A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      A Lantern in her Hand (1928)
Author:     Bess Streeter Aldrich, 1881-1954
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Language:   English
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Title:      A Lantern in her Hand (1928)
Author:     Bess Streeter Aldrich, 1881-1954





Because the road was steep and long,
And through a dark and lonely land,
God set upon my lips a song
And put a lantern in my hand.

JOYCE KILMER




THE STORY BEHIND A LANTERN IN HER HAND

By Bess Streeter Aldrich


When the editor of Christian Herald asked me to write the story
behind the story of "A Lantern in Her Hand," it seemed an easy
assignment.  Here at my desk several weeks later the task does not
look so simple.  For the roots of a writer's work in creating
characters often go deep into the garden soil of his own life.  So
the article must contain something of my childhood, for it was then
that I began, all unconsciously, to gather material for this book.

The child of middle-aged parents, I was the last of a family of
eight, born after they had moved from their Iowa farm into the
college town of Cedar Falls, so I was not a farm child and never
knew at first hand any of the experiences in the story.  There was
a great deal of talk and laughter in that childhood home, for many
relatives were always coming and going, uncles and aunts who had
been sturdy pioneers there on the Cedar River when the state was
new.

My grandfather, Zimri Streeter, had arrived in Blackhawk County
with his big family in 1852, when there was no railroad west of the
Mississippi and the crossing of the river was made by ferry boat.
He built a sturdy log cabin, sheltered his neighbors during an
Indian scare or two, and turned the virgin sod.  Dipping into the
politics of the new county, he was elected to the first legislature
after the capital was moved from its territorial status in Iowa
City to the little new Des Moines.  Because of his dry wit he was
called "the wag of the House," and undoubtedly he was a
reactionary, for there is an old letter still in existence which
says he believes he "did more settin' on unwise measures than
anybody in the House."

A dozen years later, at the time of the second Lincoln election, he
was appointed by Governor Kirkwood to go down into Georgia and
bring back the Iowa soldiers' votes.  He was sixty-four years old
then, and when he got back to Atlanta he found the city burning,
all communication to the north severed, and he had to march along
with Sherman to the sea.  There is a story to the effect that in
all the hardships he had to undergo, sometimes foraging for food
from the fields, his only complaint when he got back was that he
had lost his hat.

All these tales of hardy old Zimri floated around my childish ears
whenever his rather garrulous clan got together.

Mother's family came to the county two years later than father's
people.  At eighteen she drove one of the teams all the way out
from Illinois.  Sometimes she would recall the scenes of that trip:
the ferrying across the Mississippi, the horses and oxen plunging
up and down the bridgeless creekbeds, the tipping over of one of
the wagons with the eight precious sacks of flour slipping into the
water and the feather pillows floating down stream like so many
geese, while the younger children chased after them with hilarious
laughter.  She would tell the happenings merrily as though there
had been no hardships at all.  The camping on the edge of the
woods, the sounds of the night winds, the odors of the prairie
grass--all these she pictured so clearly that I could almost see
and hear and smell them myself.

So the pictures she drew for me verbally became a part of my
knowledge, even though they had happened so many years before I was
born.  And with no possible foresight on my part of how they were
to be used one day in stories, they seemed to belong in my own
memories.

Mother was a high-minded woman, a lover of good literature even
though her own schooling had ended in a log schoolhouse.  She was a
person who found joy in little things--to whom a cloud floating
across the blue was a poem--to whom the twilight chirp of robins
was a prayer.  In those early days of hard work after starting the
new home with my father, she must have been torn between her love
of the finer things of life and the menial tasks her hands were
forced to do.  And being so torn, she did what many another pioneer
woman did: she lifted her eyes to the hills while her hands
performed their humble labors.

When she was in her eighties, she once related some pioneer
experiences about the snow sifting through the chinks of the cabin
and making grotesque figures on the bed quilts.  In a moment of
sympathy I remarked that we daughters were sorry her life had been
hard in her pioneering days, that it seemed unfair that we now
should live in an easier era with all its modern conveniences.  She
looked at me with an odd little expression and said:  "Oh, save
your pity.  We had the best time in the world."

I thought of it many times after she was gone--that I would like to
do a story of that type of woman.  Other writers had depicted the
Midwest's early days, but so often they had pictured their women as
gaunt, browbeaten creatures, despairing women whom life seemed to
defeat.  That was not my mother.  Not with her courage, her humor,
her nature that would cause her to say at the end of a long life:
"We had the best time in the world."

So my desire was first, to catch in the pages of a book the spirit
of such a woman, and second, historical accuracy.  Almost before
the outline of the book was formulated, I named this main character
Abbie Deal, a name which seemed from the first to fit her.  The
fictitious character, Abbie Deal, might have lived anywhere.  She
might have traveled into the Mohawk Valley in another era.  She
might have gone with her husband into the wheatlands of Dakota,
onto a Montana ranch, into the orchard country of the Northwest.
But the natural choice of settings was the Iowa and Nebraska
backgrounds known to me.

Probably the question most often put to me in the twenty- three
years since Abbie Deal was pictured in "A Lantern In Her Hand" has
been, "Was she your own mother?"  The answer is yes and no.  With
all the above introduction to my mother's character, it is easy to
see that she was with me in spirit all of the time I was at work.
But in the physical realm, that pioneering in Nebraska, she was not
Abbie Deal.  For mother never came to Nebraska until she was in her
seventies, when she moved here with us to live out her days.  And
as I never lived in Nebraska until after my marriage, whatever
knowledge I have of the pioneer days has been obtained from old
people who did live there in an earlier day.  Some of them were
still living when the book was written, none of those who helped me
are now alive.  It was only the authentic historical material that
I lacked for the story, as those childhood memories of my own hardy
forebears gave the keys to the pioneer character.

Three books of mine had been published previously and I was under
contract to my publishers for another one when I came to the
decision to do that pioneer mother story which had been dormant in
my mind for so long.  Because one of the previous books, "The Rim
of the Prairie," had pictured a pioneer couple among its cast of
characters, the editor of the Nebraska State Journal asked me to
give a talk over the radio on "The Pioneer in Fiction."  Twenty-
five years ago that was something of a pioneering event in itself,
and I remember how my family all trailed over to a neighbor
doctor's home to hear me, his radio being the only one in town.  At
the close of that rather nervous talk into the unfamiliar
mechanism, I asked all those listening who had any anecdotes
concerning the early days here in Nebraska, and who were interested
in having them incorporated into a novel, to send them to my home.
Expecting perhaps a half dozen or so responses, I was amazed to see
the letters, newspaper clippings, scrapbooks, and diaries which
almost swamped me.  In addition to this, there were the interviews
with many old people closer at hand.

For fourteen months I worked among that material sent me and the
notes from the interviews, the actual writing took only five
months.  The necessity for the lengthy preparation was the rambling
nature of those letters and interviews, as they jumped blithely
from one subject to another and one year to another without regard
to sequence of events, making one huge jigsaw puzzle.  So it took
that long to prepare anecdotes and events in their correct
succession of time.  So thorough had been this sorting into
containers for each year of the story that when the actual writing
began I could pick up any chapter and work on it, be it fourteen,
five or eleven.  A certain reward for this rather painstaking
process is the fact that the book has been used for years as
supplementary reading in history classes, through an educational
edition with questions at the end of chapters.

"A Lantern in Her Hand" was written to please no one but my own
consciousness of the character of many of those pioneer mothers.
It was written in the so-called "mad twenties" when most of the
best-selling books were about sophistication, flaming youth, or far-
flung countries.  There was some youth in it, but not of the
flaming type.  There was no sophistication, for Abbie Deal was of
the soil.  There was not even diversity of scene, for Abbie was
only a homemaker.

"Lantern" seemed destined to be lost in the wave of the popular
type of the times.  That it has made new friends each year since
that day might be a bit of a lesson for young writers.  _Regardless
of the popular literary trend of the times, write the thing which
lies close to your heart._




INTRODUCTION


Cedartown sits beside a great highway which was once a buffalo
trail.  If you start in one direction on the highway--and travel
far enough--you will come to the effete east.  If you start in the
opposite direction--and travel a few hundred miles farther--you
will come to the distinctive west.  Cedartown is neither effete nor
distinctive, nor is it even particularly pleasing to the passing
tourist.  It is beautiful only in the eyes of those who live here
and in the memories of the Nebraska-born whose dwelling in far
places has given them moments of homesickness for the low rolling
hills, the swell and dip of the ripening wheat, the fields of
sinuously waving corn and the elusively fragrant odor of alfalfa.

There are weeks when drifting snow and sullen sleet hold the
Cedartown community in their bitter grasp.  There are times when
hot winds come out of the southwest and parch it with their
feverish breath.  There are periods of monotonous drouth and
periods of dreary rain; but between these onslaughts there are days
so perfect, so filled with clover odors and the rich, pungent smell
of newly turned loam, so sumac-laden and apple-burdened, that to
the prairie-born there are no others as lovely by mountain or lake
or sea.

The paved streets of Cedartown lie primly parallel over the
obliterated tracks of the buffalo.  The substantial buildings of
Cedartown stand smartly over the dead ashes of Indian campfires.
There are very few people left now in the community who have seen
the transition,--who have witnessed the westward trek of the last
buffalo, the flicker of the last burnt-out ember.

Old Abbie Deal was one of these.

Just outside the corporate limits of Cedartown stands the old Deal
home.  It was once a farm-house, but the acreage around it has been
sold, and Cedartown has grown out to meet it, so that a newcomer
could not know where the town ceased and the country began.

The house stands well back from the road in a big yard with a long
double row of cedars connecting the formal parlor entrance and the
small front gate.  However, in the days when the Deals lived there,
scarcely any one used the little gate, or walked up the grassy path
between the cedars.  All comers chose to enter by the wide carriage-
gate standing hospitably open and beckoning a welcome to the lane
road which runs past a row of Lombardy poplars to the sitting-room
porch.

The house itself is without distinction.  There were no architects
in the community when the first of its rooms were built.  "We'll
have the living-room there and the kitchen here," one told old Asy
Drumm.  And old Asy, with few comments and much tobacco-chewing,
placed the living-room there and the kitchen here.  The result was
weatherproof, sturdy and artless.  When the country was new, homes,
like dresses, were constructed more for wearing qualities than
beauty.

Twice, onto the first wing-and-ell, old Asy, a little more glum and
tobacco-stained, added a room, until the house had attained its
present form.  That form, now, is not unlike an aeroplane which has
settled down between the cedars at the front and the cottonwood
wind-break in the rear.  The parlor, protruding toward the road,
might contain the engine.  The sitting-room to the left and a
bedroom to the right seem the wings, while the dining-room,
kitchen, and a summer kitchen beyond, trail out like the long tail
of the thing.  If one's imagination is keen he can even fancy that
the fan-shaped colored-glass window in the parlor may some day
begin to whirl, propeller-like, and the whole house rise up over
the cedars.

The interior of the house, during Abbie Deal's lifetime, was a
combination of old-fashioned things which she had accumulated
through the years, and modern new ones which the grown children had
given her.  A dull-finished, beautifully-proportioned radio cabinet
stood opposite a homemade, rudely painted what-not.  A kitchen
table, with a little declivity in one corner, in which old Doc
Matthews had rolled pills in Civil War times, stood near a white
enameled case which was the last word in refrigeration.  A little
crude oil-painting of a prairie sunset, which Abbie Deal had done
in the 'seventies, hung across the room from a really exquisite
study of the same subject, which a daughter, Mrs. Frederick
Hamilton Baker, had done forty years later.

Abbie Deal kept everything that had ever come into the house.
Every nail, every button, every string, was carefully hoarded.
"This would make a strong bottom for one of the kitchen chairs some
day," old Abbie Deal would say, when in truth the bottom of the
chair was as strong as its legs.  Or, "Save those stubs of candles
from the Christmas tree.  I can melt them and run them into one big
one."  The characteristic was a hang-over from the lean and frugal
days when the country was new, when every tiny thing had its use.
As a consequence, there was in the house the flotsam of all the
years.

One of the daughters, Mrs. Harrison Scannell Rhodes, on her annual
visit out from Chicago, protested once:  "Mother, if the house only
represented some one PERIOD!  But it's such a jumbled combination
of things.  They're not antique.  They're just OLD."

"And why should it?"  Old lady Deal flared up a little.  "I'M no
one period.  I've lived with spinning-wheels and telephones . . .
with tallow-dips and electric lights.  I'M not antique.  I'm just
OLD.  It represents ME, doesn't it?"

You will infer from the retort that old Abbie Deal was a strong
personality.  And you will be quite right.  The fact that she lived
there in the old home until her eightieth year, over the protests
of children and grandchildren, attested to that.  At the time she
was seventy, they began trying to pry her away from "The Cedars."
They talked over various plans for her--that she should go to Omaha
to live with Mack,--to Lincoln to live with Margaret,--that she
should have rooms at John's right there in Cedartown,--that Grace
should give up her teaching in Wesleyan University temporarily and
stay at home.  When they had quite definitely decided on the
Lincoln home with Margaret, old Abbie Deal spoke.  "I will do
nothing of the kind," she said with finality.  "I am going to stay
right here.  And kindly let me alone.  Because a woman is old, has
she no rights?"

After that they did not press the matter.  They "let her alone,"
but they drove in frequently, for only the Chicago daughter lived
far away.  Sometimes, on Sundays, the lane road contained a half
dozen high-powered cars parked there through the dinner hour and
the afternoon.  But not one son or daughter could ever become
reconciled to the idea of driving away and leaving her there.

"When I think of fire . . ." one of them would say.

"Or of her getting sick in the night . . ."

"Or falling . . . and no one to help her . . ."

"Or any one of a dozen things . . ."

"Yes . . . something will happen to Mother some day."

And they were quite right.  Something happened to Mother.  Last
July on a late afternoon, while suppers cooked and children of the
north end of town played "Run, Sheep, Run," in her yard, old lady
Deal died.  A neighbor woman found her lying across the foot of the
bed, fully dressed, while the slice of meat which she had been
cooking, burned to a crisp.

