A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      Spring Came on Forever (1935)
Author:     Bess Streeter Aldrich
eBook No.:  0500651h.html
Edition:    1
Language:   English
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Date first posted:          June 2005
Date most recently updated: June 2005

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SPRING CAME ON FOREVER

Bess Streeter Aldrich

1935

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

In the telling of a story the narrator takes a bit from life as definitely and completely as one would cut out a paper doll, trimming away all of the flimsy sheet excepting the figure. A section of real life is not so detached and finished, for the causes and consequences of it reach backward and forward and across the world. For that reason no mere story can ever be complete, no family history contain a beginning or an end.

This is the story of two midwestern families and the strange way in which their paths crossed. It begins in Illinois in the year 1866, and ends in Nebraska in the present one, severed from all that went before and all that will continue beyond--a thing of incompleteness.

Matthias Meier was twenty-one in that year of 1866, tall and stalwart of form, with only a healed red furrow across his upper left arm to show for the last day's fighting of his Illinois regiment.

We find him, now, sitting on a high stool before a sloping desk in the office of his uncle. Office, it may have been called, but the word was something of a misnomer, for it was no separate room, merely the end of a dingy salesroom in connection with the foundry of which his relative was sole owner.

The whole place gave an impression of scowling blackness. Iron coffee-pots, flat-irons, long-legged frying-pans and short-handled spiders occupied several shelves; and the larger utensils, huge kettles and boilers, stood on the floor in disarray, with plowshares shouldering them, as well as rough kegs containing nails of various sizes. At the opposite side of the long room, through an opening, one could see into the blacksmith shop with its anvil and multitudinous horseshoes hanging about on spikes as though this were the luckiest place in all Illinois. Iron was everywhere. Iron was king. One felt there was no other metal or substance in the world.

Matthias, now, was going over an old ledger in which accounts had been kept for a dozen years, and not very accurately either, he was deciding. A master-hand at the molding, his uncle was less punctilious about records of purchases and sales than his more mathematical-minded nephew.

Late morning sunshine filtering through a spattered and cobwebby window fell across the yellow pages of the book.

It was March, and apparently it was going to be an advanced one. The maples were feeling the push of the sap against the dark of their bodies. The hickory and oaks of the virgin timber-land not far away were vaguely responding to the stir of life. In the pulpiness of the bog the trailing arbutus would soon be showing its mauve-colored face,--on the hillside a thousand lavender crocuses spring forth to the call of the sun.

If Matthias Meier, too, vaguely felt the call and the push of the springtime, he was quite unaware of it, and merely checked and figured in the thumb-blackened and well-worn pages of the yellow book.

Up to this time, the room had been quiet save for the bumbling of a single advance guard of bottle-green flies and the sound of some one cutting timber far away. But into the stillness now came the creaking sound of wheels in the yard, the pull of horses' feet from the stickiness of mud and the lusty "whoa" of an unseen driver.

Matthias uncoiled his long legs from their crowded posture under the high table and swung himself off the stool. He even walked over to the opened door, although it went through his mind at the time that it was rather an undignified procedure to hurry out as though customers were so few and far between that they needed a committee of welcome.

A large and sandy-bearded man was swinging himself over the lumber-wagon's wheel preparatory to entering. But it was not at the man Matthias looked. For who, indeed, would look elsewhere with such a flower-like face before one as that of the girl in the green silk bonnet? Her full lips were rosy pink, and in their velvet blueness her wide eyes were like cornflowers. The braid of her soft hair, wound round her head and showing just at the edge of the bonnet, was the color of cornsilk before the summer sun has seared it.

Not that Matthias had time or inclination for any poetic rhapsodies. He merely took in the composite whole with a sensing of the girl's dainty perfection, and the fleeting thought that here was a little Dresden shepherdess.

The girl, in turn, may have been not unpleased at the appearance of the young foundryman, for Matthias was strong-featured and very good to look upon. But so intent was he just now upon the loveliness of the girl that he found himself staring a little stupidly at the man coming toward him.

"Good-morning to you, sir."

"Guten Morgen."

When he heard the German tongue, Matthias, too, turned to the language of his ancestors for, although English schooled, he could speak it readily. So in the German he asked politely: "What can I do for you?"

"I'm Wilhelm Stoltz," the man answered much more loudly than the short distance between the two demanded. "I want to look at the large kettles."

