain by this disagreeable habit of early rising?" — This is a question I have often asked myself since. Was it only a useless obsession on the part of my pioneer dad? Why couldn't we have slept till six, or even seven? Why rise before the sun? i I cannot answer this, I only know such was our habit 118 Chores and Almanacs summer and winter, and that most of /our neighbors conformed to the same rigorous tradition. None of us got rich, and as I look back on the situation, I cannot recall that those "sluggards" who rose an hour or two later were any poorer than we. I am inclined to think it was all a convention of the border, a custom which might very well have been broken by us all. My mother would have found these winter days very long had it not been for baby Jessie, for father was busily hauling wood from the Cedar River some six or seven miles away, and the almost incessant, mournful piping of the wind in the chimney was dispiriting. Occasionally Mrs. Button, Mrs. Gammons or some other of the neighbors would drop in for a visit, but generally mother and Jessie were alone till Harriet and Frank and I came home from school at half-past four. Our evenings were more cheerful. My sister Hat tie was able to play a few simple tunes on the melodeon and Cyrus and Eva or Mary Abbie and John occasion ally came in to sing. In this my mother often took part. In church her clear soprano rose above all the others like the voice of some serene great bird. Of this gift my father often expressed his open admiration. There was very little dancing during our second winter but Fred Jewett started a singing school which brought the young folks together once a week. We boys amused ourselves with "Dare Gool" and "Dog and Deer." Cold had little terror for us, provided the air was still. Often we played "Hi Spy" around the barn with the thermometer twenty below zero, and not infrequently we took long walks to visit Burton and other of our boy friends or to borrow something to read. I was always on the trail of a book. Harriet joined me in my search for stories and nothing lift A Son of the Middle Border in the neighborhood homes escaped us. Anything in print received our most respectful consideration. Jane Porter's Scottish Chiefs brought to us both anguish and delight. Tempest and Sunshine was another discovery. I cannot tell to whom I was indebted for Ivanhoe but I read and reread it with the most intense pleasure. At the same time or near it I borrowed a huge bundle of The New York Saturday Night and TJie New York Ledger and from them I derived an almost equal enjoyment. "Old Sleuth" and "Buckskin Bill" were as admirable in their way as "Cedric the Saxon." At this time Godey's Ladies Book and Peterson's Maga zine were the only high-class periodicals known to us. The Toledo Blade and The New York Tribune were still my father's political advisers and Horace Greeley and "Petroleum V. Nasby" were equally corporeal in my mind. Almanacs figured largely in my reading at this time, and were a source of frequent quotation by my father. They were nothing but small, badly-printed, patent medicine pamphlets, each with a loop of string at the corner so that they might be hung on a nail behind the stove, and of a crude green or yellow or blue. Each of them made much of a calm-featured man who seemed unaware of the fact that his internal organs were opened to the light of day. Lines radiated from his middle to the signs of the zodiac. I never knew what all this meant, but it gave me a sense of something esoteric and remote. Just what "Aries" and "Pisces" had to do with healing or the weather is still a mystery. These advertising bulletins could be seen in heaps on the counter at the drug store especially in the spring months when "Healey's Bitters" and "Allen's Cherry Pectoral " were most needed to "purify the blood." They were given out freely, but the price of the marvellous 120 Chores and Almanacs mixtures they celebrated was always one dollar a bottle, and many a broad coin went for a "bitter" which should have gone to buy a new dress for an overworked wife. These little books contained, also, concise aphorisms and weighty words of advice like "After dinner rest awhile; after supper run a mile," and "Be vigilant, be truthful and your life will never be ruthful." "Take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves" (which needed a little translating to us) probably came down a long line of English copy books. No doubt they were all stolen from Poor Richard. Incidentally they called attention to the aches and pains of humankind, and each page presented the face, signature and address of some far-off person who had been miraculously relieved by the particular "balsam" or "bitter" which that pamphlet presented. Hollow- cheeked folk were shown "before taking," and the same individuals plump and hearty "after taking," followed by very realistic accounts of the diseases from which they had been relieved gave encouragement to others suffering from the same "complaints." Generally the almanac which presented the claims of a "pectoral" also had a "salve" that was "sovereign for burns" and some of them humanely took into ac count the ills of farm animals and presented a cure for bots or a liniment for spavins. I spent a great deal of tune with these publications and to them a large part of my education is due. It is impossible that printed matter of any kind should possess for any child of today the enchantment which came to me, from a grimy, half-dismembered copy of Scott or Cooper. The Life of P. T. Barnum, and Frank lin's Autobiography we owned and they were also well- springs of joy to me. Sometimes I hold with the Lacede- 121 A Son of the Middle Border monians that " hunger is the best sauce" for the mind as well as for the palate. Certainly we made the most of all that came our way. Naturally the school-house continued to be the center of our interest by day and the scene of our occasional neighborhood recreation by night. In its small way it was our Forum as well as our Academy and my memories of it are mostly pleasant. Early one bright winter day Charles Babcock and Albert Button, two of our big boys, suddenly appeared at the school-house door with their best teams hitched to great bob-sleds, and amid much shouting and laughter, the entire school (including the teacher) piled in on the straw which softened the bottom of the box, and away we raced with jangling bells, along the bright winter roads with intent to "surprise" the Burr Oak teacher and his flock. I particularly enjoyed this expedition for the Burr Oak School was larger than ours and stood on the edge of a forest and was protected by noble trees. A deep ravine near it furnished a mild form of coasting. The school room had fine new desks with iron legs and the teacher's desk occupied a deep recess at the front. Altogether it possessed something of the dignity of a church. To go there was almost like going to town, for at the corners where the three roads met, four or five houses stood and in one of these was a post-office. That day is memorable to me for the reason that I first saw Bettie and Hattie and Agnes, the prettiest girls in the township. Hattie and Bettie were both fair-haired and blue-eyed but Agnes was dark with great velvety black eyes. Neither of them was over sixteen, but they had all taken on the airs of young ladies and looked with amused contempt on lads of my age. Nevertheless, I had the right to admire them in secret for they added the 122 Chores and Almanacs final touch of poetry to this visit to "the Grove School House." Often, thereafter, on a clear night when the ther mometer stood twenty below zero, Burton and I would trot away toward the Grove to join in some meeting or to coast with the boys on the banks of the creek. I feel again the iron clutch of my frozen boots. The tippet around my neck is solid ice before my lips. My ears sting. Low-hung, blazing, the stars light the sky, and over the diamond-dusted snow-crust the moonbeams splinter. Though sensing the glory of such nights as these I was careful about referring to it. Restraint in such matters was the rule. If you said, "It is a fine day," or "The night is as clear as a bell," you had gone quite as far as the proprieties permitted. Love was also a forbidden word. You might say, "I love pie," but to say "I love Bettie," was mawkish if not actually im proper. Caresses or terms of endearment even between parents and their children were very seldom used. People who said "Daddy dear," or "Jim dear," were under suspicion. "They fight like cats and dogs when no one else is around" was the universal comment on a family whose members were very free of their terms of affection. We were a Spartan lot. We did not believe in letting our wives and children know that they were an important' part of our contentment. Social changes were in progress. We held no more quilting bees or barn-raisings. Women visited less than in Wisconsin. The work on the new farms was never ending, and all teams were in constant use during week days. The young people got together on one excuse or another, but their elders met only at public meetings. Singing, even among the young people was almost 123 A Son of the Middle Border entirely confined to hymn-tunes. The new Moody and Sankey Song Book was in every home. Tell Me the Old Old Story did not refer to courtship but to salvation, and Hold the Fort for I am Coming was no longer a signal from Sherman, but a Message from Jesus. We often spent a joyous evening singing O, Bear Me Away on Your Snowy Wings, although we had no real desire to be taken "to our immortal home." Father no longer asked for Minnie Minium and Nellie Wildwood, — but his love for Smith's Grand March persisted and my sister Harriet was often called upon to play it for him while he explained its mean ing. The war was passing into the mellow, rem iniscent haze of memory and he loved the splendid pictures which this descriptive piece of martial music recalled to mind. So far as we then knew his pursuit of the Sunset was at an end. 124 CHAPTER Xin Boy Life on the Prairie TIE snows fell deep in February and when at last the warm March winds began to blow, lakes de veloped with magical swiftness in the fields, and streams filled every swale, transforming the landscape into something unexpected and enchanting. At night these waters froze, bringing fields of ice almost to our door. We forgot all our other interests in the joy of the games which we played thereon at every respite from school, or from the wood-pile, for splitting fire-wood was our first spring task. From time to time as the weather permitted, father had been cutting and hauling maple and hickory logs from the forests of the Cedar River, and these logs must now be made into stove-wood and piled for summer use. Even before the school term ended we began to take a hand at this work, after four o'clock and on Saturdays. While the hired man and father ran the cross-cut saw, whose pleasant song had much of the seed-time sugges tion which vibrated in the caw-caw of the hens as they burrowed in the dust of the chip-yard, I split the easy blocks and my brother helped to pile the finished product. The place where the wood-pile lay was slightly higher than the barnyard and was the first dry ground to appear in the almost universal slush and mud. Delightful memories are associated with this sunny spot and with a pond which appeared as if by some conjury, on the very field where I had husked the down-row so painfully 125 A Son of the Middle Border. in November. From the wood-pile I was often permitted to go skating and Burton was my constant companion in these excursions. However, my joy in his companion ship was not unmixed with bitterness, for I deeply en vied him the skates which he wore. They weie trimmed with brass and their runners came up over his toes in beautiful curves and ended in brass acorns which trans figured their wearer. To own a pair of such skates seemed to me the summit of all earthly glory. My own wooden "contraptions" went on with straps and I could not make the runners stay in the middle of my soles where they belonged, hence my ankles not only tipped in awkwardly but the stiff outer edges cf my boot counters dug holes in my skin so that my out ing was a kind of torture after all. Nevertheless, I per sisted and, while Burton circled and swooped like a hawk, I sprawled with flapping arms in a mist of ignoble rage. That I learned to skate fairly well even under these disadvantages argues a high degree of enthusiasm. Father was always willing to release us from labor at times when the ice was fine, and at night we were free to explore the whole country round about, finding new places for our games. Sometimes the girls joined us, and we built fires on the edges of the swales and played "gool" and a kind of "shinny" till hunger drove us home. We held to this sport to the last — till the ice with prodigious booming and cracking fell away in the swales and broke through the icy drifts (which lay like dams along the fences) and vanished, leaving the corn-rows littered with huge blocks of ice. Often we came in from the pond, wet to the middle, our boots completely soaked with water. They often grew hard as iron during the night, and we experienced the greatest trouble in getting 126 Boy Life on the Prairie them on again. Greasing them with hot tallow was a regular morning job. Then came the fanning mill. The seed grain had to be fanned up, and that was a dark and dusty "trick" which we did not like anything near as well as we did skating or even piling wood. The hired man turned the mill, I dipped the wheat into the hopper, Franklin held sacks and father scooped the grain in. I don't suppose we gave up many hours to this work, but it seems to me that we spent weeks at it. Probably we took spells at the mill in the midst of the work on the chip pile. Meanwhile, above our heads the wild ducks again pursued their northward flight, and the far honking of the geese fell to our ears from the solemn deeps of the windless night. On the first dry warm ridges the prairie cocks began to boom, and then at last came the day when father's imperious voice rang high in familiar command. "Out with the drags, boys! We start seed ing tomorrow." Again we went forth on the land, this time to wrestle with the tough, unrotted sod of the new breaking, while all around us the larks and plover called and the gray badgers stared with disapproving bitterness from their ravaged hills. Maledictions on that tough northwest forty! How many times I harrowed and cross-harrowed it I cannot say, but I well remember the maddening persistency with which the masses of hazel roots clogged the teeth of the drag, making it necessary for me to raise the corner of it — a million times a day! This had to be done while the team was in motion, and you can see I did not lack for exercise. It was necessary also to "lap- half" and this requirement made careful driving needful for father could not be fooled. He saw every "balk." As the ground dried off the dust arose from undel 127 A Son of the Middle Border the teeth of the harrow and flew so thickly that my face was not only coated with it but tears of rebellious rage stained my cheeks with comic lines. At such times it seemed unprofitable to be the twelve-year-old son of a western farmer. One day, just as the early sown wheat was beginning to throw a tinge of green over the brown earth, a tre mendous wind arose from the southwest and blew with such devastating fury that the soil, caught up from the field, formed a cloud, hundreds of feet high, — a cloud which darkened the sky, turning noon into dusk and sending us all to shelter. All the forenoon this blizzard of loam raged, filling the house with dust, almost smoth ering the cattle in the stable. Work was impossible, even for the men. The growing grain, its roots exposed to the air, withered and died. Many of the smaller plants were carried bodily away. As the day wore on father fell into dumb, despairing rage. His rigid face and smoldering eyes, his grim lips, terrified us all. It seemed to him (as to us), that the entire farm was about to take flight and the bitterest part of the tragic circumstance lay in the reflection that our loss (which was much greater than any of our neigh bors) was due to the extra care with which we had pul« verized the ground. "If only I hadn't gone over it that last time," I heard him groan in reference to the "smooch" with which I had crushed all the lumps making every acre friable as a garden. "Look at Woodring's!" Sure enough. The cloud was thinner over on Wood- ring's side of the line fence. His rough clods were hardly touched. My father's bitter revolt, his impotent fury appalled me, for it seemed to me (as to him), that na ture was, at the moment, an enemy. More than seventj acres of this land had to be resown. 