Of the five middle-aged children, seven grandchildren and three
great-grandchildren, not one was with her.  They all came hastily
in response to the messages.  Within two hours' time, a shining
limousine, two big sedans, and a roadster all stood in the lane
road.  For the first time, when the cars turned into the driveway
by the Lombardy poplars, no little old white-haired woman with
bright brown eyes, had come hurrying out to give cheery greeting.
That queer, solemn hush of death hung over the whole place.  It was
in the quivering droop of the cottonwoods,--in the deepening of the
prairie twilight,--in the silence of the star-filled summer sky.

They all gathered in the parlor with its modern radio and its old-
fashioned what-not, its elaborate new floor-lamp and its crude oil-
painting.  All of the children and several of the grandchildren
were there.  Mackenzie Deal, the Omaha banker, was there.  John
Deal, the Cedartown attorney and state legislator, was there.  Mrs.
Harrison Scannell Rhodes of Chicago, who had been visiting in
Omaha, was there.  Mrs. Frederick Hamilton Baker, of Lincoln, and
Miss Grace Deal, of Wesleyan University, were there.  They
were people of poise, men and women not given to hysterical
demonstration, but at the first gathering they all broke down.  For
a brief quarter of an hour there in the old parlor with its
familiar objects, they let their grief have sway.  For a little
while there in the farm-home of their youth, they were but children
whose mother had left them lonely when night was coming on.

When they had pulled themselves together, their greatest grief
seemed to be that she died alone.  In deepest remorse they blamed
themselves.  Standing there together in common sorrow, they said
the same things over and over to each other:

"Didn't she seem as well as ever to you last week?"

"I'll never forgive myself that I played bridge all afternoon."

"Do you suppose she suffered much?"

"Or called for us?"

"Isn't it DREADFUL?  Poor Mother!  So many of us . . . and not one
of us here just when she needed us . . . and after all she's done
for us."

Only one,--Laura Deal,--a twelve-year-old granddaughter, turned
away from the window where she had been looking down the long
double row of cedars, and said in a clear, steady voice:  "_I_
don't think it was so dreadful.  I think it was kind of nice.
Maybe she didn't miss you."  She looked slowly around the circle of
her elders.  "When you stop to think about it, maybe she didn't
miss you AT ALL.  One time Grandma told me she was the very
happiest when she was living over all her memories.  Maybe . . ."
She hesitated, a little shy at expressing the thought in her heart,
"Maybe she was doing that . . . THEN."


This is the story of the old lady who died while the meat burned
and the children played "Run, Sheep, Run," across her yard.



CHAPTER I


Abbie Mackenzie was old Abbie Deal's maiden name.  And because the
first eight years of her life were interesting only to her family,
we shall skip over them as lightly as Abbie herself used to skip a
hoop on the high, crack-filled sidewalks in the little village of
Chicago, which stood at the side of a lake where the bulrushes
grew.

We find her then, at eight, in the year 1854, camping at night on
the edge of some timberland just off the beaten trail between
Dubuque and the new home in Blackhawk County, Iowa, to which the
little family was bound.

Abbie and a big sister of fifteen, Isabelle, were curled up
together under two old patchwork quilts in one of the wagons.
Another sister, Mary, and a little brother, Basil, were in the
other wagon with their mother.  Sixteen-year-old James and eleven-
year-old Dennie, the men of the party, were sleeping near the oxen,
so that the warmth of the animals' bodies would keep them warm.

Because she had propped up a small section of the wagon's canvas
cover, Abbie could see out into the night.  The darkness was a
heavy, animate thing.  It hung thickly about the wagon, vaguely
weird, remotely fearsome.  It seemed to see and hear and feel.  It
looked at Abbie with its stars, heard her whispered words with its
tree-leaves, felt of her warm little body with its cool breeze
fingers.  Something about the queer closeness of it almost
frightened her.  Something about the hushed silence of it made her
think of her father who had died two years before.  She summoned a
picture of him into her mind, now,--recalling the paleness of his
long, thin face, the neatness of his neckcloth, the gentle courtesy
of his manner.  Thinking of him so, she punched Isabelle with an
active elbow.  "Belle, tell me about Father and Mother."

The big girl was a little impatient.  "I've told you everything I
remember."

"Tell it again."

"I should think you'd get tired of hearing the same thing."

"Oh, I NEVER do."

"Well . . . Father were what they call an aristocrat.  He lived in
Aberdeen, Scotland, and his folks, the Mackenzies, had a town house
and two country houses.  He belonged to the landed gentry."

"What's landed gentry?"

"It means he were a gentleman and didn't have to work."

"Will James and Dennie be gentlemen?"

"Of course not.  We lost all our money."

"Tell how we lost it."  Abbie settled herself with complacence.
There was an element of satisfaction in having had such a foreign
substance at one time, even if it was long before her birth.

"Well . . . Father were a young man and never had to do nothing but
enjoy hisself, and he were out one day following the hare and
hounds . . ."

"Tell about that."

"That's hunting . . . a pack of hounds after a rabbit . . . and he
got away from the rest of them and were lost."

"The rabbit?"

"No, dunce-cap, . . . you know I mean father.  And he come to a
peasant's cottage."

"What's peasant?"

"Awful poor people that have to work.  But don't stop me every
minute.  I always forget where I were.  Well . . . and he wanted a
drink.  And a sixteen-year-old peasant girl come out of the house.
They were Irish, but I guess they were working for some folks in
Scotland.  Anyway it were Mother and she got a drink for him . . .
were pulling up the rope and he took the rope and pulled it
up hisself.  Just think!  A GENTLEMAN . . . and Mother were
sixteen . . . just ONE year older than me.  Abbie, do you suppose
there'll be an aristocratic landed gentleman out in Blackhawk County
where we're going?"

"No . . . I don't think so.  Go on."

"Well, Mother were pretty . . . Irish girls about ALWAYS are . . .
and there were a rosebush and Father asked her for a rose and she
pulled one for him.  Abbie, don't you tell anybody, but I've got a
little rosebush done up in a wet rag in the wagon and I'm going to
plant it out in Blackhawk County."

"Ho!  Ho!  It takes years and years for a rosebush to grow big
enough to have flowers to pull off for a-RIS . . . for a-RIST . . .
for gentlemen.  Go on."

"Anyway, Father took his rose and went away and the next day he
come back."

"Were he lost again?"

"No, dunce-cap!  He come back to see Mother a-purpose.  And he come
other days, even after that, and they would walk over the heather
hills together."

"What's feather hills?"

"Not feather!  HEATHER! . . .  a little kind of weedy grass.  And
all the neighbors shook their heads and said they'd seen THAT thing
happen before from the gentry . . . and . . ." Isabelle whispered
solemnly, "NO GOOD EVER COME OF IT."

"What did they say that for?"

"I can't tell you now.  You wouldn't understand.  When you're as
old as me, you will.  But just the same, Father DID marry her and
took her to Aberdeen to the big Mackenzie house.  Mother wore her
best dress and her best head-shawl, but even then, all fixed up
that nice way, the Mackenzies didn't like her.  Father's mother
were Isabelle Anders-Mackenzie and she were awful proud and I hate
her for not liking Mother.  I hate her so bad that I'm sorry I'm
named for her.  If Mother would let me, I'd change it to Rosamond.
I read about a Rosamond and she . . ."

"Go on about her . . . not YOU."

"Well . . . she were ashamed of Mother, but she had to take her in
because she were Father's wife, and she dressed her up grand and
tried to make her different.  But when Mother would go back to see
her folks, she'd put on her peasant dress and wear her shawl on her
head and slip away.  And Sundays when the Mackenzies would go to
the kirk . . ."

"What's kirk?"

"Church.  Where were I?  Oh . . . the aristocrats set down below
and the peasants all set up in the loft . . ."

"Like a hay loft?"

"No.  Stop interrupting, or I won't tell you one thing more.  And
Mother wouldn't leave her folks, the O'C'onners, so Father went and
set with them and the Mackenzies were just SICK with shame.  Then
Grandfather Mackenzie died, and a long time afterward . . . after
Janet and James and Mary and Dennie and I were all born,
Grandmother Isabelle Anders-Mackenzie . . ."

"I just ADMIRE to hear that name . . ."

"There you go again.  Now I'm through telling it."

"Please . . . I won't stop you again."

"Well. . . .  Grandmother died, too.  Then Father come to America
on a sailing vessel, just for a pleasure trip, and he were gone so
long and folks thought he weren't coming back at all . . . and
Mother cried something terrible . . . and Father had signed a note
for a man . . ."

"What's signed a . . . ?  Oh, . . . go on."

"And it made him lose all his money.  Men come and put cards up on
the house and stables while he were gone and the signs said there
were going to be a roup there."

"What's . . . ?  Go on."

"A roup's an auction sale.  There were fifteen saddle-horses in the
stables, but after the roup cards went up Mother were not allowed
to touch one on account of the law, and so her and James and Janet
walked twenty-seven miles to have her father and mother come and
bid in some of her things.  She's got 'em yet in that little
wooden chest with calf-skin all over it.  It's in the other wagon
and I know just what's in it because I saw 'em.  There's a white
silk shawl with big solid roses in the corners . . . all FOUR
corners . . . and a jeweled fan . . . and a breastpin with lavender
sets and a string of pearls.  There are just as many things as there
are girls in our family and Mother says each girl are to have one
for a keepsake.  I know which one I want . . . the silk shawl.  I
tried it on once when Mother were gone and I looked a lot like the
painting of Isabelle Anders-Mackenzie that hung up on the landing of
the stairway in the great hall.  Course, you understand, Abbie, I
never said I hated her LOOKS . . ."

"Which one is Mother going to give me?"

"I don't know.  She aren't going to give 'em to us until our
wedding days.  Of course, Janet didn't get hers on HER wedding day
because she got married out here in Blackhawk County before we
come, but Mother'll give it to her to-morrow when we get there."

"Go on . . . you're forgetting the end of the story."

"Oh, well, you know it anyway.  When Father got back to Liverpool
he heard all about the money and the property being lost, and the
things being sold, and he never even went to Aberdeen but sent for
Mother and all five of us children to come to Liverpool and we
all crossed the ocean.  I were seven and I can remember just as
well . . . and when we got to New York, you were born."

Abbie breathed a sigh of relief.  It was a welcome respite after a
narrow escape.  With every telling of the story, almost it seemed
for a time that she was not to be born.

"Now tell about the painting of Isabelle Anders-Mackenzie that hung
on the landing of the stairway in the great hall."  Abbie rolled
the magic words from her lips in delicious anticipation.  This was
the part she liked the best of all.

"Well . . . it were beauteous.  It were in a great heavy gold
frame . . . and as big as life.  I can remember it just as well.
In the picture she were young, you know . . ."

"And beautiful . . ." prompted Abbie.

"And beautiful.  She had reddish-brown hair like yours . . . and
she were standing by a kind-of . . . a table-thing, and she had on
a velvet dress that swept down and around her . . . and she had a
hat in her hand with a plume . . ."

"A flowing white plume . . ." corrected Abbie.

"A flowing white plume," repeated the more matter-of-fact Isabelle.
"And she had pretty hands and long slender fingers that tapered at
the ends."

Abbie held her hands up to the opening of the canvas on the wagon
and peered at them in the moonlight.  The fingers were long and
slender and they tapered at the ends.  She sighed with satisfaction,
and slipped them under the old patched quilt.

"And nobody knows what become of the picture?"  It was half
statement, half question, as though from the vast fund of
information which Isabelle possessed, she might, some day, suddenly
remember what had become of the picture.

"No.  It were sold at the roup.  I don't know who got it."

Abbie sighed again, but not with satisfaction.  Of all the
beautiful things that were sold, she felt that she could have
missed seeing any of them with better grace than the portrait.  In
her immature way, she resented the sale more than any other thing,--
the passing of the lovely lady into other hands.  Jewels, money,
furniture,--they seemed lifeless, inanimate things beside the
picture of the woman who was flesh of her flesh.  It ought to have
been saved.  It was their own grandmother who stood there forever
inside the heavy gold frame, in the dark velvet dress that swept
around her,--and with the flowing white plume--and the long slender
fingers that tapered at the ends.

"Well, I wish we had it here with us, Belle.  We could have it all
wrapped up in quilts in the wagon . . . and then some day out in
Blackhawk County when we get rich, we could build us a grand
house with a wide curving stairway and hang the picture on the
landing . . . and everybody that come . . ."

"Abbie!  Belle!"  A voice came suddenly from the other wagon.
"Sure 'n' you're the talkers.  Settle yoursel's now.  We want to
get a good early start by sunup."

Abbie started.  From a dreamy journey into the fields of romance
she had been drawn back to the prosaic world of reality by her
mother's voice.  She could not quite reconcile good fat Mother with
the romantic figure of the pretty girl at the well, picking a rose
for an aristocratic gentleman.  But then, Mother was almost an old
woman, now,--thirty-seven.

Abbie turned to the opening in the canvas cover and looked out
again at the night.  Yellow-white, the moon rose higher over the
dark clumps of trees.  A thousand stars, looking down, paled at its
rising.  An owl gave its mournful call.  The smell of burning maple
boughs came from the fire.  A wolf howled in the distance so that
James got up and took out the other gun from the wagon.  There was
a constant tick-tacking in the timber,--all the little night
creatures at their work.  It was queer how it all hurt you,--how
the odor of the night, the silver sheen of the moon, the moist
feeling of the dew, the whispering of the night breeze, how,
somewhere down in your throat it hurt you.  It was sad, too, that
this evening would never come again.  The night winds were blowing
it away.  You could not stop the winds and you could not stop Time.
It went on and on,--and on.  To-morrow night would come and the
moon would look down on this same spot,--the trees and the grass,
the wagon-tracks and the dead campfire.  But she would not be here.
Her heart swelled with an emotion which she could not name.  Tears
came to her eyes.  The telling of the story always brought that
same feeling.