"Certainly. I'll be glad to show you." Matthias hesitated, and looked toward the pretty occupant of the wagon sitting rather like a little queen on her high and homely throne. "Perhaps the young lady would like to come and see them, too."

She smiled. "I can give help, Father,"--this, too, in the German tongue,--and began gathering her voluminous skirts in a little mittened hand.

"Nein," the father said brusquely. "It does not take two."

Matthias winced at the domineering tone and felt an embarrassment for the girl who in spite of her youth was apparently no child. So it was with relief and perhaps something more which he had not then analyzed that he heard the man call back over a huge shoulder: "Come, then, if you must." But even so, the father stomped his way on down a path toward the first of the pits, leaving the girl to climb over the high wheel as best she might.

At once Matthias sprang to the wagon and gave her his hand. So daintily small was she that a heady feeling of the strength of his masculinity surged over him as he assisted her to alight in a billowing of skirts.

"It is a nice day," he said a bit inanely in the German.

She nodded gayly: "Meadow larks are singing, and I smell spring."

Quite true. He noticed it for the first time. Meadow-larks were singing. You could smell spring.

He walked behind her into the dingy room, noting the pretty way she carried her shoulders and held her head. A patrician-looking little thing, not solid and big-boned like so many of the German girls thereabout.

Inside, the two customers moved among the pots and kettles, the nails and plowshares, the man stomping about noisily as though he would tell the business world that no one could pull wool over his eyes, the girl daintily holding back the dark cloth of her skirts and the wide fringe of her flowing shawl.

Each time the man asked the prices in the German tongue and was answered in kind by Matthias, he blustered: "Too much," or "The price . . . it is crazy," until Matthias heartily disliked him, so that if it had not been for the girl he would no doubt have lost a sale by some ill-advised retort.

He could read in the girl's heightened color her embarrassment, and so did his best to make her feel at ease. Once while the blustering parent was squeaking in his cowhide boots at the end of the long room, Matthias pointed out to her a special kettle. "This one I made myself," he said to her very low. "Mostly my uncle does the kettle molding."

The kettle was huge and faultless in its rounded symmetry. Matthias had been painstaking to make the wooden pattern absolutely right,--the inside mold called the core and the outside one called the jacket,--had poured molten metal carefully between them and covered the whole thoroughly with sand to keep every particle of air from it while it cooled.

"It is perfect." She glanced up shyly.

Vollkommen, was it? Matthias, looking down on her daintiness, thought she, too, was perfect. "I wish then, that this should be the one you choose. A perfect kettle for . . ." He wanted to say "a perfect little lady," but that would have been too bold, so he finished "for you." But, after all, he knew the words were synonymous.

She looked up again through long lashes. But this time a little twinkle invaded the blueness that lay behind them and a smile just faintly curled at the edge of her lips: "Do not, then, say to him that this is the one to buy," she suggested demurely.

And Matthias, sharing her little secret of filial disloyalty, grinned sympathetically and said: "That I will not."

"How much is this one? . . . and this? . . . and this?" Wilhelm Stoltz was asking.

And then Matthias Meier did a foolish and unaccountable thing. He priced the kettle which was of his own molding at a lower figure than his uncle had put upon it.

Stoltz looked them all over again, craftily, suspiciously, thumping their sides for the answering sound of the metal, and then said suddenly and loudly, as though Matthias might discover his mistake: "This one I take."

Matthias looked quickly at the girl and she gave him the ghost of a swiftly mischievous and understanding smile, so that he felt the same headiness of spirit and body which he had experienced before. For with no words she was saying: "I am glad it is your kettle." And Matthias was saying: "I made it for you before I had ever seen you." The messages were as plain as spoken language. No one knows how it can be transmitted,--this Esperanto of Youth. It just is so.

Wilhelm Stoltz took out a leather pouch, counted out the money into the palm of Matthias' hand, lifted the huge iron kettle as though he must get away with his bargain before any attempt to rectify a possible mistake had been made, and said loudly: "Come now, Amalia, we must go." He pronounced it A-moll-ea in the German way.

Coughing and wheezing and blustering, he stalked ahead of the two young people out to the wagon. And Matthias, heady and bold, was saying: "Your name, then, is Amalia?" He, too, pronounced it Amollea, letting his voice linger over the liquid syllables.

"Yes."

"It's . . . like . . . like a bit of music."