128 Boy Life on the Prairie Most authors in writing of "the merry merry farmer" leave out experiences like this — they omit the mud and the dust and the grime, they forget the army worm, the flies, the heat, as well as the smells and drudgery of the barns. Milking the cows is spoken of in the tradi tional fashion as a lovely pastoral recreation, when as a matter of fact it is a tedious job. We all hated it. We saw no poetry in it. We hated it in summer when the mosquitoes bit and the cows slashed us with their tails, and we hated it still more in the winter time when they stood in crowded malodorous stalls. In summer when the flies were particularly savage we had a way of jamming our heads into the cows' flanks to prevent them from kicking into the pail, and sometimes we tied their tails to their legs so that they could not lash our ears. Humboldt Bunn tied a heifer's tail to his boot straps once — and regretted it almost instantly. — No, no, it won't do to talk to me of "the sweet breath of kine." I know them too well — and calves are not "the lovely, fawn-like creatures" they are supposed to be. To the boy who is teaching them to drink out of a pail they are nasty brutes — quite un like fawns. They have a way of filling their nostrils with milk and blowing it all over their nurse. They are greedy, noisy, ill-smelling and stupid. They look well when running with their mothers in the pasture, but as soon as they are weaned they lose all their charm — for me. Attendance on swine was less humiliating for the reason that we could keep them at arm's length, but we didn't enjoy that. We liked teaming and pitching hay and harvesting and making fence, and we did not greatly resent plowing or husking corn but we did hate the smell, the filth of the cow-yard. Even hostling had its "outs," especially in spring when the horses were shedding their hair. I never fully enjoyed the taste oi 129 A Son of the Middle Border equine dandruff, and the eternal smell of manure irked me, especially at the table. Clearing out from behind the animals was one of our never ending jobs, and hauling the compost out on the fields was one of the tasks which, as my father grimly said, "We always put off till it rains so hard we can't work out doors." This was no joke to us, for not only did we work out doors, we worked while standing ankle deep in the slime of the yard, getting full benefit of the drizzle. Our new land did not need the fertilizer, but we were forced to haul it away or move the barn. Some folks moved the barn. But then my father was an idealist. Life was not all currying or muck-raking for Burt or for me. Herding the cows c¥ame in to relieve the monot ony of farm-work. Wide tracts of unbroken sod still lay open to the north and west, and these were the common grazing grounds for the community. Every farmer kept from twenty-five to a hundred head of cattle and half as many colts, and no sooner did the green begin to show on the fire-blackened sod in April than the winter-worn beasts left the straw-piles under whose lee they had fed during the cold months, and crawled out to nip the first tender spears of grass in the sheltered swales. They were still "free commoners" in the eyes of the law. The colts were a fuzzy, ungraceful lot at this season. Even the best of them had big bellies and carried dirty and tangled manes, but as the grazing improved, as the warmth and plenty of May filled their veins with new blood, they sloughed off their mangy coats and lifted their wide-blown nostrils to the western wind in exultant return to freedom. Many of them had never felt the weight of a man's hand, and even those that had win tered in and around the barn-yard soon lost all trace of 130 Boy Life on the Prairie domesticity. It was not unusual to find that the wildest and wariest of all the leaders bore a collar mark or some other ineffaceable badge of previous servitude. They were for the most part Morgan grades or "Ca nuck," with a strain of broncho to give them fire. It was curious, it was glorious to see how deeply-buried in stincts broke out in these halterless herds. In a few days, after many trials of speed and power the bands of all the region united into one drove, and a leader, the swiftest and most tireless of them all, appeared from the ranks and led them at will. Often without apparent cause, merely for the joy of it, they left their feeding grounds to wheel and charge and race for hours over the swells, across the creeks and through the hazel thickets. Sometimes their movements arose from the stinging of gadflies, sometimes from a battle between two jealous leaders, sometimes from the passing of a wolf — often from no cause at all other than that of abounding vitality. In much the same fashion, but less rapidly, the cattle went forth upon the plain and as each herd not only contained the growing steers, but the family cows, it became the duty of one boy from each farm to mount a horse at five o'clock every afternoon and "hunt the cattle," a task seldom shirked. My brother and I took turn and turn about at this delightful task, and soon learned to ride like Comanches. In fact we lived in the saddle, when freed from duty in the field. Burton often met us on the feeding grounds, and at such times the prairie seemed an excellent place for boys. As we gal loped along together it was easy to imagine ourselves Wild Bill and Buckskin Joe in pursuit of Indians or buffalo. We became, by force of unconscious observation, deeply learned in the language and the psychology of A Son of the Middle Border kine as well as colts. We watched the big bull-necked stags as they challenged one another, pawing the dust or kneeling to tear the sod with their horns. We pos sessed perfect understanding of their battle signs. Their boastful, defiant cries were as intelligible to us as those of men. Every note, every motion had a perfectly def inite meaning. The foolish, inquisitive young heifers, the staid self-absorbed dowagers wearing their bells with dignity, the frisky two-year-olds and the lithe-bodied wide-horned truculent three-year-olds all came in for interpretation. Sometimes a lone steer ranging the sod came suddenly upon a trace of blood. Like a hound he paused, snuffling the earth. Then with wide mouth and outthrust, curl ing tongue, uttered voice. Wild as the tiger's food-sick cry, his warning roar burst forth, ending in a strange, upward explosive whine. Instantly every head in the herd was lifted, even the old cows heavy with milk stood as if suddenly renewing their youth, alert and watchful. Again it came, that prehistoric bawling cry, and with one mind the herd began to center, rushing with menac ing swiftness, like warriors answering their chieftain's call for aid. With awkward lope or jolting trot, snort ing with fury they hastened to the rescue, only to meet in blind bewildered mass, swirling to and fro in search of an imaginary cause of some ancestral danger. At such moments we were glad of our swift ponies. From our saddles we could study these outbreaks of atavistic rage with serene enjoyment. In herding the cattle we came to know all the open country round about and found it very beautiful. On the uplands a short, light-green, hair-like grass grew, intermixed with various resinous weeds, while in the lowland feeding grounds luxuriant patches of blue-joint, wild oats, and other tall forage plants waved in the 132 Boy Life on the Prairie wind. Along the streams and in the "sloos" cat-tails and tiger-lilies nodded above thick mats of wide-bladed marsh grass. — Almost without realizing it, I came to know the character of every weed, every flower, every living thing big enough to be seen from the back of a horse. Nothing could be more generous, more joyous, than these natural meadows in summer. The flash and ripple and glimmer of the tall sunflowers, the myriad voices of gleeful bobolinks, the chirp and gurgle of red-winged blackbirds swaying on the willows, the meadow-larks piping from grassy bogs, the peep of the prairie chick and the wailing call of plover on the flowery green slopes of the uplands made it all an ecstatic world to me. It was a wide world with a big, big sky which gave alluring hint of the still more glorious unknown wilderness be yond. Sometimes of a Sunday afternoon, Harriet and I wan dered away to the meadows along Dry Run, gathering bouquets of pinks, sweet-williams, tiger-lilies and lady- slippers, thus attaining a vague perception of another and sweeter side of life. The sun flamed across the splen did serial waves of the grasses and the perfumes of a hundred spicy plants rose in the shimmering mid-day air. At such times the mere joy of living filled our young hearts with wordless satisfaction. Nor were the upland ridges less interesting, for huge antlers lying bleached and bare in countless numbers on the slopes told of the herds of elk and bison that had once fed in these splendid savannahs, living and dying in the days when the tall Sioux were the only hunters. The gray hermit, the badger, still clung to his deep den on the rocky unplowed ridges, and on sunny April days the mother fox lay out with her young, on south ward-sloping swells. Often we met the prairie wolf or 133 A Son of the Middle Border startled him from his sleep in hazel copse, finding in him the spirit of the wilderness. To us it seemed that just over the next long swell toward the sunset the shaggy brown bulls still fed in myriads, and in our hearts was a longing to ride away into the "sunset regions" of our song. All the boys I knew talked of Colorado, never of New England. We dreamed of the plains, of the Black Hills, discussing cattle raising and mining and hunting. "We'll have our rifles ready, boys, ha, ha, ha-ha!" was still our favorite chorus, "Newbrasky" and Wyoming our far-off wonderlands, Buffalo Bill our hero. David, my hunter uncle who lived near us, still retained his long old-fashioned, muzzle-loading rifle, and one day offered it to me, but as I could not hold it at arm's length, I sorrowfully returned it. We owned a shotgun, how ever, and this I used with all the confidence of a man. I was able to kill a few ducks with it and I also hunted gophers during May when the sprouting corn was in most danger. Later I became quite expert in catching chickens on the wing. On a long ridge to the north and west, the soil, too wet and cold to cultivate easily, remained unplowed for several years and scattered over these clay lands stood small groves of popple trees which we called " tow-heads." They were usually only two or three hundred feet in diameter, but they stood out like islands in the waving seas of grasses. Against these dark-green masses, breakers of blue- joint radiantly rolled. — To the east some four miles ran the Little Cedar River, and plum trees and crabapples and haws bloomed along its banks. In June immense crops of strawberries offered from many meadows. Their delicious odor rose to us as we rode our way, tempting us to dismount and gather and eat. 134 Boy Life on the Prairie Over these uplands, through these thickets of hazel brush, and around these coverts of popple, Burton and I careered, hunting the cows, chasing rabbits, killing rattlesnakes, watching the battles of bulls, racing the half-wild colts and pursuing the prowling wolves. It was an alluring life, and Harriet, who rode with us occa sionally, seemed to enjoy it quite as much as any boy. She could ride almost as well as Burton, and we were all expert horse-tamers. We all rode like cavalrymen, — that is to say, while holding the reins in our left hands we guided our horses by the pressure of the strap across the neck, rather than by pulling at the bit. Our ponies were never allowed to trot. We taught them a peculiar gait which we called "the lope," which was an easy canter in front and a trot behind (a very good gait for long distances), and we drilled them to keep this pace steadily and to fall at command into a swift walk without any jolting inter vening trot. — We learned to ride like circus performers standing on our saddles, and practised other of the tricks \ve had seen, and through it all my mother remained un- alarmed. To her a boy on a horse was as natural as a babe in the cradle. The chances we took of getting killed were so numerous that she could not afford to worry. Burton continued to be my almost inseparable com panion at school and whenever we could get together, and while to others he seemed only a shy, dull boy, to me he was something more. His strength and skill were remarkable and his self-command amazing. Although a lad of instant, white-hot, dangerous temper, he sud denly, at fifteen years of age, took himself in hand in a fashion miraculous to me. He decided (I never knew just why or how) — that he would never again use an obscene or profane word. He kept his vow. I knew him for over thirty years and I never heard him raise his 135 A Son of the Middle Border voice in anger or utter a word a woman would have shrunk from, — and yet he became one of the most fear less and indomitable mountaineers I ever knew. This change in him profoundly influenced me and though I said nothing about it, I resolved to do as well. I never quite succeeded, although I discouraged as well as I could the stories which some of the men and boys were so fond of telling, but alas! when the old cow kicked over my pail of milk, I fell from grace and told her just what I thought of her in phrases that Burton would have repressed. Still, I manfully tried to follow his good trail. Cornplanting, which followed wheat-seeding, was done by hand, for a year or two, and this was a joyous task. — • We "changed works" with neighbor Button, and in return Cyrus and Eva came to help us. Harriet and Eva and I worked side by side, " dropping" the corn, while Cyrus and the hired man followed with the hoes to cover it. Little Frank skittered about, planting with desultory action such pumpkin seeds as he did not eat. The presence of our young friends gave the job some thing of the nature of a party and we were sorry when it was over. After the planting a fortnight of less strenuous labor came on, a period which had almost the character of a holiday. The wheat needed no cultivation and the corn was not high enough to plow. This was a time for building fence and fixing up things generally. This, too, was the season of the circus. Each year one came along from the east, trailing clouds of glorified dust and filling our minds with the color of romance. From the time the "advance man" flung his highly colored posters over the fence till the coming of the glorious day we thought of little else. It was India and Arabia and the jungle to us. History and the magic Boy Life on the Prairie and pomp of chivalry mingled in the parade of the morn* ing, and the crowds, the clanging band, the haughty and alien beauty of the women, the gold embroidered hous ings, the stark majesty of the acrobats subdued us into silent worship. I here pay tribute to the men who brought these mar vels to my eyes. To rob me of my memories of the circus would leave me as poor as those to whom life was a drab and hopeless round of toil. It was our brief season of imaginative life. In one day — in a part of one day — we gained a thousand new conceptions of the world and of human nature. It was an embodiment of all that was skillful and beautiful in manly action. It was a compendium of biologic research but more im portant still, it brought to our ears the latest band pieces and taught us the most popular songs. It furnished us with jokes. It relieved our dullness. It gave us some thing to talk about. We always went home wearied with excitement, and dusty and fretful — but content. We had seen it. We had grasped as much of it as anybody and could re member it as well as the best. Next day as we resumed work in the field the memory of its splendors went with us like a golden cloud. Most of the duties of the farmer's life require the lapse of years to seem beautiful in my eyes, but haying was a season of well-defined charm. In Iowa, summer was at its most exuberant stage of vitality during the last days of June, and it was not strange that the facul ties of even the toiling hay-maker, dulled and deadened with never ending drudgery, caught something of the superabundant glow and throb of nature's life. As I write I am back in that marvellous time. — The cornfield, dark-green and sweetly cool, is beginning to 137 A Son of the Middle Border ripple in the wind with multitudinous stir of shining^ swirling leaf. Waves of dusk and green and gold, circle across the ripening barley, and long leaves upthrust, at intervals, like spears. The trees are in heaviest foliage, insect life is at its height, and the shimmering air is filled with buzzing, dancing forms, and the clover is gay with the sheen of innumerable gauzy wings. The west wind comes to me laden with ecstatic voices? The bobolinks sail and tinkle in the sensuous hush, now sinking, now rising, their exquisite notes filling the air as with the sound of fairy bells. The king-bird, alert, aggressive, cries out sharply as he launches from the top of a poplar tree upon some buzzing insect, and the plover makes the prairie sad with his wailing call. Vast purple-and-white clouds move like stately ships before the breeze, dark with rain, which they drop momentarily in trailing garments upon the earth, and so pass in maj esty amidst a roll of thunder. The grasshoppers move in clouds with snap and buzz, and out of the luxurious stagnant marshes comes the ever-thickening chorus of the toads, while above them the kildees and the snipe shuttle to and fro in sounding flight. The blackbirds on the cat-tails sway and swing, uttering through lifted throats their liquid gurgle, mad with delight of the sun and the season — and over all, and laving all, moves the slow wind, heavy with the breath of the far-off blooms of other lands, a wind which covers the sunset plain with a golden entrancing haze. At such times it seemed to me that we had reached the "sunset region" of our song, and that we were indeed 11 lords of the soil." I am not so sure that haying brought to our mothers anything like this rapture, for the men added to our crew made the duties of the kitchens just that much heavier. I doubt if the women — any of them — got out into the Boy Life on the Prairie fields or meadows long enough to enjoy the birds and the breezes. Even on Sunday as they rode away to church, they were too tired and too worried to re-act to the beauties of the landscape. I now began to dimly perceive that my mother was not well. Although large and seemingly strong, her in creasing weight made her long days of housework a torture. She grew very tired and her sweet face was often knotted with physical pain. She still made most of our garments as well as her own. She tailored father's shirts and underclothing,' sewed carpet rags, pieced quilts and made butter for market, — and yet, in the midst of it all, found time to put covers on our baseball, and to do up all our burns and bruises. Being a farmer's wife in those days, meant laboring out side any regulation of the hours of toil. I recall hearing one of the tired housewives say, "Seems like I never get a day off, not even on Sunday," a protest which my mother thoroughly understood and sympathized with, notwithstanding its seeming inhospitality. No history of this time would be complete without a reference to the doctor. We were a vigorous and on the whole a healthy tribe but accidents sometimes happened and "Go for the doctor!" was the first command when the band-cutter slashed the hand of the thresher or one of the children fell from the hay-rick. One night as I lay buried in deep sleep close to the garret eaves I heard my mother call me — and something in her voice pierced me, roused me. A poignant note of alarm was in it. "Hamlin," she called, "get up — at once. You must go for the doctor. Your father is very sick. Hurry! " I sprang from my bed, dizzy with sleep, yet under standing her appeal. "I hear you, I'm coming," I called down to her as I started to dress. 