"Isabelle Anders-Mackenzie," she said it over until it took upon
itself the cadence of a melody, the rhythm of a poem.  "I shall be
like her," she thought.  "I have hair like her now and hands like
her.  I shall be lovely.  And I shall do wonderful things . . .
sing before big audiences and paint pictures inside of gold frames
and write things in a book."  She wondered how you got things put
in a book.  There were some books in one of the wooden chests
over in the other wagon.  A man with a long name that began
S-h-a-k-e-s . . . had made some of them.  They had been Father's.
Mother didn't read them.  She didn't read anything but her Bible.
Even that was hard for her, so that she read the same verses over
and over.  Yes, she would be like Father and Isabelle Anders-
Mackenzie, not like Mother's family with their cottage on the side
of the hill and their dark shawls over their heads.  She would be
rich and lovely . . . with a velvet dress and a long sweeping
plume . . . under the moon . . . and the night wind, . . . that felt
of your body with its long . . . slender fingers . . . that tapered
at the ends . . .

Abbie Mackenzie slept,--little Abbie Mackenzie, with the mixture of
the two strains of blood,--with the stout body of the O'Conners and
the slender hands of the Mackenzies,--with the O'Conner sturdiness
and the Mackenzie refinement.  And she is to need them both,--the
physical attributes of the peasant and the mental ones of the
aristocrat,--the warm heart of the Irish and the steadfastness of
the Scotch.  Yes, Abbie Mackenzie is to need them both in the
eighty years she is to live,--courage and love,--a song upon her
lips and a lantern in her hand.



CHAPTER II


The sun, shining through the propped-up canvas of the wagon,
wakened Abbie.  Wide-eyed, she looked out through the aperture upon
the same setting of the night before.  But now it was changed.  The
child lived a life in each of two distinct worlds and it is not
possible to say which one she most enjoyed.  One of them was made
of moonbeams and star-dust, of night winds and cloud fancies, of
aristocratic gentlemen and lovely ladies.  The other was the
equally pleasant one of boiled potatoes and salt pork, of games
with Basil and Mary, of riding a-top old Buck or picking wild
flowers at the edge of the timber.

Just now the prosaic world of everyday seemed the more attractive
of the two.  James had replenished the night fire and Mother was
cooking breakfast, with the odor of frying pork and corn-cakes
strong on the air.  The team of horses and the oxen were eating
close by, the horses guzzling their grain noisily, the oxen chewing
slowly and stolidly.

Maggie O'Conner Mackenzie was a heavy, dumpy woman, her body the
shape of a pudding-bag tied in the middle.  One shawl was wrapped
around the shapeless figure and a smaller one, over her head, was
knotted under her fat chin.  Strands of heavy black hair showed
around the edges of the head-shawl, and the face enclosed in its
folds was round and smooth, fat and placid.  Only her dark Irish
eyes, the color of the blue-black waters at Kilkee, and a dimple in
the middle of her rolling chin, gave a touch of reality to the old
romance of the peasant girl.

This was the last day of the journey which had been of three weeks'
duration.  (Six decades later James Mackenzie was to make the
journey back with a grandson in one day.)

Breakfast over, the little cavalcade set out with much noisy
chatter,--reminders not to forget this or that.

"Did ye put out the last o' the fire, Dennie?"

"Fasten that buckle on Whitey's bridle, Belle."

The mother drove the horse team,--James, the oxen.  Walking along
beside the latter, James' boyish "Gee" or "Haw" or "Whoa How" rang
out with valiant attempts to make the notes stentorian.  Buck was a
red and white animal, Boy a brindle.  As they walked, they swung
their huge heads rhythmically from side to side, the brass buttons
a-top their horns shining in the morning sun.  Almost at the first
rod's length of the journey little Basil had to stop the procession
to change from one wagon to the other.  Belle rode on the seat with
her mother, but, because it was early and cool, Abbie, Mary and
Dennie walked behind, darting off the trail to gather Mayflowers or
wild Bouncing-Bets.  Sometimes they jumped over the young rosin-
weeds and wild blue phlox and occasionally they caught on the back
of the wagon, clutching onto the household goods and swinging their
feet off the ground for a few moments.

About nine, they forded a stream.  The oxen ahead crossed slowly,
lumberingly, with many stops in that foolish, stolid way they had.
When they were across, Mother Mackenzie drove her team into the
creek bed.  As the horses were going up the bank, one of them
stumbled, crowding against its mate.  There was a creaking, and
backing, a shouting and a tipping.  One sack of flour began falling
slowly, and then another and another.  Eight sacks of flour,
pushing against each other, slipped slowly into the water like fat,
clumsy, old men, reluctant to wet their feet.

Maggie Mackenzie was out and managing her horses by way of their
bridles, while James, running back from his own wagon, assisted in
bringing order out of the catastrophe.  Then some one called
excitedly, "Look out for the bedding," and two great pillows
started floating down stream with majestic motion, as though the
geese from which their contents had been plucked, were suddenly
coming to life.

"Och!"  And "Och!"  The mother wrung her hands in distress.  Eight
sacks of flour and two pillows were a fortune.

Abbie and Dennie and little Basil, their laughter high with
excitement, all ran along the side of the creek bed after the
pillows.  In the meantime, James and Belle were wading into the
stream and pulling out the sacks.  To the mother the disaster
seemed more than she could bear.  "Och!  If I ever get there," said
Maggie O'Conner Mackenzie, "sure 'n' I'll never l'ave the spot."
Sure, and she never did.  Many years later she died a quarter of a
mile from the place where she first stepped out of the wagon.

When the last sack was retrieved, the entire family, with much dire
foreboding, crowded around James, who was opening a sack to see how
the contents fared.  It was as though the whole of life's future
hung on the outcome.  To their extreme relief the wet flour had
formed but a thin paste, which, with a few moments drying in the
sun, now high and hot, would form a crust and keep the precious
contents unharmed.

In spite of the delay the family reached the settlement on the
Cedar River by the middle of the afternoon and stopped near the log
cabin of Tom Graves, the man whom the older sister Janet had come
out to marry.  Janet, herself, hearing the creaking of the wagons,
came hurrying down the grassy trail to meet them, a three-weeks-old
baby in her arms.  The baby was something by way of surprise to the
entire group of relatives, his arrival having taken place after the
family had started westward.

Maggie O'Conner Mackenzie, with much clucking and chirping and
adjustment of clothing, welcomed her first grandchild.

"Sure 'n' he's the big one.  How did ye get along?  Is he good?
Did ye have a doctor or a neighbor woman?"

Janet answered them all even while her mother was still talking.
Oh, yes, there was a doctor,--Doc Matthews over at town.  Cedar
Falls was quite a place.  It had a sawmill and a hotel and a store,
a dozen log cabins, and a few frames ones.  The school-house had
the only tower bell in the state.  For pay Tom was to haul in a
load of wood for the doctor's office stove,--he had a two-roomed
house, part log and part frame.

The oxen behind them slathered and snorted.  There was the smell in
the air of newly-cut chips.  The woods back of the cabin looked
thick and impenetrable beyond the short arrows of the sun.  And
then Tom Graves, himself, came out of the timber, his ax, the
insignia of the fight, on his shoulder.

"Here is my mother, Tom, and this is Belle and that one is Mary.
And that boy is James and this one Dennie and here's little Basil.
And over there with the reddish-brown hair is Abbie,--we almost
forgot her."

So much was to be said, and all at once.  "We've got a house all
ready for you, Mother.  It was Grandpa Deal's sheep shed.  The
Deals have been here for three years, but they've moved down
farther on the prairie now in a fine big log house, and you can
have this until you get your own cabin done.  We've cleaned it all
out for you and hung a thick quilt over the opening, and if it
storms you can come in with us."

And so Maggie O'Conner Mackenzie, who had lived in the great
Aberdeen town house and on the two Scotch country estates, was to
make her bed now in a sheep shed.

Every one turned in to help with the settling.  From the wagons
they took out the walnut bedsteads and the bedding and the highboy.
They brought in the heavy, cumbersome guns and the powder-horn and
the splint-bottom chairs.  Maggie Mackenzie brought in her flat-
iron into which one put glowing hickory embers through an iron
door, and she hung up the iron tallow-lamp with a home-spun wick
hanging over the side like a tongue hanging grotesquely from
the side of a mouth.  If she could have foreseen that two
granddaughters, Mrs. Harrison Scannell Rhodes and Mrs. Frederick
Hamilton Baker, were going to stage a polite but intensive campaign
over which one could have the old tallow-lamp in her sun parlor, a
half century later, she would have shaken her fat sides with
laughter.

Everything was out of the wagon now,--everything but one.  Abbie,
standing in the grassy trail in front of the old sheep shed, was
watching for it.  On tiptoe there in her ankle-length starched
dress, her red-brown hair wound around her head and tucked into a
snood, she was the picture of watchful waiting.  She might have
been carved in marble as "Expectancy."

"Let me!  Let me!" she called, when her mother was bringing out the
calf-skin-covered box from under the wagon seat.

"If ye'll carry it carefu'."

No need to caution Abbie to be careful.  In a warm feeling of
pleasure over the temporary possession, she clasped her arms around
its hairy sides and the "M.OC." initials formed by nail-heads.

Inside the box lay all the accouterments of another life.  In its
skin-covered depths was all the equipment of an entirely different
world.  They were symbols of things in life to come.  They
represented the future in which she would some day live.  She got
down on her knees on the dirt floor, with its earthy odor, and
pushed the little chest into the far, dark corner under her
mother's bed.  Lovingly and lingeringly she relinquished her hold
upon it.  For a few moments she saw herself in that future, her red-
brown hair in curls, over her shoulders a white silk shawl with
roses in the corners, its folds held together with a lavender
breastpin.  There was a string of pearls around her neck, and she
was waving a jeweled fan with long, white fingers that tapered at
the ends.  There was soft music playing.  She came out on a high
stage ready to sing.  Lovely ladies and courtly men were clapping
their hands.  Some of them stood up.  She smiled at them and waved
her jeweled fan. . . .

"Abbie . . . Abbie . . . where are you?"  Quite suddenly, the
gorgeous trappings fell away.  She was back in the everyday world,
hearing loud voices calling her.

"Abbie! . . ."  The voices were raised high in fright.  She
scrambled out backward from under the bed.

"Abbie . . . Abbie . . ."  Dennis and Mary were running toward her,
their faces white with fear.  "The Indians are coming.  A man here
on horseback says the Indians are coming down the river."

Abbie scrambled back under the bed and brought out the hairy chest
in her arms.  Not to any wild and heathenish Indian was Abbie
Mackenzie intending to relinquish the only tangible tie that bound
her to the lovely lady.



CHAPTER III


In the midst of the hurry and confusion and fright, Abbie gathered
that they were all to get back into the wagons and "go down to
Grandpa Deal's," wherever that was.

Everything that could be handled easily was thrown into the wagons.
Janet rolled a fresh batch of bread and raised doughnuts into a
homespun tablecloth.  Tom tied old Whitey to the back of his wagon
and put her new calf in the end of the box so she could see her
offspring and not bellow for it.  Abbie clutched the hairy chest in
protecting arms.  The cavalcade started lumberingly down the river
road.  Through the dark timber they drove, over spongy moist
leaves, past thickets of sumac and hazel-brush, their hearts
pounding in alarm, their bodies tense with fear, every tree the
potential hiding place of an Indian.

Out of the cool river road and onto the hot, flat prairie they came
as suddenly as one opens a door upon a bright, heated room.  For
two miles they drove over the faintly marked prairie trail, coming
then to another wooded section and to the largest house in the
community,--a big log structure which looked palatial to Abbie's
eyes after Tom Graves' one-roomed cabin and the sheep shed.

Other horse and ox teams were hitched to the straw-roofed log
stable.  Other families were scurrying into the house with smoked
hams and batches of bread and valued possessions in their arms.
Not far from the back door of the big log house, Abbie, still
grasping the hairy chest, stopped to watch a boy of twelve or
thirteen caressing the sleek, quivering head of a young deer, tied
to a tree by a strap around its neck.

A small, severe-looking woman in a black calico dress, with a black
netting cap tied under her sharply pointed chin, was scolding
nervously.  "No, Willie, you can't.  I won't have it.  It's bad
enough to have the whole kit 'n' bilin' in the country comin' 'n'
trackin' up,--all the rag-snag 'n' bob-tails bringin' their stuff."

"But, Mother," the boy plead, "I'll keep her by herself.  I'll get
her up the loft stairs."

"No--you sha'n't, Willie Deal."

And then a big, powerful man came out,--a man with only one arm,
his left sleeve pinned to the side of his coat.  He had a shock of
wiry black hair, and an equally wiry beard which gave him an
unkempt look.  But his eyes were blue and twinkling and kind,--they
held the calmness of blue ice, but not its coldness.

He put his one hand on the boy's dark head, now, and said quietly,
"You'd best let her go, son.  She'll take care of herself,--and
it's only fair to give her her freedom."

Without a word the boy cut the strap at the fawn's throat, and even
while he was unloosing the piece around her neck, she darted from
him lightly, gracefully, into the hazel-brush.

Inside the big log house where all seemed confusion, Abbie, after a
time, sought out the dark-haired boy.

"Do you think you'll ever get her back?" she asked shyly.

"Get what?"

"Your little deer."

"Naw, . . . never."  The boy turned his head away.

Abbie's heart seemed bursting with sorrow for him.  There was that
word again,--NEVER.  It was the saddest word!  It made her throat
hurt.  Willie Deal would never, never have his little deer again.

With his head still averted, the boy said tensely, "I found
her . . . 'n' raised her . . . myself."

Abbie put her hand out gently and touched the boy's arm.

"I'm sorry."  Her voice held deep sympathy.

"Aw . . ."  He threw up his fine dark head.  "I didn't care."

But Abbie knew it was not so.  Abbie knew that he cared.

It seems precarious business to take time to describe Grandpa and
Grandma Deal, when a band of disgruntled Indians is reported on its
way down the Shell Rock, but, pending its arrival, one ought to
know a little of Gideon Deal and his wife.  They were not yet out
of their forties.  Indeed, their youngest daughter, Regina, was
only nine, but through older offspring scattered about the
community, several grandchildren had been presented to them, and
so, to differentiate them from other and younger Deals, the titles
"Grandpa" and "Grandma" had been bestowed early upon them.