And when she smiled up at that, he asked quickly while there was time: "Where do you live?"

"Over the Plum Creek road way . . . on the far side of the Big Woods. But . . ."

But what, Amalia? Say it now before you have taken away with you that which you should not accept. Or have left behind you that which you should not give.

But Amalia did not say it. And when Matthias turned back into the dullness of the room magic gifts had been exchanged.

And so--such is life--had Wilhelm Stoltz driven up to Peter McClure's hardware store, or sent to Chicago, or even to Springfield for an iron kettle, or, for that matter, had Amalia but finished her sentence, the history of future lives and of a state might have been different. Some call it Providence, others Fate. But, Providence or Fate, "life is a loom weaving illusion."

As it was, Matthias stood looking a little bewildered now at the remaining kettles and the plowshares and the spiders, as ugly as ever, but somehow different. How queer that into so gloomy a place should have come something so shining-winged! He set himself again to the task of the book-work and, although the same sand-colored pages of a half-hour before confronted him, they were now strangely illustrated with shadowy half-pictures of blue eyes and rosy lips and hair the color of cornsilks before the summer sun has seared it.

After a time his uncle came in, a quick-moving little man with a bushy graying beard. "Any one here?"

"The Stoltzes . . . a man and daughter." Matthias realized that he was making the simple statement with a certain degree of consciousness.

"Hm! Wilhelm Stoltz, that would be! Up the Plum Creek way . . . one of the several Lutheran families scattered about."

Even now "up Plum Creek way," Amalia and her father in the high wagon were lumbering along toward their farm which was the first one just out of the Big Woods on the timber road.

The journey had taken much of the afternoon, for it lay over prairie and creek-beds, through muddy roads and timber-land, and the horses which they drove were heavy brood mares, their legs large and clumsy and shaggy with hair.

The two said little as they rode. Sometimes the father made a gruff comment on the stickiness of the mud, the amount of the last rainfall, or the slowness of the horses. Always it pertained to the material world and especially that part of it which lay close at hand. And always when he spoke Amalia agreed with him. For adverse opinions from his daughter or any other human were not welcomed. So, riding beside the bulky form of her father, Amalia lived in her own world, not always the material one and most definitely not that part of it which was close at hand.

Once she volunteered: "The young man . . . he was pleasant."

Her father grunted and said gruffly: "You will do well not to let your thoughts linger on strange young men." Immediately after which he turned toward her so abruptly that she jumped from the sheer fright that, having done this very thing, her thoughts were betraying her.

"You are not doing so?"

"Nein," Amalia said demurely.

But thoughts are acrobats, agile and quite often untrustworthy. So now, with impish disregard of the command, they hopped about quite easily. They asked Amalia innocently why the nice young man wanted to know where she lived. They suggested with subtle art the possibility that he would try to find out. And then when the gruff person at her side questioned their activities they urged her quickly to answer "Nein."

It was only in the late afternoon when the heavy horses turned into the barnyard of the Stoltz farm, that the exigency of a quick change of dress, the gathering of the eggs, and the planning of the supper brought all the vagrant thoughts into subjection and made them subservient to matters more practical, that Amalia ceased dwelling on the day's experience.

The Stoltz farm-house was modest but as neat and shining as white paint and green blinds could make it. There were no pigs or chickens boldly running about as there were at many of the neighbors'. Pigs were in their pens and chickens in their yards, both conditions of which were made possible by fences formed of small hickory posts for the pigs and of tall willow saplings set close together for the chickens. That the fence of the chicken yard was now putting forth faint green shoots did not detract from its utility. On a sloping cellar door, scrubbed like a bake-board, sat the milk crocks sweetening in the sunshine. Currant bushes and gooseberry bushes nearby, looking ready to burst their tightly closed buds, held countless freshly washed dish-towels. Lilac bushes which were beginning to feel the stir of sap were near the front door, and a rose vine, brown yet from the winter's sleep, trailed over the doorway.

Amalia coming into the kitchen door now, sighed that there were to be changes so soon. Inside the house, thinking of those changes, she looked about her as with the eye of a stranger. She saw the shining blackness of the cook-stove (the neighbor Kratzes still cooked on an open fire), the scrubbed table with its checkered cloth, the tin brush-and-comb holder on the wall with the mirror above, the clean wooden pail of water with its gourd dipper on the shelf, the rag rugs--Oh, it was a pleasant house. The cellar still held many Schinken from the butchering, stone jars of Äpfelbutter and Pflaumenbutter. No old housewife--not even Mrs. Kratz or Mrs. Rhodenbach--had put by more food last fall than she.