139 A Son of the Middle Border "CallHattie. I need her too." The rain was pattering on the roof, and as I dressed I had a disturbing vision of the long cold ride which lay before me. I hoped the case was not so bad as mother thought. With limbs still numb and weak I stumbled down the stairs to the sitting room where a faint light shone. Mother met me with white, strained face. "Your father is suffering terribly. Go for the doctor at once." I could hear the sufferer groan even as I moved about the kitchen, putting on my coat and lighting the lantern. It was about one o'clock of the morning, and the wind was cold as I picked my way through the mud to the barn. The thought of the long miles to town made me shiver but as the son of a soldier I could not falter in my duty. In their warm stalls the horses were resting in dreamful doze. Dan and Dick, the big plow team, stood near the door. Jule and Dolly came next. Wild Frank, a fleet but treacherous Morgan, stood fifth and for a mo ment I considered taking him. He was strong and of wonderful staying powers but so savage and unreliable that I dared not risk an accident. I passed on to bay Kittie whose bright eyes seemed to inquire, "What is the matter?" Flinging the blanket over her and smoothing it care fully, I tossed the light saddle to her back and cinched it tight, so tight that she grunted. "I can't take any chances of a spill," I explained to her, and she accepted the bit willingly. She was always ready for action and fully dependable. Blowing out my lantern I hung it on a peg, led Kit from her stall out into the night, and swung to the saddle. She made off with a spattering rush through the yard, out into the road. It was dark as pitch but I was fully awake 140 Boy Life on the Prairie now. The dash of the rain in my face had cleared my brain but I trusted to the keener senses of the mare to find the road which showed only in the strips of water which filled the wagon tracks. We made way slowly for a few minutes until my eyes expanded to take in the faint lines of light along the lane. The road at last became a river of ink running between faint gray banks of sward, and my heart rose in con fidence. I took on dignity. I was a courier riding through the night to save a city, a messenger on whose courage and skill thousands of lives depended. "Get out o' this!" I shouted to Kit, and she leaped away like a wolf, at a tearing gallop. She knew her rider. We had herded the cattle many days on the prairie, and in races with the wild colts I had tested her speed. Snorting with vigor at every leap she seemed to say, "My heart is brave, my limbs are strong. Call on me." Out of the darkness John Martin's Carlo barked. A hatf-mile had passed. Old Marsh's fox hound clamored next. Two miles were gone. From here the road ran diagonally across the prairie, a velvet-black band on the dim sod. The ground was firmer but there were swales full of water. Through these Kittie dashed with unhesi tating confidence, the water flying from her drumming hooves. Once she went to her knees and almost unseated me, but I regained my saddle and shouted, "Go on, Kit." The fourth mile was in the mud, but the fifth brought us to the village turnpike and the mare was as glad of it as I. Her breath was labored now. She snorted no more in exultation and confident strength. She began to wonder — to doubt, and I, who knew her ways as well as I knew those of a human being, realized that she was beginning to flag. The mud had begun to tell on her. A Son of the Middle Border It hurt me to urge her on, but the memory of my mother's agonized face and the sound of my father's groan of pain steeled my heart. I set lash to her side and so kept her to her highest speed. At last a gleam of light! Someone in the village was awake. I passed another lighted window. Then the green and red lamps of the drug store cheered me with their promise of aid, for the doctor lived next door. There too a dim ray shone. Slipping from my weary horse I tied her to the rail and hurried up the walk toward the doctor's bell. I re membered just where the knob rested. Twice I pulled sharply, strongly, putting into it some part of the anx iety and impatience I felt. I could hear its imperative jingle as it died away in the silent house. At last the door opened and the doctor, a big blonde handsome man in a long night gown, confronted me with impassive face. " What is it, my boy?" he asked kindly. As I told him he looked down at my water-soaked form and wild-eyed countenance with gentle patience. Then he peered out over my head into the dismal night. He was a man of resolution but he hesitated for a moment. " Your father is suffering sharply, is he? " "Yes, sir. I could hear him groan. — Please hurry." He mused a moment. "He is a soldier. He would not complain of a little thing — I will come." Turning in relief, I ran down the walk and climbed upon my shivering mare. She wheeled sharply, eager to be off on her homeward way. Her spirit was not broken, but she was content to take a slower pace. She seemed to know that our errand was accomplished and that the warm shelter of the stall was to be her reward. Holding her down to a slow trot I turned often to see if I could detect the lights of the doctor's buggy which was a familiar sight on our road. I had heard that he kept 142 Boy Life on the Prairie one of his teams harnessed ready for calls like this, and I confidently expected him to overtake me. "It's a ter rible night to go out, but he said he would come," I repeated as I rode. At last the lights of a carriage, crazily rocking, came into view and pulling Kit to a walk I twisted in my saddle, ready to shout with admiration of the speed of his team. "He's driving the 'Clay-Banks/ " I called in great excitement. The Clay-Banks were famous throughout the county as the doctor's swiftest and wildest team, a span of bronchos whose savage spirits no journey could entirely subdue, a team he did not spare, a team that scorned petting and pity, bony, sinewy, big-headed. They never walked and had little care of mud or snow. They came rushing now with splashing feet and foam ing, half -open jaws, the big doctor, calm, iron-handed, masterful, sitting in the swaying top of his light buggy, his feet against the dash board, keeping his furious span in hand as easily as if they were a pair of Shetland ponies. The nigh horse was running, the off horse pacing, and the splatter of their feet, the slash of the wheels and the roaring of their heavy breathing, made my boyish heart leap. I could hardly repress a yell of delight. As I drew aside to let him pass the doctor called out with mellow cheer, "Take your time, boy, take your time! " Before I could even think of an answer, he was gone and I was alone with Kit and the night. My anxiety vanished with him. I had done all that could humanly be done, I had fetched the doctor. What ever happened I was guiltless. I knew also that in a few minutes a sweet relief would come to my tortured mother, and with full faith and loving confidence in the man of science, I jogged along homeward, wet to the bone but triumphant. CHAPTER XIV Wheat and the Harvest ^TT^HE early seventies were years of swift change on JL the Middle Border. Day by day the settlement thickened. Section by section the prairie was blackened by the plow. Month by month the sweet wild meadows were fenced and pastured and so at last the colts and cows all came into captivity, and our horseback riding ceased, cut short as if by some imperial decree. Lanes of barbed wire replaced the winding wagon trails, our saddles gathered dust in the grain-sheds, and groves of Lombardy poplar and European larch replaced the tow-heads of aspen and hazel through which we had pursued the wolf and fox. I will not say that this produced in me any keen sense of sorrow at the time, for though I missed our horse-herds and the charm of the open spaces, I turned to tamer sports with the resilient adaptability of youth. If I could not ride I could at least play baseball, and the swimming hole in the Little Cedar remained untouched. The com ing in of numerous Eastern settlers brought added charm to neighborhood life. Picnics, conventions, Fourth of July celebrations — all intensified our interest, and in their increasing drama we were compensated, in some degree at least, for the delights which were passing with the prairie. Our school-house did not change — except for the worse. No one thought of adding a tree or a vine to its ugly yard, 144 Wheat and the Harvest Sun-smit, bare as a nose it stood at the cross-roads, re ceiving us through its drab door-way as it had done from the first. Its benches, hideously hacked and thick with grime, were as hard and uncomfortable as when I first saw them, and the windows remained unshaded and un washed. Most of the farm-houses in the region remained equally unadorned, but Deacon Gammons had added an "ell" and established a "parlor," and Anson Burtch had painted his barn. The plain began to take on a comfortable look, for some of the trees of the wind breaks had risen above the roofs, and growing maples softened the effect of the bleak expanse. My mother, like most of her neighbors, still cooked and served meals in our one living room during the winter but moved into a "summer kitchen" in April. This change always gave us a sense of luxury — which is pa thetic, if you look at it that way. Our front room be came suddenly and happily a parlor, and was so treated. Mother at once got down the rag carpet and gave orders for us to shake out and bring in some clean straw to put under it, and when we had tacked it down and re-ar ranged the furniture, it was no longer a place for muddy boots and shirt-sleeved shiftlessness, it had an air of being in perpetual Sabbath leisure. The Garlands were not so poor as all this would seem to imply, for we were now farming over three hundred acres of land and caring for a herd of cattle and many swine. It merely meant that my father did not feel the need of a "best room" and mother and Harriet were not yet able to change his mind. Harriet wanted an organ like Mary Abby Gammons, mother longed for a real "in grain" carpet and we all clamored for a spring wagon. We got the wagon first. That bleak little house is clearly defined in my mind at this moment. The low lean-to kitchen, the rag-carpeted 145 A Son of the Middle Border sitting room with its two chromos of Wide Awake and Fast Asleep — its steel engraving of General Grant, and its tiny melodeon in the corner — all these come back to me. There are very few books or magazines in the scene, but there are piles of newspapers, for my father was an omnivorous reader of all things political. It was not a hovel, it was a pioneer cabin persisting into a settled community, that was all. During these years the whole middle border was men aced by bands of horse-thieves operating under a secret well-organized system. Horses disappeared night by night and were never recovered, till at last the farmers, in despair of the local authorities, organized a Horse Thief Protective Association which undertook to pursue and punish the robbers and to pay for such animals as were not returned. Our county had an association of this sort and shortly after we opened our new farm my father became a member. My first knowledge of this fact came when he nailed on our barn-door the white cloth poster which proclaimed in bold black letters a warning and a threat signed by "the Committee." — I was always a little in doubt as to whether the horse-thieves or ourselves were to be protected, for the notice was fair warning to them as well as an assurance to us. Anyhow very few horses were stolen from barns thus protected. The campaign against the thieves gave rise to many stirring stories which lost nothing in my father's telling of them. Jim McCarty was agent for our association and its effectiveness was largely due to his swift and fearless action. We all had a pleasant sense of the mystery of the night riding which went on during this period arid no man could pass with a led horse without being under suspicion of being either a thief or a deputy. Then, too, the thieves were supposed to have in every community a spy who gave information as to the best horses, and 146 Wheat and the Harvest Informed the gang as to the membership of the Pro tective Society. One of our neighbors fell under suspicion at this time and never got clear of it. I hope we did him no injustice in this for never after could I bring myself to enter his house, and he was clearly ostracized by all the neighbors. As I look back over my life on that Iowa farm the song of the reaper fills large place in my mind. We were all worshippers of wheat in those days. The men thought and talked of little else between seeding and harvest, and you will not wonder at this if you have known and bowed down before such abundance as we then enjoyed. Deep as the breast of a man, wide as the sea, heavy- headed, supple-stocked, many-voiced, full of multitudi nous, secret, whispered colloquies, — a meeting place of winds and of sunlight, — our fields ran to the world's end. We trembled when the storm lay hard upon the wheat, we exulted as the lilac shadows of noon-day drifted over it! We went out into it at noon when all was still — so still we could hear the pulse of the transforming sap as it crept from cool root to swaying plume. We stood before it at evening when the setting sun flooded it with crim son, the bearded heads lazily swirling under the wings of the wind, the mousing hawk dipping into its green deeps like the eagle into the sea, and our hearts expanded with the beauty and the mystery of it, — and back of all this was the knowledge that its abundance meant a new carriage, an addition to the house or a new suit of clothes. Haying was over, and day by day we boys watched with deepening interest while the hot sun transformed the juices of the soil into those stately stalks. I loved to go out into the fairy forest of it, and lying there, silent in its swaying deeps, hear the wild chickens peep and the 147 A Son of the Middle Border wind sing its subtle song over our heads. Day by day I studied the barley as it turned yellow, first at the root and then at the neck (while the middle joints, rank and sappy, retained their blue-green sheen), until at last the lower leaves began to wither and the stems to stiffen in order to uphold the daily increasing weight of the milky berries, and then almost in an hour — lo! the edge of the field became a banded ribbon of green and yellow, lan guidly waving in and out with every rush of the breeze. Now we got out the reaper, put the sickles in order, and father laid in a store of provisions. Extra hands were hired, and at last, early on a hot July morning, the boss mounted to his seat on the self-rake "McCormick" and drove into the field. Frank rode the lead horse, four stalwart hands and myself took "stations" behind the reaper and the battle was on! Reaping generally came about the 2oth of July, the hottest and dryest part of the summer, and was the most pressing work of the year. It demanded early rising for the men, and it meant an all day broiling over the kitchen stove for the women. Stern, incessant toil went on inside and out from dawn till sunset, no matter how the ther mometer sizzled. On many days the mercury mounted to ninety-five in the shade, but with wide fields all yellowing at the same moment, no one thought of laying off. A storm might sweep it flat, or if neglected too long, it might "crinkle." Our reaper in 1874 was a new model of the McCormick self-rake, — the Marsh Harvester was not yet in general use. The Woods Dropper, the Seymour and Morgan hand-rake "contraptions" seemed a long way in the past. True the McCormick required four horses to drag it but it was effective. It was hard to believe that any thing more cunning would ever come to claim the farm er's money. Weird tales of a machine on which two men 148 Wheat and the Harvest rode and bound twelve acres of wheat in ten hours came to us, but we did not potently believe these reports — • on the contrary we accepted the self-rake as quite the final word in harvesting machinery and cheerily bent to the binding of sheaves with their own straw in the good old time-honored way. No task save that of "cradling" surpassed in severity "binding on a station." It was a full-grown man's job, but every boy was ambitious to try his hand, and when at fourteen years of age I was promoted from "bundle boy" to be one of the five hands to bind after the reaper, I went to my corner with joy and confidence. For two years I had been serving as binder on the corners, (to keep the grain out of the way of the horses) and I knew my job. I was short and broad-shouldered with large strong hands admirably adapted for this work, and for the first two hours, easily held my own with the rest of the crew, but as the morning wore on and the sun grew hotter, my enthusiasm waned. A painful void developed in my chest. My breakfast had been ample, but no mere stomachful of food could carry a growing boy through five hours of desperate toil. Along about a quarter to ten, I began to scan the field with anxious eye, longing to see Harriet and the promised luncheon basket. Just when it seemed that I could endure the strain no longer she came bearing a jug of cool milk, some cheese and some deliciously fresh fried-cakes. With keen joy I set a couple of tall sheaves together like a tent and flung myself down flat on my back in their shadow to devour my lunch. Tired as I was, my dim eyes apprehended something of the splendor of the shining clouds which rolled like storms of snow through the deep-blue spaces of sky and so, resting silently as a clod I could hear the chirp of the 149 A Son of the Middle Border crickets, the buzzing wings of flies and the faint, fairy- like tread of smaller unseen insects hurrying their way just beneath my ear in the stubble. Strange green worms, grasshoppers and shining beetles crept over me as I dozed. This delicious, dreamful respite was broken by the far-off approaching purr of the sickle, flicked by the faint snap of the driver's whip, and out of the low rustle of the everstirring lilliputian forest came the wailing cry of a baby wild chicken lost from its mother — a falling, thrill ing, piteous little pipe. Such momentary communion with nature seemed all the sweeter for the work which had preceded it, as well as that which was to follow it. It took resolution to rise and go back to my work, but I did it, sustained by a kind of soldierly pride. At noon we hurried to the house, surrounded the kitch en table and fell upon our boiled beef and potatoes with such ferocity that in fifteen minutes our meal was over. There was no ceremony and very little talking till the hid wolf was appeased. Then came a heavenly half-hour of rest on the cool grass in the shade of the trees, a siesta as luxurious as that of a Spanish mon arch — but alas! — this "nooning," as we called it, was always cut short by father's word of sharp command, "Roll out, boys!" and again the big white jugs were filled at the well, the horses, lazy with food, led the way back to the field, and the stern contest began again. All nature at this hour seemed to invite to repose rather than to labor, and as the heat increased I longed with wordless fervor for the green woods of the Cedar River. At times the gentle wind hardly moved the bended heads of the barley, and the hawks hung in the air like trout sleeping in deep pools. The sunlight was a golden, silent, scorching cataract — yet each of us must strain Wheat and the Harvest his tired muscles and bend his aching back to the harvest. Supper came at five, another delicious interval — and then at six we all went out again for another hour or two in the cool of the sunset. — However, the pace was more leisurely now for the end of the day was near. I always enjoyed this period, for the shadows lengthening across the stubble, and the fiery sun, veiled by the gray clouds of the west, had wondrous charm. The air be gan to moisten and grow cool. The voices of the men pulsed powerfully and cheerfully across the narrowing field of unreaped grain, the prairie hens led forth their broods to feed, and at last, father's long-drawn and musi cal cry, "Turn OUT! All hands TURN OUT!" rang with restful significance through the dusk. Then, slowly, with low-hung heads the freed horses moved toward the barn, walking with lagging steps like weary warriors going into camp. In all the toil of the harvest field, the water jug filled a large place. It was a source of anxiety as well as com fort. To keep it cool, to keep it well filled was a part of my job. No man passed it at the "home corner" of the field. It is a delightful part of my recollections of the harvest. 0 cool gray jug that touched the lips In kiss that softly closed and clung, No Spanish wine the tippler sips, No port the poet's praise has sung — Such pure, untainted sweetness yields As cool gray jug in harvest fields. 1 see it now! — a clover leaf Out-spread upon its sweating side!