To the other settlers Grandpa Deal seemed as substantial as the
native hickory timber in whose clearing he had built his house.  He
was both freighter and farmer.  Two of the grown sons worked his
place, while he himself drove the six-ox-team over the long trail
to Dubuque and back, with freight for the whole community.  For
this,--and for his reputation as a wit,--he was known far and wide.
To fully appreciate his wit, one must have taken Grandma Deal into
account, for she was the background against which his droll sayings
stood forth.  The little wiry woman, fretful, energetic and
humorless, was intolerant of wasting time in fun-making.  Grandpa
Deal, kind, easy-going and jolly, was always picking up every
little saying of his partner's to bandy it about with sly
drollness.  There was never any loud laughter on his part, just a
twinkle in the sharp blue eyes appreciative of his outlook on life.
Grandma Deal spent her time hustling about, darting in and out,
scolding at Grandpa, finding fault with the children, the well-
sweep, the weather, everything that came under her eagle eye or
into her busy brain.

Just now, however, Grandma was not scolding.  Grandpa was not
joking.  The news of impending disaster had brought them to a
common ground of fear.  Most of the other families of the community
had gathered now in the larger and stronger Deal home in response
to the rumor of the Indian uprising.  Already the men were
stationing guns near windows and barring and barricading doors.
Several women were running bullets in the little salamander stove,
a queer affair whose short legs in front and long legs in the back,
gave it the appearance of an inverted giraffe.  One woman was
hysterical; another a little out of her mind from fear, kept
wanting to go back out doors where there was air.

All night they waited for whatever Fate had in store for them.  In
the morning, a man rode up on horseback, a young boy, about Willie
Deal's age, behind him in the saddle.  It was Doc Matthews, who had
come to bring word that the hostile band of Indians had gone north.

Immediately there was the confusion of getting ready to leave.
Grandpa Deal told those who lived farthest away to stay and make a
visit for the day.  Abbie could hear Grandma Deal sputtering about
her husband's freehanded hospitality.

The boy who came with Doc Matthews was his son Ed.  He had been
east all year to a boys' boarding school.  He was dressed in a nice
suit and a flat white collar and a little round hat.

He stood and looked at Willie Deal in his homespun suit.  Willie
Deal stood and looked at Eddie Matthews from the Philadelphia
boarding-school.  Their contempt seemed mutual.

The Indian scare, then, had gone into nothing.  The wagons went
lumbering back across the prairie and through the damp, dark river
road where the hazel-brush and sumac knotted together under the
native oaks and hickories.

All summer long, the Mackenzies lived in the sheep shed, while
their own log house was being built.  James and Tom Graves were
building it, and Dennie was helping, battening the inside with long
split saplings and filling the chinks with mud.

All summer long, Abbie went happily in and out of the sheep shed
with the patchwork quilt in front for the door.  There were so many
lovely things to do that one did not know how to find time for them
all.  There were flowers in the deep, dark recesses of the Big
Woods,--wild honeysuckles and Bouncing-Bets and tall ferns that one
could pretend were long, sweeping, white plumes.

Sometimes Abbie would take one of the longest of the ferns and,
with a slender twig, pin it on a wild grapevine leaf or a plantain
for a hat.  Then she would drape one of her mother's dark shawls
around her sturdy little body, and standing on a grassy hillock in
the clearing, pretend she was Isabelle Anders-Mackenzie, the lovely
lady.

And then she had a whole set of dishes hidden in the hollow of an
oak at the edge of the timberland.  James had made them for her
from acorns, removing the nut and whittling little handles for the
cups.  And she had a child for which she must care constantly.  It
was an elongated-shaped stone with a small round formation on the
end for its head.  She put little Basil's outgrown dress on it and
a knitted bonnet.  She liked the feeling of the stone against her
breast.  It seemed heavy and like a real baby.  Sometimes in
carrying it about, her heart would swell in potential mother love
for it.  But sometimes there was no need to pretend about a baby,
for there was Janet's real, live one to hold and rock.  Janet had a
low, wooden trundle-bed for him that pushed under the big bed.  It
was rough on the outside and the ends were made from the sawed
round disks of a tree.

One afternoon, Willie Deal came up to the Big Woods with his shaggy-
haired father to see Tom Graves.  Willie Deal had remembered Abbie
and brought her a plant in a clay jar he had made.  The plant was a
green, lacy, fern-like thing, and there were three little, round,
scarlet balls on it.

"Whatever are they?" Abbie wanted to know.

"They're love apples," Willie told her.  "But don't you ever dare
put one up to your mouth.  They're tremendous poisonous."

Abbie promised that she never, never would so much as touch the
poison.  For how could Willie Deal and Abbie Mackenzie in the
'fifties know anything about vitamine-filled tomatoes?

And then, in the fall, Janet's baby was not quite well.  No one
seemed to know what the matter could be.  Maggie O'Conner Mackenzie
doctored him with castor oil and peppermint.  Grandma Deal sent
word by Tom Graves to give him sassafras tea and tie a little bag
of asafetida around his neck.  When he seemed no better, Janet,
pale and worried, said maybe they ought to send for Dr. Matthews.
Abbie was frightened beyond measure when she heard that, for she
well knew that a doctor was the last resort for saving one who was
sick.  Tom went out immediately to saddle a horse and go for the
doctor.  Janet told Abbie to hold the baby while she went out to
the lean-to kitchen for warm water.  Mother Mackenzie had gone over
to her own home for flannel cloths.

And then, Abbie was calling them and crying all in the same breath,
"Janet, . . . Mother, . . . come quick . . . oh, come . . ."

Janet was in the room like a flash, a wild bittern at the call of
its young.  Abbie could scarcely talk for crying:  "I was just
holding him as steady.  He acted queer, . . . and threw up his
arms.  He got kind of bluish.  What ought I to 've done?"

Doctor Matthews came with Tom.  He said, yes, the baby was dead.
Janet was wild with grief.  Sitting on the edge of the bed, she
rocked the little cold form back and forth in her arms and would
not let them take him from her.  Rachel, who lives again in every
grieving mother, was crying for her child and would not be
comforted.

Over in their own cabin, Abbie sobbed aloud on the bed.  Suddenly
she sat up, "I hate God," she said.  Maggie Mackenzie hushed her
quickly and told her it was tremendous wicked to say that.

"But he made death.  I hate death.  I HATE it."

"The poor colleen," her mother said to Belle.  "She's smart like
the Mackenzies, . . . but faith . . . an' she has the Irish heart."



CHAPTER IV


By the time Abbie was eleven, she was doing more work.  Life was
not all play now.  One of her tasks was to thread the wicks into
candle molds, for her slim fingers were more agile than her
mother's short, thick ones.  She had to poke the long wick-string
through all of the six molds, and carefully loop the tops over a
stick to keep them from slipping.  Her mother would then pour the
hot tallow into the molds and set it away to harden.  Abbie was
always anxious to see the finished product slip out.  She would
watch her mother plunge the molds into hot water to loosen the hard
grease, and then, "Let me, . . . let me," she would call, and
sometimes Maggie Mackenzie would let her carefully work the shining
cream-colored candles out of their containers.

There were a dozen other tasks for her to perform,--drive the cows
to drink, gather eggs from the chickens' stolen nests among the
sheds and stacks, and the daily one of going to school.

But even work could take upon itself a mask of fun.  One could
pretend, when threading the wicks into candle molds, that one was
stringing pearls accidentally broken at the ball,--that the long
walk through the hazel-brush to the schoolhouse was between rows of
admiring spectators who, instead of a mere rustling in the wind,
were whispering, "There she goes,--there goes Abbie Mackenzie, the
singer."

For Abbie was always singing from the elevation of her grassy knoll
in the clearing.  It made her happy to walk up the little incline,
turn and bow to an unseen audience, throw up her head and let forth
her emotions in song.  Her heart would swell in a feeling of
oneness with Nature and the Creator of it, and there would come to
her a great longing for things she did not quite know or
understand.

The log school-house sat in a clearing of timber just out of the
river's high-water line.  The hazel-brush and sumac tangled
together under its windows and there were butternut and black
walnut trees behind it.  The desks were rough shelves against the
walls on three sides of the room, and in front of them were three
long benches of equal height, so that a strapping six-foot boy or a
tiny six-year-old girl could, with economy, use the same seats.

While studying, the children sat with their backs toward the
teacher, but when it was recitation time they had to put their legs
up over the benches and turn to face him.  Abbie always crawled
over slowly, holding modestly on to her dress and three petticoats.
But Regina Deal would flip over daringly in a whirlwind of skirts
and pantalets.  The cloaks and bonnets were hung on nails on the
one side of the room which contained no desk-shelf.  The water-pail
and dipper were on a bench by the door, which made a sloppily wet
corner, excepting on those winter days when the dipper froze in the
pail.  The room was heated by a stove in the center, and one
unhappily roasted or froze in proportion to his proximity to the
stove.

Sometimes the contents of the dinner buckets were also frozen and
one had to thaw them out before eating.  On fall days, a few of the
more adventuresome of the squirrels and chipmunks whisked in and
out of the window-opening in the logs, purloining the crumbs for
waiting families.

In the spring, when the maple sap ran, every one crossed the river
in flat-bottomed boats and helped in the little sugar camp.  Louise
and Regina Deal showed Abbie and Mary Mackenzie how to make maple
eggs.  They took tiny pieces of shell off the small ends of eggs,
carefully removed the raw contents, ran the maple sap into the
hollow molds, and after it had hardened, picked off the shells,--
and behold, there was a platter of candy ready for the winter
parties.

The fall in which Abbie was eleven, the entire crowd of young
people on the north side of the river was invited to the
Mackenzies'.  Already there was a social distinction being drawn
between the north, or country side, and the south, or town side, of
the river.  The party was for Belle, who was soon to be married.
Belle had planted her rosebush by the log cabin, but the chickens
had pecked at it, and the pigs had rooted under it, and no
aristocratic gentleman had come by,--only a plain farmer boy who
had hired out to Tom Graves.

The young folks came in lumber wagons along the river road under
the full moon.  The few pieces of furniture were set out of doors
to make room for the party, and there were tallow candles lighted
and placed high up on shelves.  In an iron kettle there was taffy
cooking to be pulled later, and platters of pop-corn balls and
dishes of maple drops, into which hickory nuts, butternuts,
hazelnuts or walnuts had been stirred.

The crowd played dancing games to their own singing and hand-
clapping:


     "I won't have none of your weevily wheat,
       I won't have none of your barley,
     I won't have none but the best of wheat,
       To make a cake for Charley."


When the fun was at its height, a horse and rider drew up at the
door, and some one called out, "Hey there, . . . you."  The young
folks, upon going out to see who it was, found Ed Matthews there
with a deer carcass, which he had been pulling behind him with a
rope.  Ed, who was sixteen now, was dressed in "city" hunter togs,
a leather-looking coat and pants and a cap with a long bill in
front.  His boots were almost hip-high and fitted snugly to his
legs.

When they were crowding around to look at the deer, Abbie first saw
the strap drawn taut on its neck.  Immediately, she was looking up
into the face of Will Deal,--a darkened, flashing face.  The young
folks all discussed the queer fact of the strap being on the deer's
neck.  But Will Deal said nothing.  And Abbie, sensing that Will
did not want to tell about it, said nothing.

Regina and Louise and Mary Mackenzie all invited Ed Matthews in to
the party.  He accepted, and immediately became the center of the
games and dancing.  But for some reason the party was not so
pleasant.  For some reason, Ed Matthews, in his city hunter togs,
had spoiled the party.

When the horses were hitched to the wagons and the young folks were
all leaving, Abbie touched Will Deal on the arm.

"It was your little deer, wasn't it?"

"I 'spose so."

Something intuitive made Abbie say, "I'm sorry HE was the one who
shot it."

Will's face flashed darkly, "Aw, shucks! . . .  I don't care."

But Abbie knew that it was not so.  Abbie knew that Will Deal
cared.

Two years later, Grandpa Deal was sent by the county to the General
Assembly.  Word trickled back to the settlement that he was well
liked by his constituents, and that he was called "Old Blackhawk"
and "the wag of the House."

Will Deal, eighteen now, had done the freighting from Dubuque all
fall during his father's absence, but when spring came, an older
brother assumed the business while Will took over the farm work.
Once when Abbie came by, he stopped the team and sat on the plow-
handle and called out to her to come and hear a letter from his
father.  It began, "Dear Friend," and ended, "This from your
affectionate father."  It said that he hoped Will could comfortably
till the fields, that there was some talk of dividing two of the
counties, that board was tremendous high,--three dollars a week,--
that his sister, Harriett, had left on the stage, that the Pikes
Peakers were beginning to run, and that he looked for quite a rush
this spring for the gold regions.  Abbie felt quite proud of the
fact that a young man like Will Deal would read his letters to a
thirteen-year-old girl.

It was only a few weeks later, that an old Springfield friend of
Grandpa Deal's was nominated for the presidency of the United
States.  When Grandpa Deal came home, he said that if you'd known
Abe Lincoln as well as he had, you'd never in the world think that
he'd have been picked for the nomination, but just the same there
was hoss sense inside his long hide.

All summer long one heard political talk here and there,--about
slavery and secessionists and the outcome of the fall election.
Men would stop in wagons on the river road and talk so long that
their teams would amble a short way into the woods, cropping at the
juicy ferns.  Grandma Deal scolded all summer about it.  Abbie
heard her say that she kept dinner hot so many times for Grandpa,
who was talking to groups around the store over in town or on the
schoolhouse steps, that she had a notion to quit cooking for him
altogether.

All winter the talk grew thicker and more heated.  While Abbie did
not fully understand it all, she knew in February, when the
Southern Confederacy had been established, that things were at some
sort of a crisis.  But from hearing Grandpa Deal talk, she felt
confident that when Abe Lincoln would take his seat in March,
everything was going to be all right.  And Grandpa Deal was to have
plenty of time to talk, for his old job of freighting from Dubuque
was to be taken from him.  Slowly, but surely, the construction of
the Dubuque and Sioux City road was being carried westward.