There was soon supper. She and her father and her brother Fritz, fifteen years old, sat down together to the Metwurst and the Kartoffel Pfannkuchen. They were Fritz's favorites,--those pork-sausages and potato-pancakes.

Wilhelm Stoltz spoke very little while attending to the primary object of eating. When he did it was about the stock, the shoeing of a horse, and the assignment of Fritz's work for the morrow. The purchase of the iron kettle, too, came in for some explanation to Fritz,--the bargain he had made and the fact that the young man must have made a mistake in the price.

This set all the little acrobatic thoughts somersaulting again in Amalia's pretty head. And, later, if they mischievously put on their tumbling act several times during the ensuing week, who was there to say the performance in that year of 1866 could not be transmitted through Youth's own particular short waves down through the damp, dark timber road and across the prairie?

For on Sunday, Matthias Meier, with clean-shaven face and in his best suit, mounted his uncle's saddle-horse, Trixie, and turned her head toward Plum Creek and the Big Woods.

CHAPTER II

To Matthias Meier the ride to the Stoltz farm that Sunday was a long one, but pleasant. The road lay through the straggling town, over the river bridge under which the dark waters of the recently melted snows foamed and charged in wrath at the sturdiness of the timbers, on across the level lands where mud and matted grasses clutched but could not hold Trixie's flying hoofs, and then into the darkness of the Big Woods where it wound sinuously among the maples and oaks and hazelnut underbrush, a leaf-soaked and twig-covered track just wide enough for a single wagon, so that one must turn into the spaces between stumps when meeting another.

As he rode, Matthias tried to analyze what peculiar force in his nature had summoned him on this unbidden call,--what emotional upheaval had urged him to plan this trip all week. He was not accustomed to follow up all his uncle's customers, he admitted, and grinned to himself at the thought.

For the first half of the trip through river bottoms, creek-beds, and on open trails, he rode enthusiastically toward his destination. About the third quarter, on more distant meadow land, he grew a bit apprehensive over his impulsive journey. In the last quarter through the Big Woods, his fervor collapsed so perceptibly that he called himself all kinds of a fool for coming. But it was noticeable that he held doggedly to his way.

At a weather-beaten cabin in a clearing he inquired of a young boy how far it was to the Stoltz farm and was told he was nearly there, that he would find it lying just beyond the third bend of the road and that he would know it from the red barn standing where the timber began to thin for the open land. He thanked the voluble informer and rode on slowly, entirely apprehensive now because of the bold thing he was doing.

The woods were thinning,--the maples and the oaks and the walnuts were not quite so close together,--not quite so thick now, the bare hazel-brush and the sumac. He rounded a clump of undergrowth that tangled with a thicket of wild plum trees, and there in a clearing not twenty feet away was the girl herself. Evidently she had heard the sound of Trixie's padding hoofs for she stood facing the trail, her hand at her throat in an attitude of startled expectancy. To-day she was bareheaded, and the sun shining into the clearing turned the braided coronet of her light yellow hair into a pale golden wreath.

She came forward hesitatingly when Matthias slipped off his horse.

"Guten nach Mittag," she said shyly,--and then by way of explaining her presence added, as always, in the German: "I was searching for signs of the first blue-bells."

Bridle-rein over his arm and hat off, Matthias approached and held out his hand.

Even while she put her own little hard hand into it, she flushed and said: "You should not be here."

"Why?" Now that he was here and safely over breaking the ice of the meeting, he felt no fear, but a heady boldness instead.

She raised her eyes to his slowly, and Matthias' heart beat quickly at seeing again the deep blueness of them. "Because . . . I should have told you when you asked where I lived . . . but, of course, I could not know by the asking you meant to come."

Then why were you down in the timber road, watching, Amalia?

Her hand still held in his, Matthias asked: "What is it you meant to have told me . . . Amalia?"

She dropped her eyes away from Matthias' searching ones.

"That I am betrothed." And with that Amalia had completed the unfinished sentence.

"You are betrothed?" . . . he repeated slowly. "I . . . I had not thought of that. I have thought of many things . . . but never that. All week I thought only of you . . . and that I would come to-day."

