Part 17 (1/2)
The biggest brother's attention was given to the bison only an instant.
For a long-horned steer collided with a hind wheel and a horse came das.h.i.+ng against the blue mare. He guided the buckboard nearer the rails to avoid the horse and reached round to hammer with his hat the steer's nose, which was thrust almost against the seat. ”They'll trample us, they'll trample us!” he cried, and he seized the little girl about the shoulders and thrust her in front of him. ”Drive,” he commanded. Then he climbed back over the seat and furiously kicked out at the animals lunging upon the buckboard.
But he could as easily have stopped the pursuing fire, which was in the meadow and was house high; for, with those in the rear pressing them on at every bound, the leaders could not slacken their course. He saw that there was but one thing to be done: increase the speed before the buckboard was run down. ”Oh, why didn't I unhitch?” he cried miserably as he climbed back to the little girl's side.
Forgetful of danger, she was whipping the blue mare with all her strength. The mare was traveling as fast as the herd now, and the station was in sight despite the drifting dust and smoke. Before it lay the black stretch at which the fire must stop, and on which, if the blue mare could be brought to a standstill behind a building or a waiting car, there was succor from death. Yet hope--with the herd upon them and the fire closer, hotter, and deadlier--was almost gone. The biggest brother, in a very final frenzy of desperation, joined his efforts to those of the little girl, and pounded the blue mare and the crowding stock repeatedly with his naked fists.
But suddenly another phase entered into that run for life. The roar behind them became louder, swelled to deafening, surged to their ears like a long, deep boom of thunder. And then, with a shriek that seemed to divide the smoke and dust, the local plunged through the cloud across her track and came even with the blue mare's muzzle.
In that moment, worn with her five miles' gallop, it was the only thing that could have spurred her on. Her eyes were bulging from lack of breath. Her sides, streaked with blood, no longer responded to the scourge of the rein ends. But, with the engine abreast, the desire to worst it, long nurtured by the little girl, set her into a wilder pace.
With a snort, she gathered herself together.
The buckboard, tossing from side to side on the uneven meadow, gained instantly on the herd and pa.s.sed to the front once more. The engine had distanced it, yet the blue mare did not slacken. The biggest brother and the little girl, torn between hope and fear, yelled at her encouragingly. Breathing heavily, she strained every muscle to obey.
Another moment and the engine was on the burnt strip; another, and the last car reached it; a third, and the blue mare's feet struck it, and she scurried into the lee of the depot to let the animals behind her divide and charge by through the town.
THE biggest brother, as soon as the blue mare had been tenderly cared for, hired a livery horse and started homeward. The little girl accompanied him, her face, like his, still streaked with dust and cinders. Neither spoke as the bare, s.m.u.tty meadow was crossed. They only looked ahead to where smoke was rising slowly, ten miles away to the west. They were spent with excitement, but their thoughts were on their mother and brothers, the house surrounded by a straw-strewn yard, the line of stacks behind the barn, the board granaries, the fields dry and ready for the match.
As they drove rapidly along through the sunlight, over the land just scored and torn up by the stampede, they pa.s.sed dead and injured animals that, weaker than the others, had fallen and been trampled and burned.
Few horses and cattle had suffered, but, beginning at the draw, the sheep were pitifully plentiful. Everywhere smoke floated up in tiny threads from smoldering buffalo-chips, and clumps of weeds burned damply, only now and then bursting into flame.
At last, with a shout of joy, the biggest brother made out the farm-house; with an unhappy cry he announced the burning of the stacks.
And when the buckboard came still nearer, they could see that the granaries were gone, and that all the sod buildings were roofless and open to the blurred sky, while on every side--the corn-field alone breaking the vista--lay the blackened fields.
When they drove up, their mother tottered to meet them, and waved one hand heartbrokenly toward the kitchen door, where the eldest and the youngest brothers, exhausted with fighting fire, their faces grimy, their clothing burned to tatters, sat weeping. ”It couldn't have been much worse,” she sobbed, as the biggest brother took her in his arms.
The little girl tumbled from the buckboard and, forgetting their quarrel of the morning, threw her arms around the eldest brother's neck. He bowed his head against her ap.r.o.n, and there was a long silence, interrupted only by sounds of mourning. Then the biggest brother spoke.
”Mother,” he said, patting her shoulder softly, ”we've got the house and the farm left, remember. We've got one another, too.” He paused a moment. Before he spoke again he gave a little laugh, and all looked up at him in surprise. ”What's more,” he went on, ”where's the caterpillars and cuc.u.mber-bugs, and the potato-bugs and cabbage lice? Burned up, slicker 'n a whistle. And mother,” he persisted, holding up her tear-stained face smilingly, ”have you happened to consider that there ain't a blamed gra.s.shopper in a hundred miles?”
XIV
HARD TIMES
THE first deep snow of the winter, dropping gently from a wide, dun sky, rested in white folds on the new straw roofs of the sod buildings, crested the low stacks that had been hauled from distant meadows not swept by the fire, covered the cinder-strewn gaps in the yard where the granaries had stood, and hid under a s.h.i.+ning, jeweled pall the stripped fields and the somber prairie. The little girl's mother, stringing pop-corn in the kitchen for the Christmas tree at the school-house, looked out toward noon to see the farm restored, as if by enchantment, to the aspect of other and happier winters; and sorrowfully welcomed the winding-sheet that gave promise of the coming resurrection, when the gra.s.s and flowers should rise again from out the naked, charred ground, bright and glorious with the fresh-born spring.
It had seemed to her, ever since the terrible holocaust of a few months before, as if the Bad Lands had moved eastward upon them. Yet, however sad was the sight of their loss and the sense of their privation, she counseled against selling out at a small figure and moving to some State where prairie fires were unknown, and bravely determined to stay and fight back to rough comfort and plenty.
”The snow will help us to forget,” she said to the biggest brother, as she took a hot, crammed popper from him and emptied it into a milk-pan.
He nodded in reply, and sprinkled the popper with kernels again, and she went back to her bench, carrying the pan under one arm. They sat without speaking, the click of the needle and the snapping of the corn alone breaking the quiet. When another popper was ready to be turned out, the biggest brother went into the adjoining shed with a wooden bucket and shoveled it full of coal from the ever-lessening pile that had been purchased, like the seed for the coming planting, on the promise of the next year's crop.
As he returned, bending under the weight of the bucket, the door into the entry was shoved slowly open and the little girl entered. She walked forward to lay her mittens on the table before she brushed the snow from her shoulders and leggings and untwisted and shook out her nubia. Her woolen cap was pulled far down over her ears, and her mother, as she watched her, did not see the grave eyes and pensive face until the little girl halted beside the biggest brother's chair to warm her hands at a stove-hole.
”How's the tree?” asked the biggest brother, putting down the bucket and depositing one small lump on the dying coals.
”It's setting in a churn,” replied the little girl, without looking up.
”Is it trimmed?” said her mother.