— As from the sheltering sheaf I pluck and swing it high, the wide Field glows with noon-day heat, The winds are tangled in the wheat. A Son of the Middle Border The swarming crickets blithely cheep, Across the stir of waving grain I see the burnished reaper creep — The lunch-boy comes, and once again The jug its crystal coolness yields — O cool gray jug in harvest fields! My father did not believe in serving strong liquor to fds men, and seldom treated them to even beer. While not a teetotaler he was strongly opposed to all that in temperance represented. He furnished the best of food, and tea and coffee, but no liquor, and the men respected him for it. The reaping on our farm that year lasted about four weeks. Barley came first, wheat followed, the oats came last of all. No sooner was the final swath cut than the barley was ready to be put under cover, and "stacking," a new and less exacting phase of the harvest, began. This job required less men than reaping, hence a part of our hands were paid off, only the more respon sible ones were retained. The rush, the strain of the reaping gave place to a leisurely, steady, day-by-day garnering of the thoroughly seasoned shocks into great conical piles, four in a place in the midst of the stubble, which was already growing green with swiftly-springing weeds. A full crew consisted of a stacker, a boy to pass bun dles, two drivers for the heavy wagon-racks, and a pitcher in the field who lifted the sheaves from the shock with a three-lined fork and threw them to the man on the load. At the age of ten I had been taught to "handle bun dles" on the stack, but now at fourteen I took my father's place as stacker, whilst he passed the sheaves and told me how to lay them. This exalted me at the same time that it increased my responsibility. It made a man of 152 Wheat and the Harvest me — not only in my own estimation, but in the eyes oi my boy companions to whom I discoursed loftily on the value of "bulges" and the advantages of the stack over the rick. No sooner was the stacking ended than the dreaded task of plowing began for Burton and John and me. Every morning while our fathers and the hired men shouldered their forks and went away to help some neigh bor thrash — (" changing works") we drove our teams into the field, there to plod round and round in solitary course. Here I acquired the feeling which I afterward put into verse — A lonely task it is to plow! All day the black and shining soil Rolls like a ribbon from the mold-board's Glistening curve. All day the horses toil, Battling with savage flies, and strain Their creaking single-trees. All day The crickets peer from wind-blown stacks of grain. Franklin's job was almost as lonely. He was set to herd the cattle on the harvested stubble and keep them out of the corn field. A little later, in October, when I was called to take my place as corn-husker, he was pro moted to the plow. Our only respite during the months of October and November was the occasional cold rain which permitted us to read or play cards in the kitchen. Cards! I never look at a certain type of playing card without experiencing a return of the wonder and the guilty joy with which I bought of Metellus Kirby my first "deck," and slipped it into my pocket. There was an alluring oriental imaginative quality in the drawing on the face cards. They brought to me vague hints of mad monarchs, desperate stakes, and huge sudden re- 153 A Son of the Middle Border wards. All that I had heard or read of Mississippi gamblers came back to make those gaudy bits of paste board marvellous. My father did not play cards, hence, although I had no reason to think he would forbid them to me, I took a fear some joy in assuming his bitter opposition. For a time my brother and I played in secret, and then one day, one cold bleak day as we were seated on the floor of the granary playing on an upturned half-bushel measure, shivering with the chill, our fingers numb and blue, the door opened and father looked in. We waited, while his round, eagle-gray eyes took in the situation and it seemed a long, terrifying interval, then at last he mildly said, "I guess you'd better go in and play by the stove. This isn't very comfortable." Stunned by this unexpected concession, I gathered up the cards, and as I took my way to the house, I thought deeply. The meaning of that quiet voice, that friendly invitation was not lost on me. The soldier rose to grand heights by that single act, and when I showed the cards to mother and told her that father had con sented to our playing, she looked grave but made no objection to our use of the kitchen table. As a matter of fact they both soon after joined our game. "If you are going to play," they said, "we'd rather you played right here with us." Thereafter rainy days were less dreary, and the evenings shorter. Everybody played Authors at this time also, and to this day I cannot entirely rid myself of the estimations which our pack of cards fixed in my mind. Prue and I and The Blithedale Romance were on an equal footing, so far as our game went, and Howells, Bret Harte and Dickens were all of far-off romantic horizon. Writers were singular, exalted beings found only in the East — in splendid cities. They were not folks, they were demi- 154 Wheat and the Harvest gods, men and women living aloof and looking down benignantly on toiling common creatures like us. It never entered my mind that anyone I knew could ever by any chance meet an author, or even hear one lecture — although it was said that they did sometimes come west on altruistic educational journeys and that they sometimes reached our county town. I am told — I do not know that it is true — that I am one of the names on a present-day deck of Author cards. If so, I wish I could call in that small plow-boy of 1874 and let him play a game with this particular pack! The crops on our farms in those first years were enor mous and prices were good, and yet the homes of the neighborhood were slow in taking on grace or comfort. I don't know why this was so, unless it was that the men were continually buying more land and more machinery. Our own stables were still straw-roofed sheds, but the trees which we had planted had grown swiftly into a grove, and a garden, tended at odd moments by all hands, brought small fruits and vegetables in season. Although a constantly improving collection of farm machinery light ened the burdens of the husbandman, the drudgery of the house-wife's dish-washing and cooking did not corre spondingly lessen. I fear it increased, for with the widen ing of the fields came the doubling of the harvest hands, and my mother continued to do most of the housework herself — cooking, sewing, washing, churning, and nursing the sick from time to time. No one in trouble ever sent for Isabelle Garland in vain, and I have many recollec tions of neighbors riding up in the night and calling for her with agitated voices. Of course I did not realize, and I am sure my father did not realize, the heavy burden, the endless grind of her toil. Harriet helped, of course, and Frank and I churned 155 A Son of the Middle Border and carried wood and brought water; but even with such aid, the round of mother's duties must have been as relentless as a tread-mill. Even on Sunday, when we were free for a part of the day, she was required to fur nish forth three meals, and to help Frank and Jessie dress for church. — She sang less and less, and the songs we loved were seldom referred to. — If I could only go back for one little hour and take her in my arms, and tell her how much I owe her for those grinding days! Meanwhile we were all growing away from our life in the old Wisconsin Coulee. We heard from William but seldom, and David, who had bought a farm of his own some ten miles to the south of us, came over to see us only at long intervals. He still owned his long-bar relled rifle but it hung unused on a peg in the kitchen. Swiftly the world of the hunter was receding, never to return. Prairie chickens, rabbits, ducks, and other small game still abounded but they did not call for the bullet, and turkey shoots were events of the receding past. Almost in a year the ideals of the country-side changed. David was in truth a survival of a more heroic age, a time which he loved to lament with my father who was almost as great a lover of the wilderness as he. None of us sang "O'er the hills in legions, boys." Our share in the conquest of the west seemed complete. Threshing time, which was becoming each year less of a "bee" and more of a job (many of the men were mere hired hands), was made distinctive by David who came over from Orchard with his machine — the last time as it turned out — and stayed to the end. As I cut bands be side him in the dust and thunder of the cylinder I re gained something of my boyish worship of his strength and skill. The tireless easy swing of his great frame was wonderful to me and when, in my weariness, I failed to slash a band he smiled and tore the sheaf apart — thus 156 Wheat and the Harvest deepening my love for him. I looked up at him at such times as a sailor regards his captain on the bridge. His handsome immobile bearded face, his air of command, his large gestures as he rolled the broad sheaves into the howling maw of the machine made of him a chieftain. — The touch of melancholy which even then had begun to develop, added to his manly charm. One day in late September as I was plowing in the field at the back of the farm, I encountered a particularly troublesome thicket of weeds and vines in the stubble, and decided to burn the way before the coulter. We had been doing this ever since the frost had killed the vege tation but always on lands after they had been safe guarded by strips of plowing. On this particular land no fire had been set for the reason that four large stacks of wheat still stood waiting the thresher. In my irrita tion and self-confidence I decided to clear away the matted stubble on the same strip though at some distance from the stacks. This seemed safe enough at the time for the wind was blowing gently from the opposite direc tion. It was a lovely golden day and as I stood watching the friendly flame clearing the ground for me, I was filled with satisfaction. Suddenly I observed that the line of red was moving steadily against the wind and toward the stacks. My satisfaction changed to alarm. The matted weeds furnished a thick bed of fuel, and against the progress of the flame I had nothing to offer. I could only hope that the thinning stubble would permit me to trample it out. I tore at the ground in desperation, hoping to make a bare spot which the flame could not leap. I trampled the fire with my bare feet. I beat at it with my hat. I screamed for help.— Too late I thought of my team and the plow with which I might have drawn a furrow around the stacks. The flame 157 A Son of the Middle Border touched the high-piled sheaves. It ran lightly, beauti* fully up the sides — and as I stood watching it, I thought, "It is all a dream. It can't be true." But it was. In less than twenty minutes the towering piles had melted into four glowing heaps of ashes. Four hundred dollars had gone up in that blaze. Slowly, painfully I hobbled to the plow and drove my team to the house. Although badly burned, my mental suffering was so much greater that I felt only part of it. — • Leaving the horses at the well I hobbled into the house to my mother. She, I knew, would sympathize with me and shield me from the just wrath of my father who was away, but was due to return in an hour or two. Mother received me in silence, bandaged my feet and put me to bed where I lay in shame and terror. At last I heard father come in. He questioned, mother's voice replied. He remained ominously silent. She went on quietly, but with an eloquence unusual in her. What she said to him I never knew, but when he came up the stairs and stood looking down at me his anger had cooled. He merely asked me how I felt, uncovered my burned feet, examined them, put the sheet back, and went away, without a word either of reproof or consolation. None of us except little Jessie, ever alluded to this tragic matter again ; she was accustomed to tell my story as she remembered it, — "an 'nen the moon changed— the fire ran up the stacks and burned 'em all down — " When I think of the myriads of opportunities for committing mistakes of this sort, I wonder that we had so few accidents. The truth is our captain taught us to think before we acted at all times, and we had little of the heedlessness which less experienced children often show. We were in effect small soldiers and carried some of the responsibilities of soldiers into all that we did. While still I was hobbling about, suffering from my Wheat and tJfte Harvest wounds my uncles William and Frank McClintock drove over from Neshonoc bringing with them a cloud of strangely-moving revived memories of the hills and woods of our old Wisconsin home. I was peculiarly delighted by this visit, for while the story of my folly was told, it was not dwelt upon. They soon forgot me and fell naturally into discussion of ancient neighbors and far-away events. To me it was like peering back into a dun, dawn-lit world wherein all forms were distorted or wondrously aggrandized. William, big, black-bearded and smiling, had lost little of his romantic appeal. Frank, still the wag, was able to turn handsprings and somersaults almost as well as ever, and the talk which followed formed an absorbing review of early days in Wisconsin. It brought up and denned many of the events of our life in the coulee, pictures which were becoming a little vague, a little blurred. Al Randal and Ed Green, who were already almost mythical, were spoken of as living creatures and thus the far was brought near. Compari sons between the old and the new methods of seeding and harvest also gave me a sense of change, a perception which troubled me a little, especially as a wistful note had crept into the voices of these giants of the middle border. They all loved the wilderness too well not to be a little saddened by the clearing away of bosky coverts and the drying up of rippling streams. We sent for Uncle David who came over on Sunday to spend a night with his brothers and in the argument which followed, I began to sense in him a spirit of restless ness, a growing discontent which covered his handsome face with a deepening shadow. He disliked being tied down to the dull life of the farm, and his horse-power threshing machine no longer paid him enough to com pensate for the loss of time and care on the other phases of his industry. His voice was still glorious and ha UO A Son of the Middle Border played the violin when strongly urged, though with a sense of dissatisfaction. He and mother and Aunt Deborah sang Nellie Wildwood and Lily Dale and Minnie Minium just as they used to do in the coulee, and I forgot my dis grace and the pain of my blistered feet in the rapture of that exquisite hour of blended melody and memory. The world they represented was passing and though I did not fully realize this, I sensed in some degree the transi tory nature of this reunion. In truth it never came again. Never again did these three brothers meet, and when they said good-bye to us next morning, I wondered why it was, we must be so widely separated from those we loved the best 160 CHAPTER XV Harriet Goes Away GIRLS on the Border came to womanhood early. At fifteen my sister Harriet considered herself a young lady and began to go out to dances with Cyrus and Albert and Frances. She was small, moody and silent, and as all her interests became feminine I lost that sense of comradeship with which we used to ride after the cattle and I turned back to my brother who was growing into a hollow-chested lanky lad — and in our little sister Jessie we took increasing interest. She was a joyous child, always singing like a canary. SHE was never a " trial/1 Though delicate and fair and pretty, she manifested a singular indifference to the usual games of girls. Con temptuous of dolls, she never played house so far as I know. She took no interest in sewing, or cooking, but had a whole yard full of " horses," that is to say, sticks of varying sizes and shapes. Each pole had its name and its "stall" and she endlessly repeated the chores of lead ing them to water and feeding them hay. She loved to go with me to the field and was never so happy as when riding on old Jule. — Dear little sister, I fear I neglected you at times, turning away from your sweet face and pleading smile to lose myself in some worthless book. I am comforted to remember that I did sometimes lift you to the back of a real horse and permit you to ride "a round, " chattering like a sparrow as we plodded back and forth across the field. 161 A Son of the Middle Border Frank cared little for books but he could take a hand at games although he was not strong. Burton who at sixteen was almost as tall as his father was the last to surrender his saddle to the ash-bin. He often rode his high-headed horse past our house on his way to town, and I especially recall one day, when as Frank and I were walking to town (one fourth of July) Burt came galloping along with five dollars in his pocket. — We could not see the five dollars but we did get the full force and dignity of his cavalier approach, and his word was sufficient proof of the cash he had to spend. As he rode on we, in crushed humility, resumed our silent plodding in the dust of his horse's hooves. His round of labor, like my own, was well established. In spring he drove team and drag. In haying he served as stacker. In harvest he bound his station. In stacking he pitched bundles. After stacking he plowed or went out "changing works" and ended the season's work by husking corn — a job that increased in severity from year to year, as the fields grew larger. In '74 it lasted well into November. Beginning in the warm and golden September we kept at it (off and on) until sleety rains coated the ears with ice and the wet soil loaded our boots with huge balls of clay and grass — till the snow came whirling by on the wings of the north wind and the last flock of belated geese went sprawling side- wise down the ragged sky. Grim business this! At times our wet gloves froze on our hands. How primitive all our notions were! Few of the boys owned overcoats and the same suit served each of us for summer and winter alike. In lieu of ulsters most of us wore long, gay-colored woolen scarfs wound about our heads and necks — scarfs which our mothers, sisters or sweethearts had knitted for us. Our footwear continued to be boots of the tall cavalry model with pointed toes 162 Harriet Goes Away and high heels. Our collars were either hoxne-mada ginghams or " bough ten" ones of paper at fifteen cents per box. Some men went so far as to wear "dickies," that is to say, false shirt fronts made of paper, but this was considered a silly cheat. No one in our neighborhood ever saw a tailor-made suit, and nothing that we wore fitted, — our clothes merely enclosed us. Harriet, like the other women, made her own dresses, assisted by my mother, and her best gowns in summer were white muslin tied at the waist with ribbons. All the girls dressed in this simple fashion, but as I write, recalling the glowing cheeks and shining eyes of Hattie and Agnes and Bess, I feel again the thrill of admiration which ran through my blood as they came down the aisle at church, or when at dancing parties they balanced or " sashayed " in Honest John or Money Musk. — To me they were perfectly clothed and divinely fair. The contrast between the McClintocks, my hunter uncles, and Addison Garland, my father's brother who came to visit us at about this time was strikingly sig nificant even to me. Tall, thoughtful, humorous and of frail and bloodless body, "A. Garland" as he signed him self, was of the Yankee merchant type. A general store in Wisconsin was slowly making him a citizen of sub stance and his quiet comment brought to me an entirely new conception of the middle west and its future. He was a philosopher. He peered into the years that were to come and paid little heed to the passing glories of the plain. He predicted astounding inventions and great cities, and advised my father to go into dairying and diversified crops. "This is a natural butter country," said he. He was an invalid, and it was through him that we first learned of graham flour. During his stay (and for some time after) we suffered an infliction of sticky "gems" A Son of the Middle Border and dark soggy bread. We all resented this displace* ment of our usual salt-rising loaf and delicious saleratus biscuits but we ate the hot gems, liberally splashed with butter, just as we would have eaten dog-biscuit or hard tack had it been put before us. One of the sayings of my uncle will fix his character in the mind of the reader. One day, apropos of some public event which displeased him, he said, "Men can be in finitely more foolish in their collective capacity than on their own individual account." His quiet utterance of these words and especially the phrase "collective ca pacity" made a deep impression on me. The underlying truth of the saying came to me only later in my life. He was full of "citrus-belt" enthusiasm and told us that he was