Part 14 (1/2)

As for Sim, he was a little disturbed, but would as soon have cut off his head as acknowledge himself in the wrong. As he went to bed, and found her still away, he yelled up the stairway:

”Say, o' woman, ain't ye comin' to bed?” Upon receiving no answer he rolled his aching body into the creaking bed. ”Do as y' d.a.m.n please about it. If y' want to sulk y' can.” And in such wise the family grew quiet in sleep, while the moist, warm air pulsed with the ceaseless chime of the crickets.

II.

When Sim Burns woke the next morning he felt a sharper twinge of remorse. It was not a broad or well-defined feeling--just a sense that ho had been unduly irritable, not that on the whole he was not in the right. Little Pet lay with the warm June suns.h.i.+ne filling his baby eyes, curiously content in striking at flies that buzzed around his little mouth.

The man thrust his dirty, naked feet into his huge boots, and, without was.h.i.+ng his face or combing his hair, went out to the barn to do his ch.o.r.es.

He was a type of the average prairie farmer, and his whole surrounding was typical of the time. He had a quarter-section of fine level land, bought with incredible toil, but his house was a little box-like structure, costing, perhaps, five hundred dollars. It had three rooms and the ever-present summer kitchen attached to the back. It was unpainted and had no touch of beauty--a mere box.

His stable was built of slabs and banked and covered with straw. It looked like a den, was low and long, and had but one door in the end.

The cow-yard held ten or fifteen cattle of various kinds, while a few calves were bawling from a pen near by. Behind the barn, on the west and north, was a fringe of willows forming a ”wind-break.” A few broken and discouraged fruit trees standing here and there among the weeds formed the garden. In short, he was spoken of by his neighbors as ”a hard-working cuss, and tol'ably well fixed.”

No grace had come or ever could come into his life. Back of him were generations of men like himself, whose main business had been to work hard, live miserably, and beget children to take their places when they died.

His courts.h.i.+p had been delayed so long on account of poverty that it brought little of humanizing emotion into his life. He never mentioned his love-life now, or if he did, it was only to sneer obscenely at it.

He had long since ceased to kiss his wife or even speak kindly to her.

There was no longer any sanct.i.ty to life or love. He chewed tobacco and toiled on from year to year without any very clearly defined idea of the future. His life was mainly regulated from without.

He was tall, dark and strong, in a flat-chested, slouching sort of way, and had grown neglectful of even decency in his dress. He wore the American farmer's customary outfit of rough brown pants, hickory s.h.i.+rt and greasy wool hat. It differed from his neighbors' mainly in being a little dirtier and more ragged. His grimy hands were broad and strong as the clutch of a bear, and he was a ”terrible feller to turn off work,”

as Councill said. ”I 'druther have Sim Burns work for me one day than some men three. He's a linger.” He worked with unusual speed this morning, and ended by milking all the cows himself as a sort of savage penance for his misdeeds the previous evening, muttering in self-defense:

”Seems 's if ever' cussid thing piles on to me at once. That corn, the road-tax, and hayin' comin' on, and now _she_ gits her back up”----

When he went back to the well he sloshed himself thoroughly in the horse-trough and went to the house. He found breakfast ready, but his wife was not in sight. The older children were clamoring around the uninviting breakfast table, spread with cheap ware and with boiled potatoes and fried salt pork as the princ.i.p.al dishes.

”Where's y'r ma?” he asked, with a threatening note in his voice, as he sat down by the table.

”She's in the bedroom.”

He rose and pushed open the door. The mother sat with the babe in her lap, looking out of the window down across the superb field of timothy, moving like a lake of purple water. She did not look around. She only grew rigid. Her thin neck throbbed with the pulsing of blood to her head.

”What's got into you _now_?” he said, brutally. ”Don't be a fool. Come out and eat breakfast with me, an' take care o' y'r young ones.”

She neither moved nor made a sound. With an oath he turned on his heel and went out to the table. Eating his breakfast in his usual wolfish fas.h.i.+on, he went out into the hot sun with his team and riding-plow, not a little disturbed by this new phase of his wife's ”cantankerousness.”

He plowed steadily and sullenly all the forenoon, in the terrific heat and dust. The air was full of tempestuous threats, still and sultry, one of those days when work is a punishment. When he came in at noon he found things the same--dinner on the table, but his wife out in the garden with the youngest child.

”I c'n stand it as long as _she_ can,” he said to himself, in the hearing of the children, as he pushed back from the table and went back to work.

When he had finished the field of corn it was after sundown, and he came up to the house, hot, dusty, his s.h.i.+rt wringing wet with sweat, and his neck aching with the work of looking down all day at the corn-rows. His mood was still stern. The mult.i.tudinous lift, and stir, and sheen of the wide, green field had been lost upon him.

”I wonder if she's milked them cows,” he muttered to himself. He gave a sigh of relief to find she had. But she had done so not for his sake, but for the sake of the poor, patient dumb brutes.