Abraham Lincoln took his seat in March, but everything was not
going to be all right.  Twenty-seven days later the first iron
horse from Dubuque shrieked its triumphant way across the Deal
farm, and on into Cedar Falls, and the old-time freighter's task
was finished.  The train's arrival was timely for the community,
inasmuch as events were to follow which would suspend construction
and cause Cedar Falls to remain the western terminus of the road
for four years.

Abbie had now passed her fourteenth birthday.  On an April
afternoon, with the river high and clods of snow still at the roots
of trees, she went into the timber to look for anemones and
Dutchmen's breeches, for dog-toothed violets and the first signs of
Mayflower buds.  Coming out on her own particular grassy knoll in
the clearing, she went up to the hillock, in one of those moments
of desire to let out her feelings in song.  To the squirrels she
may have seemed an ordinary girl clothed in a green-checked gingham
dress, with reddish-brown curls twisted up into a snood, but the
squirrels were not seeing correctly.  For Abbie knew that she had a
dark velvet dress that swept around her feet, a string of pearls on
her neck, and in her hand a hat with a sweeping plume.  She was
holding it carelessly at her side with her long, slender fingers
that tapered at the ends.

At the top of the knoll she turned.  A sea of white faces looked up
at her.  To the casual observer it might have seemed a mass of wild
plum-blossoms.  Even before she sang, the audience applauded
vociferously and a few people stood up.  An onlooker, who was not
magic-eyed, might have thought the wind merely blew the blossoms.
Abbie bowed, smiled,--waited for her accompaniment to begin.  She
fingered her pearls, and smiled at the girl at the reed-organ.  All
at once she realized that the girl at the organ was a talented
orphan whom she had been befriending.  It made her feel happy,
light-hearted.  She threw back her head and began singing:


     "Oh! the Lady of the Lea,
     Fair and young and gay was she,
     Beautiful exceedingly,
     The Lady of the Lea."


The song embodied for her all the enchantment of the Arabian
Nights.  It opened a door to a magic castle.  It smelled of perfume
and spices.  It stood for wonderful things in life to come.


     "Many a wooer sought her hand,
     For she had gold and she had land,"


Her voice rose melodiously high and sweet and true.


     "Everything at her command,
     The Lady of the Lea."


Her heart seemed bursting with love of the trees, the sky, the
melody.


     "Oh, the Lady of the Lea,
     Fair and young and gay was she,"


There seemed a gleam ahead of her,--a light that beckoned,--a
little will-o'-the-wisp out there beyond the settlement in the Big
Woods.  It was something no one knew about,--Mother nor Mary nor
Belle.  Only for her it shone,--for her, and other lovely ladies.


     "Fanciful exceedingly,
     The Lady of the Lea."


When the song had died away and Abbie was bowing to the invisible
audience, she heard it, "Abbie, . . . oh, Abbie . . . hoo-hoo!"
Mary's voice was calling and crying in the distance.  She slipped
out of the clearing, climbed the stake-and-rider fence, and saw
Mary coming,--calling and crying and coming toward her.  "Abbie,
they've just got word out from Dubuque that Fort Sumter was fired
on."

Abbie clutched her.  "What, . . . what does THAT mean, Mary?"

"It means, . . ."  Mary's voice whispered it hoarsely, "Grandpa
Deal says it means WAR."



CHAPTER V


Yes, it meant war, with James leaving at the first call, and
Belle's young husband enlisting without her knowing his intentions.
Abbie thought she could not stand it to see them go.  It seemed
that life was doing something to her which she could not
countenance.  She had a queer sensation of wind blowing past her,--
of wind that she could not stop.  She stood in front of the Seth
Thomas clock on the shelf in her mother's cabin and watched the
hands moving above the little brown church painted on the glass of
the door.  _Oh, stop Time for a few minutes until we can do
something about the war._

But the winds blew past, and the clock hands went around, and James
and Belle's husband and several of the neighbor boys had gone to
war.

And by 1862, when Lincoln's call for additional volunteers came,
Dennie, who was nineteen now, went into the Cedar Falls Reserves, a
group of one hundred stalwart fellows.  And Abbie again went all
through the torn emotions of parting with Dennie and hating war.

And then she learned that there was one thing worse than going to
war.  And that was not going to war.  Will Deal told her so.  To be
twenty-one and able-bodied, and see the Reserves entrain and not
go!  He was ashamed, and miserable.  But his father, with his one
arm, and in the Assembly as he was,--and no one to farm,--and
Regina and Louise and his mother all depending on him,--he could
not go.  It seemed queer that of all the people in the community,
Abbie Mackenzie, who was only sixteen, should be the one in whom
Will Deal confided.  And because Will Deal had done this, Abbie
told him some things she had never told a soul,--that some day she
was going to be a big person.  She could feel it in her,--that she
was going to do great things, sing before vast audiences, and paint
lovely pictures in frames and write things in a book.

"You know, Will, I don't want people to laugh at me,--and I don't
believe you would.  But sometimes it all comes over me, that I can
do these big things.  It's ahead of me, . . . kind-of like a light
in the woods that shines and stays far away.  And when I read
verses, . . . or hear music, . . . or sing, . . . it beckons me
on, . . . and my throat hurts with wanting to do something great."

Will did not laugh at her, but instead, looked at her queerly for a
moment, noticing for the first time that her skin was as creamy-
white as the May-flowers that grew in the Big Woods, that her lips
were of deep red tints and her eyes of deep brown ones, and that
her mop of curly hair held them both,--the reds and the browns.

And then, the next year, Ed Matthews, who had been east to college,
was drafted.  And Doc Matthews called Will out of the field where
he was cutting wheat with a cradle, and told him he would give him
five hundred dollars to go in Ed's place.

Will walked to the house, laid the sack of gold pieces in his
mother's lap and said, "I'm going, Mother.  There's the money to
hire the work done."

He left from the new Dubuque and Sioux City station two miles from
his father's place.  Grandpa Deal was there, sick at heart, joking
the boys.  Grandma Deal, in her black cap tied under her wrinkled
face, was there, scolding that Will was going, that the coach would
be crowded,--scolding and sputtering in her little nagging way.
Why didn't they stand back?  Why didn't they go to-morrow?  What
made every one so noisy?  Maggie O'Conner Mackenzie, in her white
cap tied under her plump, placid face, was there.  And Abbie
Mackenzie, in a sprigged delaine over hoop skirts, and with a
little pancake flowered hat tipped over her forehead, was there.
_Oh, God, stop the wind blowing by,--the wind that blows Time away.
Stop the clock hands until I can think whether Will Deal ought to
go to war._

And then, something happened.  The train was ready to start.  There
were good-bys and noise and tears and confusion.  Will Deal shook
his father's one hand, and kissed his mother's little wrinkled
cheeks and Regina and Louise,--and started to shake hands with
Abbie Mackenzie, but suddenly kissed her instead.  And if battles
have been lost and kingdoms have fallen over less, who is there to
blame Abbie Mackenzie, that her own little kingdom was in a state
of revolution when she left the station and drove home in the
lumber-wagon across the prairie and over the damp, dark river road?

In the fall of '64, when she was seventeen, Abbie herself was
teaching the home school,--in a new white schoolhouse with green
blinds, but standing in the same spot where the hazel-brush grew in
tangled masses down toward the river bank.  There was only one big
boy in school that autumn, a harmless unfortunate, whom Grandpa
Deal termed a "three-quarters wit."  The others were "with
Sherman."  And Sherman was before Atlanta.

Abbie's thoughts seemed always with them, those boys in shabby
blue: James and Dennie and all the old neighborhood schoolmates.
Through the monotonously droning reading of the McGuffey readers,
the ciphering and the cramped copybook work, she thought of them.
"God bring them all safe home.  Please bring them home, God, . . .
James and Dennie and Will Deal."  There were other friends and
schoolmates, but no one so big and fine and clean as Will Deal, and
so understanding.  Whenever she craved understanding, she always
thought of Will Deal, who did not laugh at her fancies, but gave
her sympathy instead.

Ed Matthews, who had paid his way out of the draft, came home that
fall for a few days.  Ed was going to be a doctor like his father.
Several times he had stopped his horse at the schoolhouse door and,
with the reins over his arm, talked to Abbie.  She was a little
proud of the attention.  It was rather complimentary to be singled
out from all the girls in the neighborhood for attention from Ed.
She could not quite make up her mind whether she really liked Ed or
not.  Will Deal didn't like him,--had never liked him.  But Will
was prejudiced.  And it was nice to see a young man dress as Ed
did.  In his riding outfit he certainly looked tony.  There were
some rumors around about Ed,--something about his drinking at
times, and riding at dusk down a by-road which decent people
avoided,--but no one had verified them, so far as Abbie knew, and,
anyway, people were probably jealous of him and his opportunities.

In that week of October on a Friday afternoon, when the hazel-brush
was as brown-burnished as Abbie's hair, and the Big Woods a mass of
scarlet and bronze and crimson, she closed the schoolhouse and left
for home.

In the distance she could see the new, stylish, high-top buggy of
Doctor Matthews going down the lane road where the honey-locusts,
yellow now, bordered the north side of the Deal place.  She was
thinking that she could have ridden home with the doctor if she had
been out a little earlier.  Not that she cared, for it was pleasant
walking.  Who could believe that the guns of the war were booming
in the South this Indian summer day?  When nearly home she paused,
turned abruptly, and climbing the stake-and-rider fence, walked
through the oaks into the clearing where the October sun flecked
down through leaf shadows.  Not for several years had she visited
the old grassy knoll between the huge trees.  She went up to the
top of the knoll now and faced an invisible audience in that old
intangible dream which she always had with her.  Half amused at her
own childishness, half earnest in her actions, there in the
seclusion of the woods, she unloosed from its binding ribbons the
reddish-brown mass of her hair.  She unbuttoned the top buttons of
her lavender-sprigged delaine dress and pulled it down over the
creamy whiteness of her shoulders, tucking in the edges to hold it.
Then, with her reddish-bronze hair, with its overtones of gold,
framing the Mayflower petals of her skin, and with her warm brown
eyes half closed, Abbie Mackenzie threw back her head and sang:


     "Oh, the Lady of the Lea,
     Fair and young and gay was she,
     Beautiful exceedingly,
     The Lady of the Lea."


The notes rose like the nuptial flight of birds, notes of desire
and a longing for their fulfillment.


     "To her bower at last there came,
     A youthful knight of noble name,
     Hand and heart in hope to claim
     And in love fell she."


They throbbed with the joy of life and the pathos of it, with the
beauty of peace and the sadness of war.


     "Still she put his suit aside,
     So he left her in her pride,
     And broken-hearted drooped and died,
     The Lady--"


A twig snapped and the note snapped with it.  Frightened, Abbie
whirled to the sound.  Ed Matthews stood near her, his blond face
aflame.  Abbie gave a startled cry, and in fright and embarrassment,
clutched the neck of her gown.  But Ed Matthews had her in his arms,
was kissing her full red lips and the creamy Mayflower petals of her
neck, burying his flushed face in the red-bronze of her hair.

"Abbie, . . . Abbie, . . . you coquette! . . .  You're wonderful,
. . . gorgeous.  I love you.  I never knew . . . I want you. . . .
You're going with me. . . .  You'll marry me. . . .  I'll take you
east . . . to New York. . . .  Your voice . . . I didn't realize
. . . You can have the best teachers . . . I have to go back to-
morrow . . . Abbie . . . you COQUETTE . . . !  And we have to-night
left . . . tonight is ours . . ."

Swept away on the tide of Ed's passionate words, she seemed to be
without thought or comprehension.  When she could speak, she found
herself saying almost without her own volition, "Don't, Ed, don't
TOUCH me.  You've no right.  YOU'VE NO RIGHT."  She was trying to
button the high neck of her dress, pushing Ed's protesting hand
away, twisting up the red-brown curls of her hair.  Ed's laughter
disconcerted and frightened her.  He seemed so very sure of
himself,--and of her.

It was sundown when they reached the Mackenzie cabin.  For a long
time they stood in front of it, talking.  Ed's flushed face bent to
Abbie's.

"I THINK so, Ed, . . . but I'm not sure.  It's sudden and, . . .
when you come in the spring I'll know my own mind."

"You're playing with me.  You ARE a coquette."

"No, Ed, . . . I'm REALLY uncertain."

"Uncertain about marrying me?"  Ed's opinion of himself was not
what one would term feeble.  "Uncertain about going to New York,
. . . with THAT voice?  . . ."

"Oh, Ed, IF I went, . . ."  Abbie was suddenly childish, wistful,
"would I be a lovely lady?"

Ed Matthews' banter and his high-handedness were stilled, his
passion and his ardor quieted.  He bent and kissed Abbie's pretty
tapering hand.  "You would be a lovely lady," he said gently.

When he had gone, Mary and Mother Mackenzie drew Abbie in to tell
them what it was all about.

Importuned to secrecy, Mary was excited beyond the completion of
sentences.  "Abbie . . . YOU . . . Doctor Ed Matthews . . . to go
to New York . . . your voice . . . teachers in New York . . . it
might be in the opera . . ."

Mother Mackenzie asked gravely, "Do you LOVE him, acushla?"

Abbie turned burning cheeks to her Irish mother and clutched her
plump shoulders.  "I don't know.  Tell me, mother, what IS love?"

"That," said Maggie O'Conner Mackenzie, "I canna tell ye.  An' no
one can tell ye.  Sure, an' I mind an' I knew it though, mysel'.  I
look for you to know it, yoursel', Abbie."