about to sell out and move to Santa Barbara. He did not urge my father to accompany him, and if he had, it would have made no difference. A winterless climate and the raising of fruit did not appeal to my Commander. He loved the prairie and the raising of wheat and cattle, and gave little heed to anything else, but to me Addison's talk of "the citrus belt" had the value of a romance, and the occasional Spanish phrases which he used afforded me an indefinable delight. It was unthinkable that I should ever see an arroya but I permitted myself to dream of it while he talked. I think he must have encouraged my sister in her growing desire for an education, for in the autumn after his visit she entered the Cedar Valley Seminary at Osage and her going produced in me a desire to accompany her. I said nothing of it at the time, for my father gave but reluctant consent to Harriet's plan. A district school education seemed to him ample for any farmer's needs. Many of our social affairs were now connected with ' ' the Grange. ' ' During these years on the new farm while we were busied with breaking and fencing and raising 164 Harriet Goes Away wheat, there had been growing up among the farmers of the west a social organization officially known as The Patrons of Husbandry. The places of meeting were called "Granges" and very naturally the members were at once called "Grangers." My father was an early and enthusiastic member of the order, and during the early seventies its meetings became very important dates on our calendar. In winter "oyster suppers," with debates, songs and essays, drew us all to the Burr Oak Grove school-house, and each spring, on the twelfth of June, the Grange Picnic was a grand "turn-out." It was almost as well attended as the circus. We all looked forward to it for weeks and every young man who owned a top-buggy got it out and washed and polished it for the use of his best girl, and those who were not so fortunate as to own "a rig" paid high tribute to the livery stable of the nearest town. Others, less able or less extravagant, doubled teams with a comrade and built a "bowery wagon" out of a wagon-box, and with hampers heaped with food rode away in state, drawn by a four or six-horse team. It seemed a splendid and daring thing to do, and some day I hoped to drive a six-horse bowery wagon myself. The central place of meeting was usually in some grove along the Big Cedar to the west and south of us, and early on the appointed day the various lodges of our region came together one by one at convenient places, each one moving in procession and led by great banners on which the women had blazoned the motto of their home lodge. Some of the columns had bands and came preceded by far faint strains of music, with marshals in red sashes galloping to and fro in fine assumption of military command. It was grand, it was inspiring —to us, to see those long A Son of the Middle Border lines of carriages winding down the lanes, joining one to another at the cross roads till at last all the granges from the northern end of the county were united in one mighty column advancing on the*picnic ground, where orators awaited our approach with calm dignity and high resolve. Nothing more picturesque, more delightful, more helpful has ever risen out of American rural life. Each of these assemblies was a most grateful relief from the sordid loneliness of the farm. Our winter amusements were also in process of change. We held no more singing schools — the " Lyceum" had taken its place. Revival meetings were given up , although few of the church folk classed them among the amuse ments. The County Fair on the contrary was becoming each year more important as farming diversified. It was even more glorious than the Grange Picnic, was indeed second only to the fourth of July, and we looked forward to it all through the autumn. It came late in September and always lasted three days. We all went on the second day, (which was con sidered the best day) and mother, by cooking all the afternoon before our outing, provided us a dinner of cold chicken and cake and pie which we ate while sitting on the grass beside our wagon just off the race-track while the horses munched hay and oats from the box. All around us other families were grouped, picnicking in the same fashion, and a cordial interchange of jellies and pies made the meal a delightful function. However, we boys never lingered over it, — we were afraid of miss ing something of the program. Our interest in the races was especially keen, for one of the citizens of our town owned a fine little trotting horse called " Huckleberry " whose honest friendly striv ing made him a general favorite. Our survey of fat sheep, broad-backed bulls and shining colts was a duty, 166 Harriet Goes Away but to cheer Huckleberry at the home stretch was a privilege. To us from the farm the crowds were the most absorb ing show of all. We met our chums and their sisters with a curious sense of strangeness, of discovery. Our playmates seemed alien somehow — especially the girls in their best dresses walking about two and two, im personal and haughty of glance. Cyrus and Walter were there in their top-buggies with Harriet and Bettie but they seemed to be having a dull time, for while they sat holding their horses we were dodging about in freedom — now at the contest of draft horses, now at the sledge-hammer throwing, now at the candy-booth. We were comical figures, with our long trousers, tliick gray coats and faded hats, but we didn't know it and were happy. One day as Burton and I were wandering about on the fair grounds we came upon a patent medicine cart from which a faker, a handsome fellow with long black hair and an immense white hat, was addressing the crowd while a young and beautiful girl with a guitar in her lap sat in weary relaxation at his feet. A third member of the " troupe," a short and very plump man of common place type, was handing out bottles. It was " Doctor" Lightner, vending his " Magic Oil." At first I perceived only the doctor whose splendid gray suit and spotless linen made the men in the crowd rustic and graceless, but as I studied the woman I began to read into her face a sadness, a weariness, which ap pealed to my imagination. Who was she? Why was she there? I had never seen a girl with such an expression. She saw no one, was interested in nothing before her — and when her master, or husband, spoke to her in a low voice, she raised her guitar and joined in the song which fee had started, all with the same air of weary disgust 167 A Son of the Middle Border Her voice, a childishly sweet soprano, mingled with the robust baritone of the doctor and the shouting tenor of the fat man, like a thread of silver in a skein of brass. I forgot my dusty clothes, my rough shoes, — I forgot that I was a boy. Absorbed and dreaming I listened to these strange new songs and studied the singular faces of these alien songsters. Even the shouting tenor had a far-away gleam in the yellow light of his cat-like eyes. The leader's skill, the woman's grace and the perfect blending of their voices made an ineffaceable impres sion on my sensitive, farm-bred brain. The songs which they sang were not in themselves of a character to warrant this ecstasy in me. One of them ran as follows: O Mary had a little lamb, Its fleece was black as jet, In the little old log cabin in the lane; And everywhere that Mary went, The lamb went too, you bet. In the little old log cabin in the lane. In the little old log cabin 0! The little old log cabin O! The little old log cabin in the lane, They're hangin' men and women now For singing songs like this In the little old log cabin in the lane. Nevertheless I listened without a smile. It was art to me. It gave me something I had never known. The large, white, graceful hand of the doctor sweeping the strings, the clear ringing shout of the tenor and the chiming, bird-like voice of the gjrl lent to the absurd words of this ballad a singular dignity. They made all other persons and events of the day of no account. In the intervals between the songs the doctor talked of catarrh and its cure, and offered his medicines for 1 68 Harriet Goes Away sale, and in this dull part of the program the tenor as sisted, but the girl, sinking back in her seat, resumed her impersonal and weary air. That was forty years ago, and I can still sing those songs and imitate the whoop of the shouting tenor, but I have never been able to put that woman into verse or fiction although I have tried. In a story called Love or the Law I once made a laborious attempt to account for her, but I did not succeed, and the manuscript remains in the bottom of my desk. No doubt the doctor has gone to his long account and the girl is a gray old woman of sixty-five but in this book they shall be forever young, forever beautiful, noble with the grace of art. The medicine they peddled was of doubtful service, but the songs they sang, the story they suggested were of priceless value to us who came from the monotony of the farm, and went back to it like bees laden with the pollen of new intoxicating blooms- Sorrowfully we left Huckleberry's unfinished race, re luctantly we climbed into the farm wagon, sticky with candy, dusty, tired, some of us suffering with sick-head ache, and rolled away homeward to milk the cows, feed the pigs and bed down the horses. As I look at a tintype of myself taken at about this time, I can hardly detect the physical relationship be tween that mop-headed, long-lipped lad, and the gray- haired man of today. But the coat, the tie, the little stick-pin on the lapel of my coat all unite to bring back to me with painful stir, the curious debates, the boyish delights, the dawning desires which led me to these ma terial expressions of manly pride. There is a kind of pathos too, in the memory of the keen pleasure I took in that absurd ornament — and yet my joy was genuine, my satisfaction complete. A Son of the Middle Border Harriet came home from school each Friday night but we saw little of her, for she was always engaged fof dances or socials by the neighbors' sons, and had only a young lady's interest in her cub brothers. I resented this and was openly hostile to her admirers. She seldom rode with us to spelling schools or " soshybles." There was always some youth with a cutter, or some noisy group in a big bob-sleigh to carry her away, and on Monday morning father drove her back to the county town with growing pride in her improving manners. Her course at the Seminary was cut short in early spring by a cough which came from a long ride in the keen wind. She was very ill with a wasting fever, yet for a time refused to go to bed. She could not resign herself to the loss of her school-life. The lack of room in our house is brought painfully to my mind as I recall that she lay for a week or two in a corner of our living room with all the noise and bustle of the family going on around her. Her own attic chamber was unwarmed (like those of all her girl friends), and so she was forced to lie near the kitchen stove. She grew rapidly worse all through the opening days of April and as we were necessarily out in the fields at wo^, and mother was busied with her household affairs, the lonely sufferer was glad to have her bed in the living room — and there she lay, her bright eyes following mother at her work, growing whiter and whiter until one beauti ful, tragic morning in early May, my father called me in to say good-bye to her. She was very weak, but her mind was perfectly clear, and as she kissed me farewell with a soft word about being a good boy, I turned away blinded with tears and fled to the barnyard, there to hide like a wounded ani mal, appalled by the weight of despair and sorrow which 170 Harriet Goes Away her transfigured face had suddenly thrust upon me. All about me the young cattle called, the spring sun shone and the gay fowls sang, but they could not mitigate my grief, my dismay, my sense of loss. My sister was passing from me — that was the agonizing fact which benumbed me. She who had been my playmate, my comrade, was about to vanish into air and earth! This was my first close contact with death, and it filled me with awe. Human life suddenly seemed fleeting and of a part with the impermanency and change of the westward moving Border Line. — Like the wild flowers she had gathered, Harriet was now a fragrant memory. Her dust mingled with the soil of the little burial ground just beyond the village bounds. My mother's heart was long in recovering from the pain of this loss, but at last Jessie's sweet face, which had in it the light of the sky and the color of a flower, won back her smiles. The child's acceptance of the funeral as a mere incident of her busy little life, in some way enabled us all to take up and carry forward the routine of our shadowed home. Those years on the plain, from '71 to '75, held much that was alluring, much that was splendid. I did not live an exceptional life in any way. My duties and my pleas ures were those of the boys around me. In all essentials my life was typical of the time and place. My father was counted a good and successful farmer. Our neighbors all lived in the same restricted fashion as ourselves, in barren little houses of wood or stone, owning few books, reading only weekly papers. It was a pure democracy wherein my father was a leader and my mother beloved by all who knew her. If anybody looked down upon us we didn't know it, and in all the social affairs of the town ship we fully shared. A Son of the Middle Border Nature was our compensation. As I look back upon it, I perceive transcendent sunsets, and a mighty sweep of golden grain beneath a sea of crimson clouds. The light and song and motion of the prairie return to me. I hear again the shrill, myriad-voiced choir of leaping insects whose wings flash fire amid the glorified stubble. The wind wanders by, lifting my torn hat-rim. The locusts rise in clouds before my weary feet. The prairie hen soars out of the unreaped barley and drops into the sheltering deeps of the tangled oats, green as emerald. The lone quail pipes in the hazel thicket, and far up the road the cowbell's steady clang tells of the home-coming herd. Even in our hours of toil, and through the sultry skies, the sacred light of beauty broke; worn and grimed as we were, $?e still could fall a-dream before the marvel of a golden earth beneath a crimson sky. 172 CHAPTER XVT We Move to Town ONE day, soon after the death of my sister Harriet, my father came home from a meeting of the Grange with a message which shook our home with the force of an earth-quake. The officers of the order had asked him to become the official grain-buyer for the county, and he had agreed to do it. "I am to take charge of the new elevator which is just being completed in Osage," he said. The effect of this announcement was far-reaching. First of all it put an end not merely to our further pioneer ing but, (as the plan developed) promised to translate us from the farm to a new and shining world, a town world where circuses, baseball games and county fairs were events of almost daily occurrence. It awed while it delighted us for we felt vaguely our father's perturba tion. For the first time since leaving Boston, some thirty years before, Dick Garland began to dream of making a living at something less back-breaking than tilling the soil. It was to him a most abrupt and startling departure from the fixed plan of his life, and I dimly understood even then that he came to this decision only after long and troubled reflection. Mother as usual sat in silence. If she showed exultation, I do not recall the fashion of it. Father assumed his new duties in June and during all that summer and autumn, drove away immediately after breakfast each morning, to the elevator some six A Son of the Middle Border miles away, leaving me in full charge of the farm and its tools. All his orders to the hired men were executed through me. On me fell the supervision of their action, always with an eye to his general oversight. I never forgot that fact. He possessed the eye of an eagle. His uncanny powers of observation kept me terrified. He could detect at a glance the slightest blunder or wrong doing in my day's activities. Every afternoon, about sunset he came whirling into the yard, his team flecked with foam, his big gray eyes flashing from side to side, and if any tool was out of place or broken, he discovered it at once, and his reproof was never a cause of laughter to me or my brother. As harvest came on he took command in the field, for most of the harvest help that year were rough, hardy wanderers from the south, nomads who had followed the line of ripening wheat from Missouri northward, and were not the most profitable companions for boys of fifteen. They reached our neighborhood in July, arriving like a flight of alien unclean birds, and vanished into the north in September as mysteriously as they had appeared. A few of them had been soldiers, others were the errant sons of the poor farmers and rough mechanics of older States, migrating for the adventure of it. One of them gave his name as "Harry Lee," others were known by such names as "Big Ed" or "Shorty." Some carried valises, others had nothing but small bundles containing a clean shirt and a few socks. They all had the most appalling yet darkly romantic conception of women. A "girl" was the most desired thing in the world, a prize to be worked for, sought for and enjoyed without remorse. She had no soul. The maid who yielded to temptation deserved no pity, no con sideration, no aid. Her sufferings were amusing, her diseases a joke, her future of no account. From these 174 We Move to Town men Burton and I acquired a desolating fund of informa tion concerning South Clark Street in Chicago, and the river front in St. Louis. Their talk did not allure, it mostly shocked and horrified us. We had not known that such cruelty, such baseness was in the world and it stood away in such violent opposition to the teaching of our fathers and uncles that it did not corrupt us. That man, the stronger animal, owed chivalry and care to woman, had been deeply grounded in our concept of life, and we shrank from these vile stories as from something dis loyal to our mothers and sisters. To those who think of the farm as a sweetly ideal place in which to bring up a boy, all this may be disturbing — but the truth is, low-minded men are low-minded every where, and farm hands are often creatures with enormous appetites and small remorse, men on whom the beauty of nature has very little effect. To most of our harvest hands that year Saturday night meant a visit to town and a drunken spree, and they did not hesitate to say so in the presence of Burton and my self. Some of them did not hesitate to say anything in our presence. After a hard week's work we all felt that a trip to town was only a fair reward. Saturday night in town! How it all comes back to me! I am a timid visitor in the little frontier village. It is sunset. A whiskey-crazed farmhand is walking bare footed up and down the middle of the road defying the world. — From a corner of the street I watch with tense interest another lithe, pock-marked bully menacing with cat-like action, a cowering young farmer in a long linen coat. The crowd jeers at him for his cowardice — a burst of shouting is heard. A trampling follows and forth from the door of a saloon bulges a throng of drunken, steaming, reeling, cursing ruffians followed by brave Jim McCarty, the city marshal, with an offender undel 175 A Son of the Middle Border each hand. — The scene changes to the middle of the street. I am one of a throng surrounding a smooth- handed faker who is selling prize boxes of soap and giving away dollars. — "Now, gentlemen," he says, "if you will hand me a dollar I will give you a sample pack age of soap to examine, afterwards if you don't want the soap, return it to me, and I'll return your dollar." He repeats this several times, returning the dollars faith fully, then slightly varies his invitation by saying, "so that I can return your dollars." No one appears to observe this significant change, and as he has hitherto returned the dollars precisely according to promise, he now proceeds to his harvest. Having all his boxes out he abruptly closes the lid of his box and calmly remarks, "I said, 'so that I can return your dollars/ I didn't say I would. — Gentlemen, I have the dollars and you have the experience." He drops into his seat and takes up the reins to drive away. A tall man who has been standing silently beside the wheel of the carriage, snatches the whip from its socket, and lashes the swindler across the face. Red streaks appear on his cheek. — The crowd surges forward. Up from behind leaps a furious little Scotchman who snatches off his right boot and beats the stranger over the head with such fury that he falls from his carriage to the ground. — I rejoice in his punishment, and admire the tall man who led the assault. — The marshal comes, the man is led away, and the crowd smilingly scatters. — We are on the way home. Only two of my crew are with me. The others are roaring from one drinking place to another, having a "good time." The air is soothingly clean and sweet after the tumult and the reek of the town. Appalled, yet fascinated, I listen to the oft repeated tales of just how Jim McCarty sprang into the saloon and cleaned out the brawling . 