"I, too, shall be truthful now. Something . . . also . . . some queer thing," she spoke shyly in spite of her honesty, "made me wonder if you might."

"If you are . . . as you say, betrothed, . . . who . . . who is he?"

"An old friend of my father's. Oh, not old . . ." she added apologetically, "at least not as old as my father. He is a good man. My father and my brother Fritz are very fond of him. My mother is not living."

"I'm sorry . . . perhaps if your mother . . ."

"I should not be here talking to you," she said, when he seemed not intending to finish his thought. "I don't know why I came. It is not right. I have been promised since I was sixteen. I shall be eighteen soon."

But the hand of Amalia which had been promised for nearly two years still lay trembling in the hand of Matthias Meier. As though just now discovering that member's perfidy, she withdrew it suddenly.

"Where is he now?" Matthias asked quietly.

"Gone with the men to the Nebraska Territory to find suitable holdings for some of our church people. We are to move as soon as they return for us. It is said that sometime before many years it may be a state, too, even as Illinois."

"Yes, I suppose so." He felt definitely disappointed, vaguely sad that this lovely girl of whom he had thought all week was betrothed. A door that had so recently opened a bit seemed suddenly shut in his face.

"You have come a long way. Perhaps you would like to sit down awhile . . ." she smiled, "beside your kettle."

And almost for the first time Matthias gave heed to the fact that the kettle which he had fashioned with such meticulous care hung on three hickory stakes in the clearing with a mound of ashes underneath.

"Already you have used it?"

"Yes . . . we made the soap, using all of our grease from the butchering so we will have a plentiful supply for the long journey and a whole year after."

But the words recalled this disquieting thing he had heard of her betrothal and going away, and he frowned as he seated himself beside her on a log near the kettle.

"But this man . . . you do not love him?" It was as much a statement as a question. She was a mere child and Matthias felt very old.

Amalia pondered. "I respect him . . . and my father says that is the same thing."

"I don't agree with him," Matthias contended boldly, and in the impulsiveness of youth stood up. "Where is your father? I would like to see him."

But Amalia, alarmed, was saying: "Do not go to the house to see him, I beg of you. I am sorry not to be more hospitable. You saw how domineering he was." Herrscht was the word she used. "He should not know you are here. He would only anger and hurt you. Always after Sunday dinner he sleeps. Indeed . . ." and the gay little smile which had so captivated Matthias was there again for a flashing moment; "he begins it in the church service."

Matthias laughed at that and sat down again beside her. "What causes you to think of going to that troubled territory?"

"It is no longer troubled. The Pawnees have long been quieted, and my father thinks all is well now to settle there. We are of the Lutheran faith and here our farms are scattered. My father says that by moving there and keeping together we can retain our customs and our language and our church relations."

"But why . . . ?" Matthias wanted to know. "What advantage is there in the people of one church being so close? I can see how the Pilgrims of England--persecuted as they were--But you're not."

"My father says none but the followers of Luther are right, and it is not well to mingle so much with others. Already two of the young people have married out of the church."

If Matthias held his own opinion on the iniquitous depths of that sin, he did not say so. Indeed, when she was speaking so earnestly he found himself far more interested in watching her long lashes sweep a soft cheek.

"Our farm is already sold to the English Dunbar family. All things are as near ready to go as is possible . . . the wagons are kept always in repair--and the harnesses. Already many barrels are packed. When the men arrive, all the families need is a short time for the last of the baking and the loading of the wagons, and the colony can start. My father says it is like the German army, each knowing his part and obeying orders instantly."

For some time sitting there on the sunken log in the clearing the girl told of the plans for the coming journey. Matthias, listening and commenting, was disturbed at his own disturbance over the moving. Once he ventured again: "This man . . . if you do not love him . . . ?"

She glanced away. "I am promised," she said simply.

Very soon, in spite of nature's heralding of the spring, it grew too cool, and when the sun dipped behind the top of the timber, the chilliness of the air made the girl suddenly shiver.

"You must go in," Matthias was all solicitude, but found himself hinting broadly: "You do not wish me to go?"

"Nein. It would be too hard to explain to my father. He could not understand that you were--" she put out her hand, "a new friend."

At that, Matthias forgot the coming journey and the faith of Martin Luther, the domineering father and the affianced who was far off beyond the Big Muddy.

"Meet me here again next Sunday afternoon, Amalia. You'll come? It couldn't be otherwise."

