O Pioneers!: Part V

Ivar was sitting at a cobbler's bench in the barn, mending harness by the light of a lantern and repeating to himself the 101st Psalm.

It was only five o'clock of a mid-October day, but a storm had come up in the afternoon, bringing black clouds, a cold wind and torrents of rain.

The hands, the tongue, the eyes, the heart, all the bodily desires we are commanded to subdue; but the feet are free members.

Groaning and mumbling he led her out of the gate and helped her into the cart, wrapping her in the dry blankets on which he had been sitting.
Alexandra smiled at his solicitude.

When you get so near the dead, they seem more real than the living. Worldly thoughts leave one.

“Mistress,” said Ivar reproachfully, “those are bad thoughts. The dead are in Paradise.”

Ever since she last saw him in the courtroom, Frank's haggard face and wild eyes had haunted her.

Frank had given himself up to the police in Omaha and pleaded guilty of killing without malice and without premeditation.

But the mere fact that she was Shabata's wife, for Alexandra, settled everything. That she was beautiful, impulsive, barely two years older than Emil, these facts had had no weight with Alexandra. Emil was a good boy, and only bad boys ran after married women.

“I'm awfully sorry,” he said in a bright, clear voice, with a rising inflection, as if he expected her to say something.

The warden listened genially while she told him briefly something of Frank's history and character, but he did not seem to find anything unusual in her account.

The warden paused at the door, speaking back over his shoulder to a pale young man in convicts' clothes who was seated at a desk in the corner, writing in a big ledger.

He glanced at Alexandra sullenly, blinked as if he had come from a dark place, and one eyebrow twitched continually.

She felt at once that this interview was a terrible ordeal to him.

His shaved head, showing the conformation of his skull, gave him a criminal look which he had not had during the trial.

He dropped into a chair and sat looking stolidly at the floor, his hands hanging loosely between his knees, the handkerchief lying across his striped leg.

His soft, lustrous black eyes, his whimsical smile, would be less against him in the Klondike than on the Divide.

“My dear, it was something one felt in the air, as you feel the spring coming, or a storm in summer. I didn't SEE anything. Simply, when I was with those two young things, I felt my blood go quicker, I felt—how shall I say it?—an acceleration of life. After I got away, it was all too delicate, too intangible, to write about.”

I try to be more liberal about such things than I used to be. I try to realize that we are not all made alike.

She was still gazing into the west, and in her face there was that exalted serenity that sometimes came to her at moments of deep feeling.