176 We Move to Town feel very young, very defenceless, and very sleepy as I listen. — On Sunday, Burton usually came to visit me or I went over to his house and together we rode or walked to service at the Grove school-house. He was now the owner of a razor, and I was secretly planning to buy one. The question of dress had begun to trouble us both acutely. Our best suits were not only made from woolen cloth, they were of blizzard weight, and as on week days (in summer) our entire outfit consisted of a straw hat, a hickory shirt and a pair of brown denim overalls you may imagine what tortures we endured when fully encased in our " Sunday best," with starched shirts and paper collars. No one, so far as I knew, at that time possessed an extra, light-weight suit for hot-weather wear, although a long, yellow, linen robe called a "duster" was in fashion among the smart dressers. John Gammons, who was somewhat of a dandy in matters of toilet, was among the first of my circle to purchase one of these very ultra garments, and Burton soon followed his lead, and then my own discontent began. I, too, desired a duster. Unfortunately my father did not see me as I saw my self. To him I was still a boy and subject to his will in matters of dress as in other affairs, and the notion that I needed a linen coat was absurd. "If you are too warm, take your coat off," he said, and I not only went without the duster, but suffered the shame of appearing in a flat-crown black hat while Burton and all the other fellows were wearing light brown ones, of a conical shape. I was furious. After a period of bitter brooding I rebelled, and took the matter up with the Commander-in- Chief. I argued, "As I am not only doing a man's work on a boy's pay but actually superintending the stock and 177 A Son of the Middle Border tools, I am entitled to certain individual rights in th« choice of a hat." The soldier listened in silence but his glance was stern. When I had ended he said, "You'll wear the hat I provide." For the first time in my life I defied him. "I will not," I said. "And you can't make me." He seized me by the arm and for a moment we faced each other in silent clash of wills. I was desperate now. "Don't you strike me," I warned. "You can't do that any more." His face changed. His eyes softened. He perceived in my attitude something new, something unconquerable. He dropped my arm and turned away. After a silent struggle with himself he took two dollars from his pocket and extended them to me. "Get your own hat," he said, and walked away. This victory forms the most important event of my fifteenth year. Indeed the chief's recession gave me a greater shock than any punishment could have done. Having forced him to admit the claims of my growing personality as well as the value of my services, I retired in a panic. The fact that he, the inexorable old soldier, had surrendered to my furious demands awed me, making me very careful not to go too fast or too far in my assumption of the privileges of manhood. Another of the milestones on my road to manhood was my first employment of the town barber. Up to this time my hair had been trimmed by mother or man gled by one of the hired men, — whereas both John and Burton enjoyed regular hair-cuts and came to Sunday school with the backs of their necks neatly shaved. I wanted to look like that, and so at last, shortly after my victory concerning the hat, I plucked up courage to ask my father for a quarter and got it! With my money 178 We Move to Town tightly clutched in my hand I timidly entered the Ton* serial Parlor of Ed Mills and took my seat in his marvel* lous chair — thus touching another high point on the road to self-respecting manhood. My pleasure, however, was mixed with ignoble childish terror, for not only did the barber seem determined to force upon me a shampoo (which was ten cents extra), but I was in unremitting fear lest I should lose my quarter, the only one I possessed, and find myself accused as a swindler. Nevertheless I came safely away, a neater, older and graver person, walking with a manlier stride, and when I confronted my class-mates at the Grove school-house on Sunday, I gave evidence of an accession of self-con fidence. The fact that my back hair was now in fashion able order was of greatest comfort to me. If only my trousers had not continued their distressing habit of climbing up my boot-tops I would have been almost at ease but every time I rose from my seat it became neces sary to make each instep smooth the leg of the other pantaloon, and even then they kept their shameful wrinkles, and a knowledge of my exposed ankles humbled me. Burton, although better dressed than I, was quite as confused and wordless in the presence of girls, but John Gammons was not only confident, he was irritatingly facile. Furthermore, as son of the director of the Sun day school he had almost too much distinction. I bitterly resented his linen collars, his neat suit and his smiling assurance, for while we professed to despise everything connected with church, we were keenly aware of the bright eyes of Bettie and noted that they rested often on John's curly head. He could sing, too, and sometimes, with sublime audacity, held the hymn book with her. The sweetness of those girlish faces held us captivi through many a long sermon, but there were times whet* 170 A Son of the Middle Border not even their beauty availed. Three or four of us occasionally slipped away into the glorious forest to pick berries or nuts, or to loaf in the odorous shade of the elms along the creek. The cool aisles of the oaks seemed more sweetly sanctifying (after a week of sun-smit soil on the open plain) than the crowded little church with its droning preacher, and there was something mystical in the melody of the little brook and in the flecking of Jight and shade across the silent wood-land path. To drink of the little ice-cold spring beneath the maple tree in Frazer's pasture was almost as delight-giving as the plate of ice-cream which we sometimes permitted ourselves to buy in the village on Saturday, and often we wandered on and on, till the sinking sun warned us of duties at home and sent us hurrying to the open. It was always hard to go back to the farm after one of these days of leisure — back to greasy overalls and milk- bespattered boots, back to the society of fly-bedevilled cows and steaming, salty horses, back to the curry comb and swill bucket, — but it was particularly hard during this our last summer on the prairie. But we did it with a feeling that we were nearing the end of it. "Next year we'll be living in town!" I said to the boys exultantly. ' ' No more cow-milking for me 1 " I never rebelled at hard, clean work, like haying or harvest, but the slavery of being nurse to calves and scrub-boy to horses cankered my spirits more and more, and the thought of living in town filled me with an in credulous anticipatory delight. A life of leisure, of intel lectual activity seemed about to open up to me, and I met my chums in a restrained exaltation which must have been trying to their souls. "I'm sorry to leave you," I jeered, "but so it goes. Some are chosen, others are left. Some rise to glory, others remain plodders — " 180 We Move to Town such was my airy attitude. I wonder that they did not roll me in the dust. Though my own joy and that of my brother was keen and outspoken, I have no recollection that my mother uttered a single word of pleasure. She must have been as deeply excited, and as pleased as we, for it meant more to her than to us, it meant escape from the drudgery of the farm, from the pain of early rising, and yet I cannot be sure of her feeling. So far as she knew this move was final. Her life as a farmer's wife was about to end after twenty years of early rising and never ending labor, and I think she must have palpitated with joy of her approaching freedom from it all. As we were not to move till the following March, and as winter came on we went to school as usual in the "bleak little shack at the corner of our farm and took part in all the neighborhood festivals. I have beautiful memories of trotting away across the plain to spelling schools and "Lyceums" through the sparkling winter nights with Franklin by my side, while the low-hung sky blazed with stars, and great white owls went flapping silently away before us. — I am riding in a long sleigh to the north beneath a wondrous moon to witness a per formance of Lord Dundreary at the Barker school-house. • — I am a neglected onlooker at a Christmas tree at Burr Oak. I am spelled down at the Shehan school — and through all these scenes runs a belief that I am leaving the district never to return to it, a conviction which lends to every experience a peculiar poignancy of appeal. Though but a shaggy colt in those days, I acknowl edged a keen longing to join in the parties and dances of the grown-up boys and girls. I was not content to be merely the unnoticed cub in the corner. A place in the family bob-sled no longer satisfied me, and when at the "sociable" I stood in the corner with tousled hair and A Son of the Middle Border clumsy ill-fitting garments I was in my desire, a con fident, graceful squire of dames. The dancing was a revelation to me of the beauty and grace latent in the awkward girls and hulking men of the farms. It amazed and delighted me to see how gloriously Madeleine White swayed and tip- toed through the figures of the " Cotillion," and the sweet aloofness of Agnes FarwelPs face filled me with worship. I envied Edwin Blackler his supple grace, his fine sense of rhythm, and especially the calm audacity of his man ner with his partners. Bill, Joe, all the great lunking farm hands seemed somehow uplifted, carried out of their everyday selves, ennobled by some deep-seated emotion, and I was eager for a chance to show that I, too, could balance and bow and pay court to women, but — alas, I never did, I kept to my corner even though Stelle Gilbert came to drag me out. Occasionally a half-dozen of these audacious young people would turn a church social or donation party into a dance, much to the scandal of the deacons. I recall one such performance which ended most dramatically. It was a "shower" for the minister whose salary was too small to be even an honorarium, and the place of meet ing was at the DurrehV, two well-to-do farmers, brothers who lived on opposite sides of the road just south of the Grove school-house. Mother put up a basket of food, father cast a quarter of beef into the back-part of the sleigh, and we were off early of a cold winter night in order to be on hand for the supper. My brother and I were mere passen gers on the straw behind, along with the slab of beef, but we gave no outward sign of discontent. It was a dear, keen, marvellous twilight, with the stars com ing out over the woodlands to the east. On every road the sound of bells and the voices of happy young 182 We Move to Town people came to our ears. Occasionally some fellow with a fast horse and a gay cutter came slashing up behind us and called out "Clear the track!" Father gave the road, and the youth and his best girl went whirling by with a gay word of thanks. Watch-dogs guarding the Davis farm-house, barked in savage warn ing as we passed and mother said, " Everybody's gone. I hope we won't be late." We were, indeed, a little behind the others for when we stumbled into the Ellis Durrell house we found a crowd of merry folks clustered about the kitchen stove. Mrs. Ellis flattered me by saying, "The young people ere expecting you over at Joe's." Here she laughed, "I'm afraid they are going to dance." As soon as I was sufficiently thawed out I went across the road to the other house which gave forth the sound rf singing and the rhythmic tread of dancing feet. It was filled to overflowing with the youth of the neighbor hood, and Agnes Farwell, Joe's niece, the queenliest of them all, was leading the dance, her dark face aglow, her deep brown eyes alight. The dance was "The Weevilly Wheat" and Ed Black- ler was her partner. Against the wall stood Marsh Bel- ford, a tall, crude, fierce young savage with eyes fixed on Agnes. He was one of her suitors and mad with jealousy of Blackler to whom she was said to be en gaged. He was a singular youth, at once bashful and baleful. He could not dance, and for that reason keenly resented Ed's supple grace and easy manners with the girls. Crossing to where Burton stood, I heard Belford say as he replied to some remark by his companions, "I'll roll him one o' these days." He laughed in a constrained way, and that his mood was dangerous was evident. In deep excitement Burton and I awaited the outcome. 18* A Son of the Middle Border The dancing was of the harmless "donation" sort. As musical instruments were forbidden, the rhythm was furnished by a song in which we all joined with clapping hands. Come hither, my love, and trip together In the morning early, Give to you the parting hand Although I love you dearly. I won't have none of your weevilly wheat I won't have none of your barley, I'll have some flour In half an hour To bake a cake for Charley. — Oh, Charley, he is a fine young man, Charley he is a dandy, Charley he is a fine young man For he buys the girls some candy. The figures were like those in the old time "Money Musk" and as Agnes bowed and swung and gave hands down the line I thought her the loveliest creature in the world, and so did Marsh, only that which gladdened me, maddened him. I acknowledged Edwin's superior claim, — Marsh did not. Burton, who understood the situation, drew me aside and said, "Marsh has been drinking. There's going to be war." As soon as the song ceased and the dancers paused, Marsh, white with resolution, went up to Agnes, and said something to her. She smiled, but shook her head and turned away. Marsh came back to where his brother Joe was standing and his face was tense with fury. "I'll make her wish she hadn't," he muttered. Edwin, as floor manager, now called out a new "set "and as the dancers began to "form on," Joe Belford hunched his brother. "Go after him now," he said. With deadly slowness of action, Marsh sauntered up to Bladder and said something in a low voice. 184 We Move to Town "You're a liar!" retorted Edwin sharply. Belford struck out with a swing of his open hand, and a moment later they were rolling on the floor in a deadly grapple. The girls screamed and fled, but the boys formed a joyous ring around the contestants and cheered them on to keener strife while Joe Belford, tearing off his coat, stood above his brother, warning others to keep out of it. "This is to be a fair fight," he said. "The best man wins!" He was a redoubtable warrior and the ring widened. No one thought of interfering, in fact we were all de lighted by this sudden outbreak of the heroic spirit. Ed threw off his antagonist and rose, bleeding but undaunted. "You devil," he said, "I'll smash your face." Marsh again struck him a staggering blow, and they were facing each other in watchful fury as Agnes forced her way through the crowd and, laying her hand on Bel- ford's arm, calmly said, "Marsh Belford, what are you doing?" Her dignity, her beauty, her air of command, awed the bully and silenced every voice in the room. She was our hostess and as such assumed the right to enforce decorum. Fixing her glance upon Joe whom she recog nized as the chief disturber, she said, "You'd better go home. This is no place for either you or Marsh." Sobered, shamed, the Belfords fell back and slipped out while Agnes turned to Edwin and wiped the blood from his face with self-contained tenderness. This date may be taken as fairly ending my boyhood, for I was rapidly taking on the manners of men. True, I did not smoke or chew tobacco and I was not greatly given to profanity, but I was able to shoulder a two bushel sack of wheat and could hold my own with most of the harvesters. Although short and heavy, I was deft 185 A Son of the Middle Border with my hands, as one or two of the neighborhood bullies had reason to know and in many ways I was counted a man. I read during this year nearly one hundred dime novels, little paper-bound volumes filled with stories of Indians and wild horsemen and dukes and duchesses and men in iron masks, and sewing girls who turned out to be daugh ters of nobility, and marvellous detectives who bore charmed lives and always trapped the villains at the end of the story — Of all these tales, those of the border naturally had most allurement. There was the Quaker Sleuth, for in stance, and Mad Matt the Trailer, and Buckskin Joe who rode disdainfully alone (like Lochinvar), rescuing maidens from treacherous Apaches, cutting long rows of death notches on the stock of his carbine. One of these narratives contained a phantom troop of skeleton horse men, a grisly squadron, which came like an icy wind out of the darkness, striking terror to the hearts of the rene gades and savages, only to vanish with clatter of bones, and click of hoofs. In addition to these delight-giving volumes, I traded stock with other boys of the neighborhood. From Jack Sheet I derived a bundle of Saturday Nights in exchange for my New York Weeklys and from one of our harvest hands, a near-sighted old German, I borrowed some twenty-five or thirty numbers of The Sea Side Library. These also cost a dime when new, but you could return them and get a nickel in credit for another, — provided your own was in good condition. It is a question whether the reading of all this exciting fiction had an ill effect on my mind or not. Apparently it had very little effect of any sort other than to make the borderland a great deal more exciting than the farm, and yet so far as I can discover, I had no keen desire to 186 We Move to Town go West and fight Indians and I showed no disposition to rob or murder in the manner of my heroes. I devoured Jack Harkaway and The Quaker Sleuth precisely as I played ball — to pass the time and because I enjoyed the game. Deacon Garland was highly indignant with my father for permitting such reading, and argued against it furi ously, but no one paid much attention to his protests — especially after we caught the old gentleman sitting with a very lurid example of " The Damnable Lies " open in his hand. "I was only looking into it to see how bad it was," he explained. Father was so tickled at the old man's downfall that he said, "Stick to it till you find how it turns out." Grandsire, we all perceived, was human after all. I think we liked him rather better after this sign of weak ness. It would not be fair to say that we read nothing else but these easy-going tales. As a matter of fact, I read everything within reach, even the copy of Paradise Lost which my mother presented to me on my fifteenth birthday. Milton I admit was hard work, but I got considerable joy out of his cursing passages. The battle scenes also interested me and I went about spouting the extraordinary harangues of Satan with such vigor that my team one day took fright of me, and ran away with the plow, leaving an erratic furrow to be explained. However, my father was glad to see me taking on the voice of the orator. The five years of life on this farm had brought swift changes into my world. Nearly all the open land had been fenced and plowed, and all the cattle and horses had been brought into pasture, and around most of the build ings, groves of maples were beginning to make the homesteads a little less barren and ugly. And yet A Son of the Middle Border with all these growing signs of prosperity I realized that something sweet and splendid was dying out of the prairie. The whistling pigeons, the wailing plover, the migrating ducks and geese, the soaring cranes, the shadowy wolves, the wary foxes, all the untamed things were passing, vanishing with the blue-joint grass, the dainty wild rose and the tiger-lily's flaming torch. Settlement was complete. 