Part 9 (1/2)
”Wal, she ain't far away but we can look out for her. She ain't poor n'r fatherless as long as we live, hey?”
And then silence fell on them. As they were jogging homeward they saw the gray gulls rise from the sod and go home to the lake for the night.
They heard the crickets' evening chorus broaden and deepen to an endless and monotonous symphony, while behind fantastic, thin, and rainless clouds the sun sank in unspeakable glory of colour. The air, perfectly still, was cool almost to frostiness, and, far above, the fair stars broke from the lilac and gold of the sun-flushed sky. Lights in the farm-houses began to appear.
Once or twice Anson said: ”She's about at Summit now. I hope she's chirked up.”
They met thres.h.i.+ng-crews going noisily home to supper. Once they met an ”outfit,” engine, tank, separator, all moving along like a train of cars, while every few minutes the red light from the furnace gleamed on the man who was stuffing the straw into the furnace-door, bringing out his face so plainly that they knew him. As the night grew deeper, an occasional owl flapped across the fields in search of mice.
”We're bound to miss her like thunder, Bert; no two ways about that.
Can't help but miss her on the cookin', hey?”
Bert nodded without looking up. As they came in sight of home at last, and saw the house silhouetted against the faintly yellow sky, Ans said with a sigh:
”No light an' no singin' there to-night.”
CHAPTER IX.
”BACHING” IT AGAIN.
”The fact is, Flaxen has sp'iled us,” laughed Anson, a couple of days later, when Bert was cursing the soggy biscuit. ”We've got so high-toned that we can't stand common cookin'. Time was we'd 'a'
thought ourselves lucky to git as good as that. Rec'lect them flapjacks we ust to make? By mighty! you could shoe a horse with 'em. Say, I wish I could jest slip in an' see what she's a-doin' about now, hey?”
”She's probably writin' a letter. She won't do much of anythin' else for the first week.”
”I hope you're right,” said Anson.
They got a queer little letter every Wednesday, each one for several weeks pitifully like the others.
Dear boys i thought i would take my pen in hand to tell you i dont like it one bit the school is just as mene as it can be the girls do laugh at me they call me toe-head. if i catch em right i will fix their heads. They is one girl who i like she is from pipestone she dont know no moren i do she says my dress is pritty--ol nig an the drake all rite i wish i was home. ELGA.
The wish to be home was in all these letters like a sob. The men read them over carefully and gravely, and finally Anson would put them away in the Bible (bought on Flaxen's account) for safe-keeping.
As the letters improved in form their exultation increased.
”Say, Bert, don't you notice she writes better now? She makes big I's now in place o' little ones. Seems 's if she runs the sentence all together, though.”
”She'll come out all right. You see, she goes into the preparatory department, where they teach writin' an' spellin'. You'll see her hand improve right along now.”
And it did, and she ceased to wail for home and ceased to say that she hated her studies.
”I am getting along splendid,” she wrote some weeks after this. ”I like my teacher; her name is Holt. She is just as nice as she can be. She is cousin to the one who came with me; I live with her uncle, and I can go to sos.h.i.+bles whenever I want to; but the other girls cant. I am feeling pretty good, but I wish you boys was here.”
She did not wish to be at home this time!
Winter shut down on the broad land again with that implacable, remorseless brilliancy of fierce cold which characterises the northern plain, stopping work on the farm and bolting all doors. Hardly a day that the sun did not s.h.i.+ne; but the light was hard, white, glittering, and cold, the winds treacherous, the snow wild and restless. There was now comparatively little danger of being lost even in the fiercest storms, but still life in one of these little cabins had an isolation almost as terrible as that of a s.h.i.+p wedged amid the ice-floes of the polar regions.
Day after day rising to feed the cattle, night after night bending over the sooty stove listening to the ceaseless voice of the wind as it beat and brushed, whispered, moaned, and piped or screamed around the windows and eaves--this was their life, varied with an occasional visit to the store or the post-office, or by the call of a neighbour. It is easy to conceive that Flaxen's bright letters were like bursts of bird-song in their loneliness. Many of the young men, their neighbours, went back East to spend the winter--back to Michigan, Iowa, New York, or elsewhere.
”Ans, why don't you go back an' visit your folks?” asked Bert, one day.