Abbie went up to her loft room.  She wanted to be alone.  Love?
Was this love?  To be able to go to New York and study?  Her voice
. . . a new world . . . the world of courtly men and lovely ladies
. . . of silken shawls . . . of strings of pearls . . . of flowing
plumes.  But that world also held Ed Matthews with his eyes that
were not quite steady, with his disconcerting laugh and the vague,
unproven rumors.  But he loved her, that was certain.  Or . . . was
it so certain?  His kisses . . . Abbie's face burned with the
memory.  She thought of Will Deal and the day he had left for war
two years before.  Will had kissed her, too--

Quite suddenly she wished she could talk the whole thing over with
Will Deal.  Will would help her know her own mind,--help her
understand what love was.  Of all the people she knew in the whole
world, Will was the most understanding.  He was so steady,--so
dependable.  "Oh God, bring Will Deal safe home soon to help me
know."



CHAPTER VI


And then the presidential campaign of '64 was on in full swing.
Over in town there were parades and banners and torchlights and
much bombastic oratory.  General Sherman was close upon Atlanta and
Grandpa Deal was close upon General Sherman.  For he had been
delegated by Governor Kirkwood to go to the first division of
General Logan's Fifteenth Army Corps to bring the vote of the Iowa
contingent back to the state.  Many weeks elapsed before his
return.  Atlanta fell.  All communication to the north was severed,
for General Sherman had started on his wearisome march to the sea.
And with the tramping columns rode Grandpa Deal on a horse whose
mane was as black as Grandpa Deal's own bushy head.  A veritable
old man of the sea he looked upon his return, grotesque appearing,
with the bag of ballots swung over his shoulder by a strap, a faded
carpet-bag in his one hand,--in the bag the government's pay to
many of the Iowa boys.

Abbie was "boarding around," and was at the Deal house for the week
when Grandpa came.  He told his experiences to the family in high
glee, his ice-blue eyes twinkling behind the bushy brows.  "I'd
al'a's throw the old bag down," he would relate with silent
chuckles, "'n' give it a kick for extra measure, so's nobody'd
allow the' was any value to it,--'n' all the time the' was two
thousand four hundred and twenty-two dollars in its old insides."

"Did you," Abbie moistened dry red lips, "did you--happen to see
Will?"

The chuckles died.  Yes, he had seen Will, had in fact kept as
close to Company B, 31st Iowa Regiment as he consistently could.
He had tried to make Will ride the horse a few times when he was
exhausted.  He had sat around the campfire with him a few nights,
when the boys sang and joked and told stories to keep up their
spirits.  "Was the awfulest dense pitch-pine smoke from them camp-
fires ye'd ever see.  Boys used to kinda apologize to me about 'em,
bein' as how I was a sort o' guest on the march.  But I'd al'a's
tell 'em black smoke didn't interfere much with my complexion."

In a few minutes he said soberly:  "Will's been caught stealin'."

"Stealing?"  A sharp pang of apprehension went through Abbie.  She
and Grandma Deal turned to each other in mutual fright.

"Yes, sir, . . . stealin'."  Grandpa Deal's forehead was puckered
in agony.

"My boy stole?"  Grandma's little worried face took on an added
anxiety.

"'Twas at Savannah.  Provisions was one ear of corn to the man.
There was transports layin' right out there in sight off the coast
with food on for our boys.  Couldn't get in 'til fortifications
fell.  'N' then my boy . . ."  His voice shook in mock sorrow.  "My
boy went to the corral," the eyes began to twinkle, "'n' stole two
ears of corn from some army mules 'n' boiled the corn for supper."

Grandma was provoked.  "You ain't got no call to be scarin' me that
way," she sputtered.  "You ain't got no call to spend your life
jokin'."

"Oh, come, now, Ma.  Better to laugh than to cry.  Will maybe'll be
remorse-stricken all the days o' his life,--to hear the brayin' in
his conscience of them poor, helpless, skinny, mouse-colored
government mules."

When Abbie was starting for school, Grandpa casually followed her
out.  "Had a good visit with Will."  He cocked one eye up at the
well-sweep.

"Did you?"

"Yep.  He wanted to know how all the Iowa folks was."

"Did he?"

"Yep.  More specifically, he wanted to know how all the Blackhawk
folks was."

"Did he?"

"Yep.  Collectively, he wanted to know how all the folks in our
community was."

"Did he?"

"Yep.  Individually, he wanted to know how YOU was."

"Oh, . . . did he?"

"Yep.  He says to me," . . . Grandpa carelessly picked up a handful
of snow and threw it at a rooster.  "If I can rec'lect his words
exact, they was, 'How's my Abbie-girl'?"

Abbie walked over the crusted snow in a maze of conflicting
emotions,--behind the hard little stays of her waist a burning
letter from Ed Matthews and plans for her future,--in her heart,
the memory of Will Deal's one kiss, more poignant than either.

A new minister and his wife came to the growing town that fall and
made a round of calls among the country folk.  They were Vermont
people.  The Reverend Ezra Whitman was dignified, pompous, a little
pedantic.  Mrs. Whitman was refined, soft-spoken, a graduate of a
girls' seminary.  She took a great interest in Abbie, so that the
young teacher began going into town to see her.  She found that
Mrs. Whitman was something of an artist.  The little new frame
house in which the couple lived held several oil paintings that
seemed the acme of art to Abbie, and there was always an unfinished
canvas on an easel.  The paints fascinated the girl.  She longed to
get her hands on them.  Something in her eyes must have flashed its
unspoken message, for one day Mrs. Whitman asked her if she would
like to try her hand with the brush.  It thrilled her beyond words.
Crudely enough, but with some intuitive knowledge, she did a little
clump of trees on a piece of waste canvas.

"I'll never be satisfied until I can do it well," she said.  From
that time on, at Mrs. Whitman's invitation, she began painting with
her, riding over to town when she could, tramping the two and one-
half miles through slush or mud when there was no other way to go.

"It's your voice, though, that shows the greater promise," Mrs.
Whitman told her.  "I wish I could help you with that, too.  Mr.
Whitman's sister will know what to tell you when she comes.  She
teaches voice in my old seminary."

And when the sister came, and heard Abbie, she was enthusiastic.
"It's good," she told them all.  "It's more than good.  It's
splendid.  You can do really big things with it.  You must try
sometime to come East for lessons."

But Abbie was too bashful to tell her that already she had an
opportunity to go to New York to study.  Her praise had its
influence in Abbie's decision.  If her voice was really as good as
Mrs. Whitman thought--And so, on the day in April that Lee
surrendered, Abbie Mackenzie surrendered, too.  She wrote the
letter to Ed Matthews that she would marry him.  When she had sent
it over to town to be mailed she went to her old grassy knoll in
the clearing to sing.  But she did not seem to sing well.
Something seemed lacking.  The melody sounded flat, unlovely, like
a song from which the soul had fled.

In the weeks that followed, Abbie felt restless, nervous and a
little sad.  She told herself that it was on account of Lincoln's
assassination.  And indeed, some of it was, for the whole
settlement mourned.  But not all of her mood was due to the
President's tragic death.

On a day in May, with the honey-locusts all in bloom, she stood at
the door of the schoolhouse, and watched the train from the east
shriek its way across Grandpa Deal's newly planted corn-fields.
She washed her blackboard, set her desk to rights, locked the
schoolhouse, and started home.  And, quite suddenly, she saw some
one coming down the lane.  Abbie stood still, her heart pounding
tumultuously with the uncertainty of the figure's identity.  The
world was a lovely painting of sunshine, blue skies, honey-locusts,
bees on the blossoms,--a palpitating, throbbing world of spring.

Will Deal in his blue soldier's suit was coming toward her.  She
could not take her eyes from his face.  He was smiling,
questioningly, a little quizzically, and with something that was
infinitely more tender.  He slipped the knapsack from his back and
held out his arms.  Swiftly, lightly, Abbie went to him.

"Oh, Will, don't let me, . . . don't let me do it," Abbie began
sobbing a little wildly, almost hysterically.  For two years Abbie
Mackenzie had not shed a tear and now she was crying wildly in Will
Deal's arms.  Will held her close, smoothed her hair back from her
creamy-white forehead.

"Do what, Abbie-girl?"  He was all gentleness, all desirous of
understanding.

"Marry Ed Matthews."

Will caught her fiercely, held her closer, kissed her red lips,
laid his face to her cheek that was like Mayflower petals.  And
Abbie thought of ships that come home to the harbor.

"I should say I won't.  He could buy me in the draft . . . but he
can't buy my Abbie."

"I was afraid all the time, Will."

Will held her close,--smoothed her red-brown hair.

"Afraid of what, Abbie-girl?"

"I don't know.  Just afraid."

"You're not afraid with me?"

"Not with you, Will.  Why is that?"

"Because I love you and you love me."

"Yes, that's it . . . and I'm not afraid."

"Of life with me, Abbie-girl?"

"Not of anything, Will, with you."

"And you'll always love me?"

"Always, Will, . . . in this life and the next,"

The afternoon sun rays lengthened across the fields.  The honey-
locusts dropped in the lane.  The bees made noisy forages into the
hearts of the blossoms.  Will and Abbie lingered, all the melody of
life a-tune, all the heaven that they desired, there in the lane
under the honey-locusts.



CHAPTER VII


They were married on a winter's day of 1865, when Abbie was not
quite nineteen and Will was twenty-three.  The day was mild, even
warm, a phenomenon for that time of year.  "A weather-breeder,"
every one called it.  A few men shed their coats and worked in
their shirtsleeves during the middle of the day, so that they might
tell of it in years to come.

Maggie Mackenzie and Abbie and Mary set the furniture out of the
log house, so there would be room for the guests.  Janet's two
children were designated as a committee to keep the chickens off
the various pieces, but so excited were the youngsters over the
elaborate culinary preparations, that during a period of the
abandonment of their posts, an old hen flew up on top of the high
boy and laid an egg in the work-basket.

Abbie had made two new dresses from cloth sent out from Chicago.
One was a wine-colored merino, the other a brown alpaca, both made
fashionably full over hoop-skirts, with panniers at the side.  A
new little hat, the shape of a butter-bowl, with ribbon bows on it,
added much to her pride.

Toward evening of the great day, Abbie was all of a-flutter because
there were so many things to do.  There was still water to be
heated in a boiler on the stove and the wash-tub to be brought in
for her bath.  She had to skim a pan of milk, so that she could
make the skin of her face and hands soft with cream.  And she
nearly forgot the flour she was to brown in the oven with which to
powder her body.  Basil, fifteen now, helped take the hot water on
its perilous journey up the loft ladder with the saplings nailed
across for steps, and lifted up the wooden tub on his strong young
shoulder.

In spite of the unusually warm day, it was a little chilly for
one's ablutions in the loft room, but Abbie was young and vigorous
and used to it.  She put on her muslin chemise and pantalets and
her tight little stays, holding her breath until she could lace
them so that her two hands could almost span her waist.  Into her
bosom she slipped a little netting sack of dried rose petals, which
smelled faintly and tantalizingly of by-gone Junes.  Then over her
head she dropped and fastened the long collapsible hoop-skirt, with
its nineteen bands of white covered wires.  There were three white
muslin petticoats, starched almost to chinaware stiffness and
ruffled to the knees.  Abbie and her mother had hemmed seventy-two
yards of ruffles by hand.  Grandma Deal had one of the Howe
stitching machines, but not all families could afford one.  Then,
at last, she put on her wine-colored merino with its countless rows
of flutings of the same material and side panniers.

She was patting her hair into place and pulling out the long
shoulder curl, when her mother came puffingly, slowly, up the loft
ladder.  Mother was getting old now.  She was forty-seven,--heavy
and placid.  Her fat round face in its white cap with strings tied
under her two chins, appeared in the loft opening.  Abbie went over
to her and took her hand, so that she would not fall.  She saw that
her mother had the calf-skin covered box in her hand.

It was several moments before Maggie Mackenzie could talk,
puffingly, after the climb.  "Abbie, I want ye to have the pearls.
I'm savin' the fan for Mary.  Janet has the breast-pin, you know,
and Belle the shawl.  Belle always stuck 'n' hung fer the shawl.
And the pearls are fer you.  Ye'll ne'er starve as long as ye have
'em."  She opened the little hairy-skinned chest and took out a
small velvet box and from it the pearls themselves.  She twined
them through her short stubby fingers, their creamy shimmer
incongruous in the plump peasant hand.  "They were Basil's fine
mother's.  After she died, . . . Basil gave 'em to me in the days
of wealth.  Sure, but it wasn't the wealth that brought us
happiness.  Many's the time I've hated it . . . longin' for a
little house somewhere, . . . out of the wind 'n' rain, . . . 'n'
not many things at all, at all. . . ."

There were tears in Abbie's brown eyes when she took them.  She
held their creamy luster in the palm of her firm young hand.  Into
her mind came that old admiration for Isabelle Anders-Mackenzie.
The touch of the jewels seemed to bring her near, to call up the
vision of the lovely lady who was wearing them in the wide gold
frame,--the lovely lady with the sweeping velvet and the long
flowing plume and the fingers that tapered at the ends.  Some day
she was going to be like her.  Some day she, too, would be lovely
and gracious and wealthy.  All of life was before her.  All the
future was hers.  And that future now held Will, with his steady
gray eyes,--Will Deal who was like a quiet harbor.  Song, soft and
meltingly tender came to her lips:


     "Oh, the Lady of the Lea,
     Fair and young and gay was she,"


She held the pearls up to the wine-colored merino and looked in the
small oblong glass.


     "Beautiful exceedingly,
     The Lady of the Lea."


Then she turned to her mother.  Her face was flushed, tender.
"Thank you, Mother, . . . so much, . . . I'll keep them always.
But with the dark dress and the high neck, . . . I'll just not wear
them to-night.  After awhile when Will and I are wealthy, I'll wear
them.  And maybe we'll have, . . ."  Some reticences existing at
the time, the blood swept Abbie's face, ". . . maybe we'll have a
daughter some day and SHE can wear them on her wedding night, . . .
in white satin . . . and all the things that go with it . . ."

Abbie swept across the dingy loft room, her hoops swinging in wiry
bounces.  She knelt down by her mother's chair, her skirts forming
a huge circular mound, and laid her head against the older woman's.
"And besides, Mother, YOU understand, don't you . . . when you
follow your heart you don't need PEARLS to make you happy?"

