O Pioneers!: Part I

A mist of fine snowflakes was curling and eddying about the cluster of low drab buildings huddled on the gray prairie, under a gray sky.

The dwelling-houses were set about haphazard on the tough prairie sod; some of them looked as if they had been moved in overnight, and others as if they were straying off by themselves, headed straight for the open plain.

On either side of this road straggled two uneven rows of wooden buildings; the general merchandise stores, the two banks, the drug store, the feed store, the saloon, the post-office.

The girl's lip trembled. She looked fixedly up the bleak street as if she were gathering her strength to face something, as if she were trying with all her might to grasp a situation which, no matter how painful, must be met and dealt with somehow.

There was a delicate pallor in his thin face, and his mouth was too sensitive for a boy's.

His cronies formed a circle about him, admiring and teasing the little girl, who took their jokes with great good nature.

Their volubility drowned every other noise in the place, and the overheated store sounded of their spirited language as it reeked of pipe smoke, damp woolens, and kerosene.

The road led southwest, toward the streak of pale, watery light that glimmered in the leaden sky.

The homesteads were few and far apart; here and there a windmill gaunt against the sky, a sod house crouching in a hollow.

To the south, his plowed fields; to the east, the sod stables, the cattle corral, the pond,—and then the grass.

But this land was an enigma. It was like a horse that no one knows how to break to harness, that runs wild and kicks things to pieces.

Late in life he married a second time, a Stockholm woman of questionable character, much younger than he, who goaded him into every sort of extravagance.

In a few years his unprincipled wife warped the probity of a lifetime.

Alexandra went to the door and beckoned to her brothers, two strapping boys of seventeen and nineteen.

The younger boy was quicker, but vacillating.

Try to break a little more land every year; sod corn is good for fodder.

Mrs. Bergson was a fair-skinned, corpulent woman, heavy and placid like her son, Oscar, but there was something comfortable about her; perhaps it was her own love of comfort.

For eleven years she had worthily striven to maintain some semblance of household order amid conditions that made order very difficult.

Habit was very strong with Mrs. Bergson, and her unremitting efforts to repeat the routine of her old life among new surroundings had done a great deal to keep the family from disintegrating morally and getting careless in their ways.

Alexandra often said that if her mother were cast upon a desert island, she would thank God for her deliverance, make a garden, and find something to preserve.

She made a yellow jam of the insipid ground-cherries that grew on the prairie, flavoring it with lemon peel; and she made a sticky dark conserve of garden tomatoes.

She disapproved of all her neighbors because of their slovenly housekeeping, and the women thought her very proud.

Ivar came running with his white bag, and the moment he got to her she was quiet and let him saw her horn off and daub the place with tar.

The Bergson wagon lurched along over the rough hummocks and grass banks, followed the bottom of winding draws, or skirted the margin of wide lagoons, where the golden coreopsis grew up out of the clear water and the wild ducks rose with a whirr of wings.

Ivar had lived for three years in the clay bank, without defiling the face of nature any more than the coyote that had lived there before him had done.

His shaggy white hair, falling in a thick mane about his ruddy cheeks, made him look older than he was.

He had a peculiar religion of his own and could not get on with any of the denominations.

If one stood in the doorway of his cave, and looked off at the rough land, the smiling sky, the curly grass white in the hot sunlight; if one listened to the rapturous song of the lark, the drumming of the quail, the burr of the locust against that vast silence, one understood what Ivar meant.

He dropped his arms and went up to the wagon, smiling amiably and looking at them out of his pale blue eyes.

“A bad road, eh, girls? And the bay with a colt at home!”

Even Lou, who was more elastic than his older brother, disliked to do anything different from their neighbors. He felt that it made them conspicuous and gave people a chance to talk about them.

Then came the hard times that brought every one on the Divide to the brink of despair; three years of drouth and failure, the last struggle of a wild soil against the encroaching plowshare.

Farmers who were already in debt had to give up their land. A few foreclosures demoralized the county.

“But, Alexandra,” he said sadly and wistfully, “I've never been any real help to you, beyond sometimes trying to keep the boys in a good humor.”

“I'll write as long as I live,” cried the boy impetuously.

But he was as indolent of mind as he was unsparing of his body.

He seemed to feel that by his own irreproachable regularity he would clear himself of blame and reprove the weather.

Her body was in an attitude of perfect repose, such as it was apt to take when she was thinking earnestly.

Her mind was slow, truthful, steadfast.

“You poor boy, you won't have to work it. The men in town who are buying up other people's land don't try to farm it. They are the men to watch, in a new country. Let's try to do like the shrewd ones, and not like these stupid fellows. I don't want you boys always to have to work like this. I want you to be independent, and Emil to go to school.”