188 CHAPTER XVII A Taste of Village Life THE change from farm to village life, though delight ful, was not so complete as we had anticipated, for we not only carried with us several cows and a span of horses, but the house which we had rented stood at the edge of town and possessed a large plot; therefore we not only continued to milk cows and curry horses, but set to work at once planting potatoes and other vege tables almost as if still upon the farm. The soil had been poorly cultivated for several years, and the weeds sprang up like dragons' teeth. Work, it seemed, was not to be escaped even in the city. Though a little resentful of this labor and somewhat disappointed in our dwelling, we were vastly excited by certain phases of our new surroundings. To be within a few minutes' walk of the postoffice, and to be able to go to the store at any moment, were conditions quite as satisfactory as we had any right to expect. Also we slept later, for my father was less disposed to get us out of bed at dawn and this in itself was an enormous gain, es pecially to my mother. Osage, a small town, hardly more than a village, was situated on the edge of a belt of hard-wood timber through which the Cedar River ran, and was quite com monplace to most people but to me it was both mysteri ous and dangerous, for it was the home of an alien tribe, hostile and pitiless— " The Town Boys." Up to this time I had both hated and feared them, 189 A Son of the Middle Border knowing that they hated and despised me, and now( suddenly I was thrust among them and put on my own defenses. For a few weeks I felt like a young rooster in a strange barn-yard, — knowing that I would be called upon to prove my quality. In fact it took but a week or two to establish my place in the tribe for one of the leaders of the gang was Mitchell Scott, a powerful lad of about my own age, and to his friendship I owe a large part of my freedom from persecution. Uncle David came to see us several times during the spring and his talk was all about "going west." He was restless under the conditions of his life on a farm. I don't know why this was so, but a growing bitterness clouded his voice. Once I heard him say, "I don't know what use I am in the world. I am a failure." This was the first note of doubt, of discouragement that I had heard from any member of my family and it made a deep impression on me. Disillusionment had begun. During the early part of the summer my brother and I worked in the garden with frequent days off for fishing, swimming and berrying, and we were entirely content with life. No doubts assailed us. We swam in the pond at Rice's Mill and we cast our hooks in the sunny ripples below it. We saw the circus come to town and go into camp on a vacant lot, and we attended every movement of it with a delicious sense of leisure. We could go at night with no long ride to take after it was over. — The fourth of July came to seek us this year and we had but to step across the way to see a ball-game. We were at last in the center of our world. In June my father called me to help in the elevator and this turned out to be a most informing experience. "The Street," as it was called, was merely a wagon road which ran along in front of a row of wheat ware-houses 190 A Taste of Village Life of various shapes and sizes, from which the buyers emerged to meet the farmers as they drove into town. Two or three or more of the men would clamber upon the load, open the sacks, sample the grain and bid for it. If one man wanted the load badly, or if he chanced to be in a bad temper, the farmer was the gainer. Hence very few of them, even the members of the Grange, were content to drive up to my father's elevator and take the honest market price. They were all hoping to get a little more than the market price. This vexed and embittered my father who often spoke of it to me. "It only shows," he said, "how hard it will be to work out any reform among the farmers. They will never stand together. These other buyers will force me off the market and then there will be no one here to represent the farmers' interest." These merchants interested me greatly. Humorous, self-contained, remorseless in trade, they were most de lightful companions when off duty. They liked my father in his private capacity, but as a factor of the Grange he was an enemy. Their kind was new to me and I loved to linger about and listen to their banter when there was nothing else to do. One of them by reason of his tailor-made suit and a large ring on his little finger, was especially attractive to me. He was a handsome man of a sinister type, and I regarded his expressionless face as that of a gambler. I didn't know that he was a poker player but it amused me to think so. Another buyer was a choleric Cornish- man whom the other men sometimes goaded into paying five or six cents more than the market admitted, by shrewdly playing on his hot temper. A third was a taK gaunt old man of New England type, obstinate, honest, but of sanguine temperament. He was always on the bull side of the market and a loud debater.— The fourth^ 191 A Son of the Middle Border a quiet little man of smooth address, acted as peace maker. Among these men my father moved as an equal, not withstanding the fact of his country training and preju dices, and it was through the man Morley that we got our first outlook upon the bleak world of Agnosticism, for during the summer a series' of lectures by Robert Inger- soll was reported in one of the Chicago papers and the West rang with the controversy. On Monday as soon as the paper came to town it was the habit of the grain-buyers to gather at their little central office, and while Morley, the man with the seal ring, read the lecture aloud, the others listened and com mented on the heresies. Not all were sympathizers with the great iconoclast, and the arguments which fol lowed were often heated and sometimes fiercely per sonal. After they had quite finished with the paper, I some times secured it for myself, and hurrying back to my office in the elevator pored over it with intense zeal. Undoubtedly my father as well as I was profoundly in fluenced by "The Mistakes of Moses." The faith in which we had been reared had already grown dim,, and under the light of IngersolPs remorseless humor most of our superstitions vanished. I do not think my father's essential Christianity was in any degree dimin ished, he merely lost his respect for certain outworn traditions and empty creeds. My work consisted in receiving the grain and keeping the elevator going and as I weighed the sacks, made out checks for the payment and kept the books — in all ways taking a man's place, — I lost all sense of being a boy. The motive power of our hoisting machinery was a blind horse, a handsome fellow weighing some fifteen hundred pounds, and it was not long before he filled a 192 A Taste of Village Life large space in my thoughts. There was something ap pealing in his sightless eyes, and I never watched him (as he patiently went his rounds in the dusty shed) without pity. He had a habit of kicking the wall with his right hind foot at a certain precise point as he circled, and a deep hollow in the sill attested his accuracy. He seemed to do this purposely — to keep count, as I imagined, of his dreary circling through sunless days. A part of my duty was to watch the fanning mill (in the high cupola) in order that the sieves should not clog. Three flights of stairs led to the mill and these had to be mounted many times each day. I always ran up the steps when the mill required my attention, but in coming down I usually swung from beam to beam, dropping from footway to footway like a monkey from a tall tree. My mother in seeing me do this called out in terror, but I assured her that there was not the slightest danger — and this was true, for I was both sure-footed and sure- handed in those days. This was a golden summer for us all. My mother found time to read. My father enjoyed companionship with the leading citizens of the town, while Franklin, as first assistant in a candy store, professed himself to be entirely content. My own holidays were spent in fish ing or in roving the woods with Mitchell and George, but on Sundays the entire family dressed for church as for a solemn social function, fully alive to the dignity of Banker Brush, and the grandeur of Congressman Deering who came to service regularly — but on foot, so intense was the spirit of democracy among us. Theoretically there were no social distinctions in Osage, but after all a large house and a two seated car riage counted, and my mother's visitors were never from the few pretentious homes of the town but from the farms. However, I do not think she worried over her 193 A Son of the Middle Border social position and I know she welcomed callers from Dry Run and Burr Oak with cordial hospitality. She was never envious or bitter. In spite of my busy life, I read more than ever before, and everything I saw or heard made a deep and lasting record on my mind. I recall with a sense of gratitude a sermon by the preacher in the Methodist Church which profoundly educated me. It was the first time I had ever heard the power of art and the value of its mission to man insisted upon. What was right and what was wrong had been pointed out to me, but things of beauty were seldom mentioned. With most eloquent gestures, with a face glowing with enthusiasm, the young orator enumerated the beautiful phases of nature. He painted the starry sky, the sunset clouds, and the purple hills in words of pris matic hue and his rapturous eloquence held us rigid. "We have been taught," he said in effect, " that beauty is a snare of the evil one; that it is a lure to destroy, but I assert that God desires loveliness and hates ugliness. He loves the shimmering of dawn, the silver light on the lake and the purple and snow of every summer cloud. He honors bright colors, for has he not set the rainbow in the heavens and made water to reflect the moon? He prefers joy and pleasure to hate and despair. He is not a God of pain, of darkness and ugliness, he is a God of beauty, of delight, of consolation." In some such strain he continued, and as his voice rose in fervent chant and his words throbbed with poetry, the sunlight falling through the window-pane gave out a more intense radiance, and over the faces of the girls, a more entrancing color fell. He opened my eyes to a new world, the world of art. I recognized in this man not only a moving orator but a scholar and I went out from that little church vaguely 194 A Taste of Village Life resolved to be a student also, a student of the beautiful. My father was almost equally moved and we all went again and again to hear our young evangel speak but never again did he touch my heart. That one discourse was his contribution to my education and I am grateful to him for it. In after life I had the pleasure of telling him how much he had suggested to me in that sermon. There was much to allure a farmer boy in the decorum of well-dressed men and the grace of daintily clad women as well as in the music and the dim interior of the church (which seemed to me of great dignity and charm) and I usually went both morning and evening to watch the regal daughters of the county aristocracy go up the aisle. I even joined a Sunday school class because charming Miss Culver was the teacher. Outwardly a stocky, un graceful youth, I was inwardly a bold squire of romance, needing only a steed and a shield to fight for my lady love. No one could be more essentially romantic than I was at this time — but fortunately no one knew it ! Mingling as I did with young people who had been students at the Seminary, I naturally developed a new ambition. I decided to enter for the autumn term, and to that end gained from my father a leave of absence during August and hired myself out to bind grain in the harvest field. I demanded full wages and when one blazing hot day I rode on a shining new Marsh harvester into a field of wheat just south of the Fair Ground, I felt myself a man, and entering upon a course which put me nearer the clothing and the education I desired. Binding on a harvester was desperately hard work for a sixteen-year-old boy for it called for endurance of heat and hunger as well as for unusual celerity and pre cision of action. But as I considered myself full-grown physically, I could not allow myself a word of complaint. I kept my place beside my partner hour after hour, tak- 195 A Son of the Middle Border ing care of my half of ten acres of grain each day. My fingers, raw and bleeding with the briars and smarting with the rust on the grain, were a torture but I persisted to the end of harvest. In this way I earned enough money to buy myself a Sunday suit, some new boots and the necessary books for the seminary term which began in September. Up to this time I had never owned an overcoat nor a suit that fitted me. My shirts had always been made by my mother and had no real cuffs. I now purchased two boxes of paper cuffs and a real necktie. My intense satisfaction in these garments made mother smile with pleasure and understanding humor. In spite of my store suit and my high-heeled calf-skin boots I felt very humble as I left our lowly roof that first day and started for the chapel. To me the brick build ing standing in the center of its ample yard was as im posing as I imagine the Harper Memorial Library must be to the youngster of today as he enters the University of Chicago. To enter the chapel meant running the gauntlet of a hundred citified young men and women, fairly entitled to laugh at a clod- jumper like myself, and I would have balked completely had not David Pointer, a neighbor's son, volunteered to lead the way. Gratefully I accepted his offer, and so passed for the first time into the little hall which came to mean so much to me in after years. It was a large room swarming with merry young people and the Corinthian columns painted on the walls, the pipe organ, the stately professors on the platform, the self-confident choir, were all of such majesty that I was re duced to hare-like humility. What right had I to share in this splendor? Sliding hurriedly into a seat I took refuge in the obscurity which my youth and short stature guaranteed to me. IQ6 A Taste of Village Life Soon Professor Bush, the principal of the school, gentle, blue-eyed, white-haired, with a sweet and mellow voice, rose to greet the old pupils and welcome the new ones, and his manner so won my confidence that at the close of the service I went to him and told him who I was. For tunately he remembered my sister Harriet, and politely said, "I am glad to see you, Hamlin," and from that moment I considered him a friend, and an almost in fallible guide. The school was in truth a very primitive institution, hardly more than a high school, but it served its purpose. It gave farmers' boys like myself the opportunity of meeting those who were older, finer, more learned than they, and every day was to me like turning a fresh and delightful page in a story book, not merely because it brought new friends, new experiences, but because it symbolized freedom from the hay fork and the hoe. Learning was easy for me. In all but mathematics I kept among the highest of my class without much effort, but it was in the "Friday Exercises" that I earliest distinguished myself. It was the custom at the close of every week's work to bring a section of the pupils upon the platform as essay ists or orators, and these "exercises" formed the most interesting and the most passionately dreaded feature of the entire school. No pupil who took part in it ever forgot his first appearance. It was at once a pillory and a burning. It called for self-possession, memory, grace of gesture and a voice! My case is typical. For three or four days before my first ordeal, I could not eat. A mysterious uneasiness developed in my solar plexus, a pain which never left me — except possibly in the morning before I had time to think. Day by day I drilled and drilled and drilled, out in the fields at the edge of the town or at home when 197 A Son of the Middle Border mother was away, in the barn while milking — at every opportunity I went through my selection with most impassioned voice and lofty gestures, sustained by the legends of Webster and Demosthenes, resolved upon a blazing victory. I did everything but mumble a smooth pebble — realizing that most of the boys in my section were going through precisely the same struggle. Each of us knew exactly how the others felt, and yet I cannot say that we displayed acute sympathy one with another; on the contrary, those in the free section considered the antics of the suffering section a very amusing spectacle and we were continually being "joshed " about our lack of appetite. The test was, in truth, rigorous. To ask a bashful boy or shy girl fresh from the kitchen to walk out upon a platform and face that crowd of mocking students was a kind of torture. No desk was permitted. Each victim stood bleakly exposed to the pitiless gaze of three hun dred eyes, and as most of us were poorly dressed, in coat? that never fitted and trousers that climbed our boot- tops, we suffered the miseries of the damned. The girls wore gowns which they themselves had made, and were, of course, equally self-conscious. The knowledge that their sleeves did not fit was of more concern to them than the thought of breaking down — but the fear of for getting their lines also contributed to their dread and terror. While the names which preceded mine were called off that first afternoon, I grew colder and colder till at last I shook with a nervous chill, and when, in his smooth, pleasant tenor, Prof. Bush called out "Hamlin Garland" I rose in my seat with a spring like Jack from his box. My limbs were numb, so numb that I could scarcely feel the floor beneath my feet and the windows were only faint gray glares of light. My head oscillated like a toy 198 A Taste of Village Life balloon, seemed indeed to be floating in the air, and my heart was pounding like a drum. However, I had pondered upon this scene so long and had figured my course so