It was time now.  Abbie went down the ladder with the saplings
nailed across for steps.  She had to go backward so that her hoops
could navigate the descension with some degree of modesty.  The
fiddlers were playing, "The Girl I Left Behind Me."  Will, looking
big and fine and handsome, was there in the black suit Grandma Deal
had made him.  Grandpa Deal, with his one arm and the kindly
twinkle in his ice-blue eyes, was there,--joking.  Grandma Deal, in
a black cap with black strings tied under the face that was covered
with the faint tracing of hosts of wrinkles, was there.  She was
nervous, fretful, scolding.  Why didn't the men stand back?  Why
didn't they shut that door?  Where was that preacher keeping
himself?  A thousand mental worries like a thousand gnats
irritating the peace of her mind.  Whole families had come in
wagons.  Regina Deal and her beau and Dr. and Mrs. Matthews were
the only ones who had come in high-top buggies.  When the doctor
and his wife came in, there was a little buzz of excitement, some
whispering that they wondered whether or not it was true that young
Dr. Ed had wanted Abbie.

A solemn hush fell on the company.

"Inasmuch as we are gathered here together in the sight of the
Lord."  Suddenly, Abbie wanted to halt the ceremony.  There seemed
nothing in her mind but that odd thought of a wind rushing by, a
wind she could not stop,--Time, going by,--Time which she could not
stay.  Stop Time for a minute, until she could think what queer
thing was happening to her.

"Do you take this woman, . . . sickness, . . . health, . . . 'til
death, . . ."  What a queer thing to talk about now,--death,--when
it was life that was before them.  ". . . this man . . . lawfully
wedded husband . . . ?"

"I do."  _But, oh Will . . . .  Will . . . who are you?  Do I know
you?_

And then, quite suddenly, Abbie Mackenzie was Abbie Deal.  The
fiddlers played "Money Musk," and "Turkey in the Straw."  The
company danced,--square dances of intricate design.  Grandpa Deal
wanted to take a partner, but Grandma Deal said no, it was foolish
for an old man, fifty-five.  But Maggie O'Conner Mackenzie danced,--
alone, lightly and puffingly, in the middle of the floor, to:


     "Oh the days of the Kerry dancing,
     Oh the days when my heart was young."


There were biscuits and chickens and cakes and cider to be eaten
from tables formed by putting long boards over saw-horses.  And
then, more dancing.

Will Deal's dark serious face bent low above Abbie's creamy-
petaled, flushed one.  A long row of love-apples stood in the
window.



CHAPTER VIII


Will and Abbie drove to Grandpa Deal's in a two-wheeled cart behind
an old white mare.  So slowly did they drive that several passed
them on the river road,--Grandpa and Grandma Deal and Louise in a
lumber-wagon with a fine big team, and Regina Deal and her beau in
the new high-top buggy.  Grandpa laughed and called out some saucy
jokes, but Grandma told him to hush his foolishness and 'tend to
his driving.

Will and Abbie had the front bedroom of the big five-roomed log-
house for their own.  In the weeks that followed, Will went about
the regular farm work for his father, and Abbie put her young
shoulder to the wheel of the housework.  For Will's sake she tried
to meet his mother's petty nagging with forbearance.  But it wore
on her like the constant dripping of water on a stone.  Grandma
Deal was a chronic grumbler and a born pessimist.  She saw bad
signs in Nature's most ordinary activities.  If a dog ate grass, if
a bird flew through the house, if the moon rose from a cloud, the
direst things were about to happen.  And life meant nothing to her,
apparently, but work.  The first break of day and the last ray of
sunlight saw her at the hard tasks of the housework.  And when all
other duties seemed done, she immediately brought out a box of
intricate quilt blocks, The Rose of Sharon and The Star of
Bethlehem, The Rising Sun or the Log Cabin.  For Grandpa Deal,
Abbie had nothing but love.  His Yankee drollness could always
bring a bubbling laugh to her lips and his stump of an arm gave her
added tenderness toward him.  Looking at the two, she used to
wonder how he could keep so cheerful.  He never crossed Grandma,
never argued with her in any way but jovially, never lost his
temper.  "Now, Mother," he would say, "can't you see the funny side
of that?"

"No, I can't," she would retort, "and neither could you if you'd
stop your foolish jokin' and keep your mind on your work."

It never went into a quarrel.  When it approached one, Grandpa
would go whistling out to the barn to work.  Yes, Abbie loved
Will's father better than his mother.  In the same way did she
enjoy and dislike Louise and Regina.  Louise was energetic,
pleasant, peace-loving.  Regina was selfish, a mischief-maker and a
shirk.  The young farmer with whom Regina was now keeping company
had come first to see Louise.  Although Abbie knew little of the
circumstances, she felt quite definitely sure that Regina had
maneuvered the transposition with adroitness.

All spring, Abbie, fearful that the family might think she was not
doing her part, took more than her share of the household duties.
She helped boil the maple sap down into sugar, swept and dusted,
baked and cooked, and took over the entire care of the chickens.
Louise worked with her faithfully, but Regina slipped out from
under the tasks with all the agility of an eel.

And then Abbie was not well, . . .

"She's not doing her share," Abbie overheard Grandma's sputtering.
"I told you it was too good to be true.  I said all the time it
wouldn't last."

"Now, Mother," Grandpa's voice came gently, patiently, "I think I
know what's the matter.  You wouldn't want her to overdo."

"Overdo, nothing.  I brought eight babies into the world.  And I
ain't ever seen the time anybody cared if _I_ was overdoin'."

"Now, Mother, I wouldn't say that.  It was hard, but you was
healthy and I always got help for you."

"Yes, a passel o' neighbor girls that wasn't worth their weight in
salt.  Now, I s'pose it'll fall on me to take care o' Abbie.
Nobody cares if I die or not."

Abbie heard Grandpa go whistling down to the barn.  Then she threw
herself on the bed and cried tears of sensitiveness and discontent.

More and more she wanted her own home.  If it were no better than
the old sheep shed that she lived in one summer when she was a
little girl, at least it would be their own.  Will was good to her,--
so kind and understanding, but he did not seem to sense how much
she wanted a home of her own.

Abbie's baby was born in January of 1867.  Roads were drifted and
Doc Matthews, in a coonskin cap with the tail down his back, came
on a horse, his saddle-bags full of quinine and calomel.

Nature had to take its course without much aid from its handmaid,
Science--and Nature took a fiendish course with Abbie.  Two days
and a night she wrestled with Nature, as Jacob wrestled with the
angel.  And then she had a son.  Lying there after her ordeal, with
the baby on her arm, she knew the age-old surge of mother-love.
All her old love of life seemed to concentrate on one thing,--the
little soft, helpless bundle.  The world of romance, of courtly men
and lovely ladies was a world of unreality,--and only Will and the
little son were worth her thoughts.

Mackenzie Deal, they named him, but it was too big a mouthful for
so small a bit of humanity, and it was not long until every one had
shortened it to Mack.  Will was inordinately proud of him.  Grandpa
Deal and Louise came in several times a day to see him, but Regina
was not overly interested.  Grandma Deal sputtered about the care
of him.  Why didn't Abbie keep more shawls around him?  Why did she
let the sun shine across the bed that way?  Why did she ask the
doctor all those questions when he didn't know as much about babies
as a mother?

When Abbie was up, life grew richer, more full.  Her voice took on
a mellowness.  With the baby in the high-backed wooden rocker, she
crooned old lullabies which Maggie O'Conner had brought from the
whins of Bally-poreen.

As little Mack grew that year and crept and then stood on fat
wobbling legs by the chairs, Abbie's desire for a home of her own
reached gigantic proportions.

"You know, Will," she brought up the subject in the spring, a
little shyly, half hesitatingly, "I wish we could have a home of
our own.  Your folks . . ."  She dropped her eyes that Will might
not see the telltale evasion in them,--"are good to me, but I'd so
like my own little house.  It needn't be half as big . . . or
nice . . ."

To Abbie's surprise Will turned on her in a sort of suppressed
fury.  "I don't like it either, you needn't think.  I'm thinking
every day what to do.  What am I here?  A hired man for Father.
I'll never get anywhere.  And now we've got the baby . . . I'm glad
you've been the one to bring it up.  It decides me.  We're going
out to Nebraska to start for ourselves."

"NEBRASKA?"  It had the sound of South Africa.

"Yes, . . . there are too many settlers here.  And as long as I'm
anywhere around here I'd always have to work for Father.  It ain't
right, I tell you.  And another thing, Abbie, our boy sha'n't be
tied down.  He can do what he wants.  And we're going to Nebraska,--
you and I and little Mack."

"Oh, no, Will, not out there.  Anywhere around here, but not to
that far-off place.  Why, Will, . . . my mother . . . my brothers
and sisters . . . your folks . . . they're ALL around here . . ."

"You can come back to visit them, I promise you that, Abbie,
whenever you want to.  It's a wonderful opportunity.  It's the poor
man's country.  We can get railroad land dirt cheap . . . or lease
school lands near the river or even push on farther west and
homestead."

"It's dangerous, Will.  There are Indians."

"Well, so are there Indians here.  A whole camp of 'em over by
Fisher's Lake."

"But they're peaceable, . . . and those out there . . .  Oh,
Will . . ."

"It's been fourteen years since the government made the treaty with
the Indians out there . . . fourteen years ago, they gave up their
title to all that land out there bordering on the Missouri.  I
guess when it's been that long settling, we'll find it in pretty
good shape. . . ."  Will was talking definitely, stubbornly, as
though the question were settled.  Abbie was so frightened at the
turn the argument was taking that she studiously kept her voice
calm.

"The baby, Will, . . . we have to think of him.  There won't be
good schools . . . or doctors . . ."

"It IS of him I'm thinking . . . the big future for him out in the
newer country.  He'll be a farmer.  All the Deals have always been
for the land. . . ."

Fathers have always thought it,--that their sons belong only to
them.  Small wonder that Will Deal made the mistake of forgetting
something, forgetting that the baby was also a Mackenzie, that his
mother held her head as Isabelle Anders-Mackenzie had held hers in
the wide gold frame,--that her hair had the gold-brown tints of the
lovely lady,--that her long slender fingers tapered at the ends.

"But, Will . . ."  Never had Abbie so thoroughly felt that queer
sensation of being swept along by the wind which she could not
stop,--of Time, which she could not stay.  "Will . . . my
voice . . . Mrs. Whitman . . .  Every one thinks I ought to do
something with it.  And my painting, Will . . . to go away out
there . . ."

"Oh, we'll find you good teachers out there.  No, Abbie, I've been
thinking it over a long time and it's my chance.  We're going in
the summer.  I'll be getting everything ready.  The army money will
buy the wagon and oxen and the land, . . . and I'll make up my mind
soon about it, . . . whether to buy near the river, or homestead
farther out."

So Will had said he was going West.  The era of this freedom had
not dawned.  Abbie Deal's man had said he was going to Nebraska,
and Abbie had to go too.  It was as simple as that, then.

They began preparations, with Abbie still protesting that Nebraska
was too far away and too uncivilized.

"It's been a state since March of last year," Will gave equal
arguments in its favor.  "They've got the site all chosen for the
new capital.  It's named Lincoln.  Queer when you stop to think
about it that an old friend of Father's should ever get big enough
to be president and have a town named after him,--ain't it?"

But Abbie was not thinking of the recently martyred President.
"Yes, but they say the place they've chosen is away out on the
prairie with just two or three log houses."  She was not so willing
to believe the best of the infant state as was Will.

He sought out all the good news he could find to cheer her.  Once
he brought an Omaha newspaper.  "Talk about a new country, . . ."
he was enthusiastic.  "Everything's as citified as can be in
Omaha, . . . and we won't be so far from there.  The paper says it
has fifteen thousand inhabitants, . . . a regular city.  How's this
for you, eleven churches and five schools, and five banks.  It says,
'Dealers in gold dust, bullion, coin and exchange.'  And the Union
Pacific's got an overland mail route clear to Laramie, with two
trains every day."

"Yes, and you read on a little farther.  You're leaving out some
things.  I saw that paper myself, Will Deal."

Will laughed.  "Oh, five breweries and sixty saloons, . . . that
ain't so bad.  And besides there's a hoop factory."

"Well, I don't care about that.  They might even go out of style
some day, although Regina thinks they never will.  I wouldn't care
if they did.  Even if they do make you look stylish, they're not
comfortable."

And all the time Abbie was getting together her little possessions,
and Will was preparing the outfit.  He had intended to make a new
ox-yoke, had in fact already cut the maple, and some pliable
hickory for the bows, when Mother Mackenzie gave him the sturdy
yoke that she had used fourteen years before on the trip out from
Illinois.  He painted the names of his ox team, "Red" and "Baldy,"
on it and in the center, "Nebraska, 1868."

After some correspondence with an old army friend, Will bought his
land, "sight unseen."  He was pleased with his purchase.  It was
railroad land and he paid two dollars an acre for it.  Some people
from Michigan by the name of Lutz were getting two quarter-sections
near him.

"It's only thirty-five miles from Nebraska City and about ten miles
from Weeping Water.  The county seat, Plattsmouth, has a hotel and
some houses and a grist mill . . .  It only takes a couple of hours
to grind a sack of corn."

"Yes, providing you've got the CORN."  Abbie could not yet enter
heartily into the plans.

"Oh, we'll have the corn all right.  They say the soil is the
finest and blackest you ever saw."

And then, before they were ready, Abbie knew that she was to be a
mother again.

On a morning in July they started.  Red and Baldy, in front of
Grandpa Deal's, stood hitched to the prairie-schooner in their
stupid, stolid way.  All the possessions were in the wagon, covered
now with its new white canvas.  Every one was there to see them
off.  Mother Mackenzie, with her pudding-bag-shaped body and her
blue-black Irish eyes and her white cap, brought the calf-skin-
covered box and the Seth Thomas clock with the little brown church
painted on the glass.

"You take the chest, Abbie . . . I want ye to have it.  You can
keep the pearls in it.  And the clock, too, . . . it seems like
it's yours.  I mind how ye was al'a's sayin' no one could stop
Time."