exactly that I made all the turns with moderate degree of grace and succeeded finally in facing my audience without falling up the steps (as several others had done) and so looked down upon my fellows like Tennyson's eagle on the sea. In that in stant a singular calm fell over me, I became strangely master of myself. From somewhere above me a new and amazing power fell upon me and in that instant I per ceived on the faces of my classmates a certain expression of surprise and serious respect. My subconscious oratori cal self had taken charge. I do not at present recall what my recitation was, but it was probably Catiline's Defense or some other of the turgid declamatory pieces of classic literature with which all our readers were filled. It was bombastic stuff, but my blind, boyish belief in it gave it dignity. As I went on my voice cleared. The window sashes regained their outlines. I saw every form before me, and the look of surprise and pleasure on the smiling face of my principal exalted me. Closing amid hearty applause, I stepped down with a feeling that I had won a place among the orators of the school, a belief which did no harm to others and gave me a good deal of satisfaction. As I had neither money nor clothes, and was not of figure to win admiration, why should I not express the pride I felt in my power to move an audience? Besides I was only sixteen ! The principal spoke to me afterwards, both praising and criticising my method. The praise I accepted, the criticism I naturally resented. I realized some of my faults of course, but I was not ready to have even Prof. Bush tell me of them. I hated "elocution" drill in class, 199 A Son of the Middle Border I relied on "inspiration." I believed that orators were born, not made. There was one other speaker in my section, a little girl, considerably younger than myself, who had the mys terious power of the born actress, and I recognized this quality in her at once. I perceived that she spoke from a deep-seated, emotional, Celtic impulse. Hardly more than a child in years, she was easily the most dramatic reader in the school. She too, loved tragic prose and pas sionate, sorrowful verse and to hear her recite, One of them dead in the East by the sea And one of them dead in the West by the sea, was to be shaken by inexplicable emotion. Her face grew pale as silver as she went on and her eyes darkened with the anguish of the poet mother. Most of the students were the sons and daughters of farmers round about the county, but a few were from the village homes in western Iowa and southern Minnesota. Two or three boys wore real tailor-made suits, and the easy flow of their trouser legs and the set of their linen collars rendered me at once envious and discontented. " Some day," I said to myself, "I too, will have a suit that will not gape at the neck and crawl at the ankle," but Idid not rise to the height of expecting a ring and watch. Shoes were just coming into fashion and one young man wore pointed "box toes" which filled all the rest of us with despair. John Cutler also wore collars of linen — real linen — which had to be laundered, but few of us dared fix our hopes as high as that. John also owned three neckties, and wore broad cuffs with engraved gold buttons, and on Fridays waved these splendors before our eyes with a malicious satisfaction which aroused our hatred. Of such complexion are the trage dies and triumphs of youth! 200 A Taste of Village Life How I envied Arthur Peters his calm and haughty bearing! Most of us entered chapel like rabbits sneak ing down a turnip patch, but Arthur and John and Walter loitered in with the easy and assured manner of Senators or Generals — so much depends upon leather and pru nella. Gradually I lost my terror of this ordeal, but I took care to keep behind some friendly bulk like young Blakeslee, who stood six feet two in his gaiters. With all these anxieties I loved the school and could hardly be wrested from it even for a day. I bent to my books with eagerness, I joined a debating society, and I took a hand at all the games. The days went by on golden, noiseless, ball-bearing axles — and almost before I realized it, winter was upon the land. But oh! the luxury of that winter, with no snow drifts to climb, no corn-stalks to gather and no long walk to school. It was sweet to wake each morning in the shelter of our little house and know that another day of delightful schooling was ours. Our hands softened and lightened. Our walk became each day less of a "galumping plod." The com panionship of bright and interesting young people, and the study of well-dressed men and women in attendance upon lectures and socials was a part of our instruction and had their refining effect upon us, graceless colts though we were. Sometime during this winter Wendell Phillips came to town and lectured on The Lost Arts. My father took us all to see and hear this orator hero of his boyhood days in Boston. I confess to a disappointment in the event. A tall old gentleman with handsome clean-cut features, rose from behind the pulpit in the Congregational Church, and read from a manuscript — read quietly, colloquially, like a teacher addressing a group of students, with scarcely a gesture and without raising his voice. Only once 201 A Son of the Middle Border toward the end of the hour did he thrill us, and then only for a moment. Father was a little saddened. He shook his head gravely. "He isn't the orator he was in the good old anti-slavery days," he explained and passed again into a glowing account of the famous "slave speech" in Faneuil Hall when the pro-slavery men all but mobbed the speaker. Per contra, I liked, (and the boys all liked) a certain peripatetic temperance lecturer named Beale, for he was an orator, one of those who rise on an impassioned chant, soaring above the snows of Chimborazo, mingling the purple and gold of sunset with the saffron and silver of the dawn. None of us could tell just what these gor geous passages meant, but they were beautiful while they lasted, and sadly corrupted our oratorical style. It took some of us twenty years to recover from the fascination of this man's absurd and high falutin' elocutionary sing^ song. I forgot the farm, I forgot the valley of my birth, I lived wholly and with joy in the present. Song, poetry, history mingled with the sports which made our life so unceasingly interesting. There was a certain girl, the daughter of the shoe merchant, who (temporarily) dis placed the image of Agnes in the niche of my shrine, and to roll the platter for her at a "sociable" was a very high honor indeed, and there was another, a glorious contralto singer, much older than I — but there— I must, not claim to have even attracted her eyes, and my meet ings with Millie were so few and so public that I cannot claim to have ever conversed with her. They were all boyish adorations. Much as I enjoyed this winter, greatly as it instructed me, I cannot now recover from its luminious dark more than here and there an incident, a poem, a song. It was 2G3 A Taste of Village Life all delightful, that I know, so filled with joyous hours that I retain but a mingled impression of satisfaction and regret — satisfaction with life as I found it, regret at its inevitable ending — for my father, irritated by the failure of his renter, announced that he had decided to put us all back upon the f arr . j CHAPTER XVin Back to the Farm JUDGING from the entries in a small diary of this date, I was neither an introspective youth nor one given to precocious literary subtleties. On March 27th, 1877, I made this entry; "To-day we move back upon the farm." This is all of it! No more, no less. Not a word to indicate whether I regretted the decision or welcomed it, and from subsequent equally bald notes, I derive the information that my father retained his position as grain buyer, and that he drove back and forth daily over the five miles which lay between the farm and the eleva tor. There is no mention of my mother, no hint as to how she felt, although the return to the loneliness and drudgery of the farm must have been as grievous to her as to her sons. Our muscles were soft and our heads filled with new ambitions but there was no alternative. It was "back to the field," or "out into the cold, cold world," so forth we went upon the soil in the old familiar way, there to plod to and fro endlessly behind the seeder and the har row. It was harder than ever to follow a team for ten hours over the soft ground, and early rising was more difficult than it had ever been before, but I discovered some compensations which helped me bear these dis comforts. I saw more of the beauty of the landscape and I now had an aspiration to occupy my mind. 204 Back to the Farm My memories of the Seminary, the echoes of the songs we had heard, gave the morning chorus of the prairie chickens a richer meaning than before. The west wind, laden with the delicious smell of uncovered earth, the tender blue of the sky, the cheerful chirping of the ground sparrows, the jocund whistling of the gophers, the winding flight of the prairie pigeons — all these sights and sounds of spring swept back upon me, bringing some thing sweeter and more significant than before. I had gained in perception and also in the power to assim ilate what I perceived. This year in town had other far-reaching effects. It tended to warp us from our father's designs. It placed the rigorous, filthy drudgery of the farm-yard in sharp contrast with the care-free companionable existence led by my friends in the village, and we longed to be of their condition. We had gained our first set of compara tive ideas, and with them an unrest which was to carry us very far away. True, neither Burton nor I had actually shared the splendors of Congressman Deering's house but we^ had obtained revelatory glimpses of its well-kept lawnf and through the open windows we had watched the waving of its lace curtains. We had observed also how well Avery Brush's frock coat fitted and we compre hended something of the elegant leisure which the sons and daughters of Wm. Petty's general store enjoyed. Over against these comforts, these luxurious condi tions, we now set our ugly little farmhouse, with its rag carpets, its battered furniture, its barren attic, and its hard, rude beds. — All that we possessed seemed very cheap and deplorably commonplace. My brother, who had passed a vivid and wonderful year riding race horses, clerking in an ice cream parlor, with frequent holidays of swimming and baseball, also 205 A Son of the Middle Border went groaning and grumbling to the fields. He too resented the curry-comb and the dung fork. We both loathed the smell of manure and hated the greasy cloth ing which our tasks made necessary. Secretly we vowed that when we were twenty-one we would leave the farm, never to return to it. However, as the ground dried off, and the grass grew green in the door-yard some part of this bitterness, this resentment, faded away, and we made no further complaint. My responsibilities were now those of a man. I was nearly full grown, quick and powerful of hand, and vain of my strength, which was, in fact, unusual and of de cided advantage to me. Nothing ever really tired me out. I could perform any of my duties with ease, and none of the men under me ever presumed to question my authority. As harvest came on I took my place on our new Marsh harvester, and bound my half of over one hundred acres of heavy grain. The crop that year was enormous. At times, as I looked out over the billowing acres of wheat which must not only be reaped and bound and shocked and stacked but also threshed, before there was the slightest chance of my returning to the Seminary, my face grew long and my heart heavy. Burton shared this feeling, for he, too, had become profoundly interested in the Seminary and was eager to return, eager to renew the friendships he had gained. We both wished to walk once more beneath the maple trees in clean well-fitting garments, and above all we hungered to escape the curry-comb and the cow. Both of us retained our membership in the Adelphian Debating Society, and occasionally drove to town after the day's work to take part in the Monday meetings. Having decided, definitely, to be an orator, I now went about with a copy of Shakespeare in my pocket and 206 Back to the Farm ranted the immortal soliloquies of Hamlet and Richard as I held the plow, feeling certain that I was following in the footprints of Lincoln and Demosthenes. Sundays brought a special sweet relief that summer, a note of finer poetry into all our lives, for often after a bath behind the barn we put on clean shirts and drove away to Osage to meet George and Mitchell, or went to church to see some of the girls we had admired at the Seminary. On other Sabbaths we returned to our places at the Burr Oak school-house, enjoying as we used to do, a few hours' forgetfulness of the farm. My father, I am glad to say, never insisted upon any religious observance on the part of his sons, and never interfered with any reasonable pleasure even on Sunday. If he made objection to our trips it was usually on behalf of the cattle. "Go where you please/' he often said, "only get back in time to do the milking." Sometimes he would ask, " Don't you think the horses ought to have a rest as well as yourselves? " He was a stern man but a just man, and I am especially grateful to him for his non interference with my religious affairs. All that summer and all the fall I worked like a hired man, assuming in addition the responsibilities of being boss. I bound grain until my arms were raw with briars and in stacking-time I wallowed round and round upon my knees, building great ricks of grain, taking obvious pride in the skill which this task required until my trousers, re-inforced at the knees, bagged ungracefully and my hands, swollen with the act of grappling the heavy bundles as they were thrown to me, grew horny and brown and clumsy, so that I quite despaired of ever being able to write another letter. I was very glad not to have my Seminary friends see me in this unlovely condition. However, I took a well-defined pride in stacking, for 207 A Son of the Middle Border it was a test of skill. It was clean work. Even now, as I ride a country lane, and see men at work handling oats or hay, I recall the pleasurable sides of work on the farm and long to return to it. The radiant sky of August and September on the prairie was a never failing source of delight to me. Na ture seemed resting, opulent, self-satisfied and honorable. Every phase of the landscape indicated a task fulfilled. There were still and pulseless days when slaty-blue clouds piled up in the west and came drifting eastward with thunderous accompaniment, to break the oppres sive heat and leave the earth cool and fresh from having passed. There were misty, windy days when the sound ing, southern breeze swept the yellow stubble like a scythe; when the sky, without a cloud, was whitened by an overspreading haze; when the crickets sang sleepily as if in dream of eternal summer; and the grasshoppers clicked and buzzed from stalk to stalk in pure delight of sunshine and the harvest. Another humbler source of pleasure in stacking was the watermelon which, having been picked in the early morning and hidden under the edge of the stack, re mained deiiciously cool till mid-forenoon, when at a signal, the men all gathered in the shadow of the rick, and leisurely ate their fill of juicy " mountain sweets." Then there was the five o'clock supper, with its milk and doughnuts and pie which sent us back to our task — replete, content, ready for another hour of toil. Of course, there were unpleasant days later in the month, noons when the skies were filled with ragged, swiftly moving clouds, and the winds blew the sheaves inside out and slashed against my face the flying grain as well as the leaping crickets. Such days gave prophecy of the passing of summer and the coming of fall. But 208 Back to the Farm there was a mitigating charm even in these conditions, for they were all welcome promises of an early return to school. Crickets during stacking time were innumerable and voracious as rust or fire. They ate our coats or hats if we left them beside the stack. They gnawed the fork handles and devoured any straps that were left lying about, but their multitudinous song was a beautiful inwrought part of the symphony. That year the threshing was done in the fields with a traction engine. My uncle David came no more to help us harvest. He had almost passed out of our life, and I have no recollection of him till several years later. Much of the charm, the poetry of the old-time threshing vanished with the passing of horse power and the coming of the nomadic hired hand. There was less and less of the "changing works" which used to bring the young men of the farms together. The grain was no longer stacked round the stable. Most of it we threshed in the field and the straw after being spread out upon the stubble was burned. Some farmers threshed directly from the shock, and the new "Vibrator" took the place of the old Buffalo Pitts Separator with its ringing bell- metal pinions. Wheeled plows were common and self- binding harvesters were coming in. Although my laconic little diary does not show it, I was fiercely resolved upon returning to the Seminary. My father was not very sympathetic. In his eyes I al ready had a very good equipment for the battle of life, but mother, with a woman's ready understanding, di vined that I had not merely set my heart on graduating at the Seminary, but that I was secretly dreaming of another and far more romantic career than that of being a farmer. Although a woman of slender schooling herself, she responded helpfully to every effort which 209 A Son of the Middle Border her sons made to raise themselves above the common* place level of neighborhood life. All through the early fall whenever Burton and I met the other boys of a Sunday our talk was sure to fall upon the Seminary, and Burton stoutly declared that he, too, was going to begin in September. As a matter of fact the autumn term opened while we were still hard at work around a threshing machine with no definite hope of release till the plowing and corn-husking were over. Our fathers did not seem to realize that the men of the future (even the farmers of the future) must have a considerable amount of learning and experience, and so October went by and November was well started before parole was granted and we were free to return to our books. With what sense of liberty, of exultation, we took our way down the road on that gorgeous autumn morning ! No more dust, no more grime, no more mud, no more cow milking, no more horse currying! For five months we were to live the lives of scholars, of boarders. — Yes, through some mysterious channel our parents had been brought to the point of engaging lodgings for us in the home of a townsman named Leete. For two dollars a week it was arranged that we could eat and sleep from Monday night to Friday noon, but we were not expected to remain for supper on Friday; and Sunday supper, was of course, extra. I thought this a great deal of money then, but I cannot understand at this distance how our landlady was able to provide, for that sum, the raw material of her kitchen, to say nothing of bed linen and soap. The house, which stood on the edge of the town, was small and without upstairs heat, but it seemed luxurious to me, and the family straightway absorbed my interest. Leete, the nominal head of the establishment, was a 210 Back to the Farm short, gray, lame and rather inefficient man of change able temper who teamed about the streets with a span of roans almost as dour and crippled as himself. His wife, who did nearly all the housework for five boarders as well as for