The Reverend and Mrs. Whitman came.  Mrs. Whitman had a box of
paints and some canvas for Abbie.  "Keep on with your little
painting talent, Abbie," she told her.

"Yes," the Reverend Whitman said, a little pompously, "and with
your music.  We can do with our lives whatever we will, you know."

"Yes, I know," agreed Abbie.

Grandma Deal, in her black cap, was sputtering because she had not
had time to put her bread in loaves.  Why didn't they tie the
chicken-coop on better?  Why hadn't they started the day before?
The weather looked as though it might storm.  What did they bother
with a dog for?  There, a bird flew in front of the oxen,--that was
a bad sign.

Doctor Matthews stopped in his new top-buggy.

Grandpa Deal's ice-blue eyes were clouded with sadness.  "Good luck
to you, my boy.  And Abbie, a real daughter couldn't have been
kinder."

Abbie's heart was in her throat.  Oh, stop the wind rushing by.
Stop Time for a few minutes, until she could think whether this
move was the thing to do.  Life was not right.  It was not meant
that you should leave your own this way.  It was not meant that
weeks and weeks of travel should separate you from your folks.  The
baby, little Mack, would forget Mother Mackenzie and kind old
Grandpa Deal.  And the next baby would never know them.

Only one thing gave her strength for the parting.  Only one thing
gave her courage to make the long journey to the raw new state.
Her love for Will.  Abbie's love for her husband had retained its
sweetness and its ardor.  And in her heart she knew that as much as
she cared for her people,--as dear as were her mother and sisters
and the old settlement to her,--they did not outweigh her love for
him.  If being with Will meant making a new home in a far,
unsettled country, why, then, she chose to journey bravely to the
far, unsettled country.

Abbie threw up her head fearlessly.  "Well, we're ready."

"Good-by . . ."

"Take good care of little Mack."

"Oh, Abbie, Abbie . . ."

"Mother . . . good-by . . ."

"Janet, dear, . . . Mary . . . Belle . . . Louise . . .  Thank you
all for all you did . . .  Good-by . . .  Yes, we'll write as soon
as . . .  Kiss Grandma, Mack-baby . . ."

Will was boyishly gay.  For the first time he felt free from "the
folks,"--his own master.

"Well, here we go."  He cracked the long black snaky-looking whip.
"Well come back rich."  He laughed in excitement.

The wagon lurched,--steadied,--moved on.

"Good-by . . . good-by . . . good-by . . ."

Hands were in the air,--a sunbonnet waved,--an apron was thrown
over some one's head.  There was sobbing.  Abbie's hand was on her
hard, dry throat.  It felt as though it must burst.  Stop the wind.
Stop Time for a minute.  The wagon lurched ahead.

Far back in the road Abbie could still see the little group,
painted flatly against the white of the fence and the green of the
honey-locusts.

Will's eyes, full of the light of hope and courage, looked to the
west.  But Abbie's, tear-misted, clung to the east.



CHAPTER IX


It was three weeks later, on a hot morning, that Will and Abbie and
the other two families, whose land was to join theirs, broke camp,
twenty miles out of Plattsmouth, where they had crossed the Platte
on the ferry.  The journey over western Iowa had been one endless
lurching through acres of dry grass and sunflowers, thickets of
sumac, wild plum and Indian currant.  And now, save for the little
clump of natural growth near the wagons, there was still not a tree
in sight, not a shrub nor bush, a human being nor any living thing,--
nothing but the coarse prairie grass.

The heads of the two Lutz families were brothers, Oscar and Henry.
Oscar had a wife and three small children, Henry, a young bride and
her little six-year-old orphaned nephew.  Grandpa Lutz, a mild-
mannered, gentle old man, had also come into the new country with
his sons.  They had traveled from Michigan, the two younger men by
wagons, several weeks prior to the others.  The women, children and
the old gentleman had gone by train to Quincy, Illinois, where they
had taken a river steamer to Hannibal, Missouri, crossing the
Missouri to St. Joseph and taking a boat up the Missouri to
Plattsmouth.  There the men, having preceded the party, had waited
a week for the boat to appear.

"I'd go down every day and kick the post the boat was goin' to tie
up to," Oscar Lutz was telling Will.

Will laughed.  "What for?"

"Oh, I don't know.  Had to take all the delay out on somethin' or
somebody, so I kicked the post instead o' Henry, here."

Sarah, the bride, was a pretty girl.  Her hair was crow-black, her
cheeks pink as prairie roses, her little black beady eyes had merry
wrinkles of laughter around them.  Life seemed a joke to her.  This
forenoon she had decorated the wagon with Indian paint brush, which
burned like flames of fire against the dingy white of the canvas
cover.

Abbie, in her illness from heat and fatigue and pregnancy, could
only sit and wonder how young Sarah Lutz could be so happy and
active.  Nothing seemed to worry or frighten her.  Apparently she
had not even been disturbed by the story of the graves at Eight-
Mile Grove,--the seven graves under the little clump of trees
fenced around with slabs which the blacksmith there had told them
were brought from the saw-mill at Rock Bluff.  They had asked him
innocently enough who was buried there.  Abbie almost shivered now
at the thought of his answer.

"Claim jumpers 'n horse thieves 'n sich," he had said
indifferently.  And, shifting his tobacco, had added definitely,
"Hung.  Vigilance committee."  And more grimly specific, "To that
there tree."

"Hung?"  Some one had repeated in the silence that followed.

"Yep.  Hang 'em in summer," he had explained cheerfully, "'n' poke
'em under the ice in winter."

Abbie shuddered again at the memory of the grim voice.

The journey on from camp was across the vast prairie itself.  As
the morning passed, the heat rolled over Abbie in waves like the
rippling of the grass.  She looked out from the canvas to see Will
plodding along, his shoulders drooping.  He had not called back any
gay cheery thing all forenoon.  The grass out there,--would it
never cease to wave?  There were four rhythmic beats like music,
but music which irritated rather than soothed one:  Blow . . . wave
. . . ripple . . . dip.  It beat upon her brain, so that she turned
wearily away from the sight.  And then, as one fascinated by
something distasteful, she looked again.  Yes, it never ceased from
those four beats:  Blow, . . . wave, . . . ripple, . . . dip, . . .
blow . . . wave . . . ripple . . . dip . . .

Little Mack was sleeping, and Abbie dropped over beside him.  She
closed her eyes and kept her mind on the lane beside Grandpa Deal's
with the honey-locusts and the maples, on the black walnut grove
back of his house and the hazel-nut thickets around the
schoolhouse.  How cool and pleasant the schoolhouse looked with the
green shutters against the white siding!  How good it would seem to
draw water from Grandpa Deal's well.  In fancy she pulled up the
bucket with the windlass and put her face into its cold, dark
depths.

She slept,--and sleeping, walked in the cool of the maples and oaks
in the Big Woods, picked anemones and creamy white Mayflowers.  She
dropped down in a bed of cool ferns behind Janet Graves' house in
the timber.  Suddenly, the wagon creaked and lurched and she opened
her eyes.  Hurriedly sitting up, only half cognizant of where she
was, she looked out through the canvas.  The sun shone hot on the
flat prairie.  Blow, . . . wave, . . . ripple, . . . dip. . . .  An
intense nausea seized her,--the mal de mer of the prairie-schooner
passenger lurching over the hot, dry inland sea.

Later in the forenoon they sighted a fringe of trees against the
unclouded sky.  It seemed an oasis,--or was it a mirage to vanish
when they should come to it?

"The Weeping Water," Henry Lutz called back.  And they knew they
were getting near to the new home.

They crossed the shallow, winding stream not far from a stone mill.
A man with milk-pails in his hands paused to watch the cavalcade.
Will, walking by his ox team, was wet to the boot-tops.

The man grinned and called out jovially:  "You've got your baptism
of the new country now.  You're branded.  You'll never go back."

"I don't want to go back," Will called out with equal jocosity.
Abbie in the wagon almost moaned from nausea, heat and homesickness.

On the other side of the stream there stood a team of oxen hitched
to a covered wagon so odd-looking, that even Abbie sat up in
interest.  The wagon-box was a rowboat painted a gaudy blue, the
bow curving toward the stolid oxen's buttocks, the stern forming
the base of the rear canvas doorway.  A man with his wife and two
babies waited for the others to come up.  Gus Reinmueller, he said
his name was, and jerking an indifferent thumb toward his wife, he
gave a laconic, "My voman, Christine."

Christine seemed as stolid as the oxen, her face as patiently
expressionless.  One could not have told whether she was old or
young.  Her colorless hair was braided in small braids and wound
flat from ear to ear, looking like a small oval-shaped rug pinned
on the back of her head.

This was the third family, then, to be going up into the same
section with the Deals.  And together, after a lunch, the wagons
journeyed on to the west.  In a long, straggling line they
journeyed stolidly and silently toward the sun.  Of them all, only
Sarah Lutz sometimes called out a cheery comment.  Abbie lay on the
wagon bottom, so ill with nausea and heat, that it seemed she could
never again take any interest in life.

Toward evening another long fringe of trees penciled itself against
the dipping sun.

"Stove Creek," Henry Lutz called back.  And they knew they were at
their destination.

There were old buffalo wallows along the creek banks, shallow
declivities, where the huge beasts had rolled and stamped out the
mud.  The sight of buffalo chips, too, reminded them that the time
was not long past since the shaggy fellows had ambled leisurely
along the creek bed.  They crossed the creek, which was little more
than a ravine now, with its few inches of water.  And then Henry
Lutz, who was in the lead, stopped.

"Well, here we are," he called when Will and Abbie had caught up
with him.  "This is yours."  He had a rude paper plan in his hand.
"Mine lies over there to the west.  Oscar's is to the north of
mine, and Reinmueller's,--"  Gus and Christine had come up in the
ridiculous boat wagon.  "Reinmueller's is exactly south of Deal's."

Abbie crawled out of the wagon-box.  She was stiff and ill and her
head ached from the blinding sunlight.  Sarah Lutz, with her round
rosy cheeks and her beady black eyes, was out of her wagon, too,
and over to Abbie's.

"Well, you're home."  She was chuckling in her merry way.  "This is
where you live,--and my good gracious,--you've got callers."  She
shook hands with Abbie in mock formality.  "May I come in and sit a
while?  Yes, thank you, I'll take the rocking-chair, Mrs. Deal.
Yes, thanks, I'll have a cup of tea."

It made Abbie laugh a little, too, the nonsense of it at such a
time.  And then, "Boo!"  Abbie squealed and jumped and ran for the
wagon.  A little dark, lizard-shaped thing had darted close to her
feet with the speed of lightning.

"They're just swifts," Will told her, "as harmless as mice."

"Yes, and just as horrid," Abbie called back.

They camped in a group for the night.  It made quite a party: Will,
Abbie and little Mack, the Oscar Lutzes with their three children,
Henry and Sarah Lutz with Grandpa Lutz and little Dan, the orphaned
nephew, Gus and Christine Reinmueller and their two babies.

The wagons formed a circle, with a single campfire in the center.
The sun slipped down behind the rim of the world.  One of the men
found a spring in the creek bed and brought water.  The others fed
the horses and led them down to drink.  The women folks got supper
and washed the plates and cups at the side of the creek bed.  The
children were put to sleep in the wagons and the older people
gathered around the fire.  The stars came out, pale yellow flowers
in the sky's own prairie.

A coyote howled.  Another answered.  It made Abbie think of a night
on the journey from Illinois when she was eight, and yet this was
different.  Then, they had been close to the woods,--the sheltering
woods.  They had heard all the little night creatures at work, all
the tiny rustlings of the timber.  But this, paradoxically, was a
silent noise.  There was complete silence,--save for those distant
coyotes.  Silence,--save for a faint sound of shivering grass.
Silence, so deep, that it roared in its vast vacuum.  Silence,--
grass,--stars.  The group around the fire seemed suddenly too small
to be alone in the still vastness, too inadequate and helpless.

What if--?  Even as her fear formed itself into thought, she saw
through the shadows a figure--and another--and others steal with
panther-like tread between the wagons and the creek bed.



CHAPTER X


Abbie could frame no words.  She could only reach forth her hand
and touch Will's arm, a nightmare of fear upon her.  Will and the
other men of the party were also looking toward the shadowy figures
in the dark.

"They're friendly," Will whispered, "there's nothing to be afraid
of."

Friendly?  Were they friendly?

All night the Indians camped near the creek bed a little to the
north.  Abbie, with Mack upon her arm, did not close her eyes.
Only a year and a half before, the Fort Phil Kearney massacre had
occurred.  Only two months before, Red Cloud had sent word that he
would not sign the great Fort Laramie treaty.  They were so much
nearer hostile Indians here than back home.  You couldn't tell from
what tribe these were.  You couldn't tell in the dark how many
there were.  All night Abbie lay in an agony of fear, her body
tense, her little son at her breast.

In the morning, fears were dissipated.  If there had been any evil
from them it would have been during the night.  They proved to be a
small group of Pawnees, with their squaws and papooses.  They had
dozens of skinned chickens across their ponies, the flies thick
upon them.

One of Henry Lutz's horses was missing from the bunch which had
been staked together.  After a half-concealed conference among the
men folks, it was deemed wiser to accept the loss and not question
the matter.  One of the braves evidently had ridden away on it.
The Indians ate, broke camp, came over to the settlers and examined
their outfits.  A brave pointed to Oscar Lutz's wife, who was not
exactly dainty in size, and shrugged massive shoulders jovially, at
which the other bucks showed symptoms of ingrowing mirth.  They
took their time to peer into all the wagons.  One man picked up a
little bright-colored shoulder shawl of Sarah Lutz's and coolly
transferred it to the shoulders of his squaw.  The others gave a
few grunts of satisfaction, fell into a long straggling line and
started toward the northwest, the red and black of the appropriated
shawl growing fainter in the distance.

Abbie wondered if she ever again would pass through such a fearsome
night.

As Henry Lutz had said, the Reinmueller place was south of the Deal
acreage and his own joined it at the west.  Abbie was glad to find
that Sarah Lutz