When she hesitated, he said, to test her: "Or I shall come boldly to the house to call on my new friend."

"I'll come," she turned away, anxious and hurried now that she had been here such a long time. "But it will be wrong," she called over her shoulder.

"And beautiful," Matthias grinned back at her impudently so that she, too, was smiling a bit mischievously when she went away.

CHAPTER III

All week Amalia went about her housework. She cooked and cleaned and scrubbed in her energetic and immaculate way. Everything was as it had been,--save one. And all week Matthias sold his uncle's iron wares, kept the books, and occasionally shod a horse at the blacksmith end of the shop. And everything was as it had been,--save one.

Sunday was milder. The Big Woods gave forth the pungent odor of bursting buds and warming leaf-mold. At the creek-bed fuzzy pussies scratched insistently inside the branches of the willows. Wild gray geese flew honking across the timber-land and disappeared in the distant north. Swallows darted high in their nuptial flight and a meadow-lark sat on a stake-and-rider fence and sang the prairie's love song to the spring.

Amalia had been in the clearing only a short time when Matthias came riding through the damp dark timber road and into the open. At the sight of the gallant figure that had scarce been out of her mind all week, she stopped, frightened at the import of the moment, her hand at her throat as though she must stifle the call of her heart to him.

With no word Matthias dismounted, threw Trixie's bridle-reins over a scrub oak and with open arms walked toward the girl.

With no word Amalia, trembling, waited for him to come. It was not until his arms closed around her and he had kissed her--and even for a long moment afterward--that a word was spoken.

"I have thought of you every moment." His voice shook with emotion.

"And I of you."

"You must break your betrothal, Amalia."

"At this moment it is broken, Matthias."

"This . . ." said Matthias after a time, "is what love is."

"Yes," said Amalia, "I know now. All week I have known."

"And when the homesteaders go you will stay with me? My uncle is old. In time I shall be able to buy the foundry from him. It is not my choice of businesses. I have been restless in it, but with you to be there with me, I shall settle down and like it better."

"I will stay, Matthias. I fear for the trouble it will make, but I will stay."

"And you do not think it wicked, then, to marry outside the church?" he teased her. "Do I seem now such a heathen . . . such a monster?" But when he saw how troubled it made her, he drew her to him again with comforting words, calling her his kleine Taube,--"little dove" in the English.

The afternoon slipped away as they talked of this new-old thing that had come to them.

"Spring! It seems that this spring belongs just to us, and to no other," Amalia said once.

"But they will keep coming, little dove. Think of it. They will all be ours. All our lives we'll live them over and over together . . . this same feel in the air . . . the odors of the woods . . . the wild geese honking . . ."

"Even when we grow very old . . ."

Matthias laughed at that. How could youth grow old? "I shall hold you close then, just as I do now, and say: 'It's spring again, Amalia! They keep coming.'"

"And I shall say: 'They will go on . . . forever . . . even though we grow old . . . and after.'"

But there were other things besides these sentimental generalities to discuss, so that they must put an end to their first rapturous moments, sit down on the log and speak of the seriousness of the future. Matthias would have gone immediately to the house but Amalia would not hear of it. "Not to-day--" she begged him. "It is so beautiful. For when that time comes, we shall have anger and harsh words. No, Matthias, give me my perfect day."

And because she would have it so, he did not go in to confront her father, but left her there in the clearing until he should come again.

On the next Sunday there came a dash of warm rain as he rode into the clearing, and at once he saw her in the doorway of the sheep-shelter, a hooded gossamer about her shoulders.

He had brought her a gift,--a little work-box covered with shells,--angel-wings and moon shells, Roman snails, and other fragile fan-like shells of a sea they had never seen. On the under side of the cover a mirror fitted into the blue silk lining and in the various compartments were a needle-ball and a pin-cushion and a tiny silver thimble.

Amalia, to whom gifts were rare, was quite beside herself with joy at the daintiness of the treasure. Almost were the strange queer shells symbolic to her of things to come,--unknown journeys with Matthias to far-off seas, hearing the sound of wind in whipping sails and the call of the gulls on the sand.

But when Matthias would have gone in to see her father, she put him off again. She had meant to break the news, she told him, but always when she was about to speak, her courage had failed her. If he would give her but another week, she would prepare him for the announcement which would so anger him. Of one thing she was certain, it must come first from her own lips.

But on the following Sunday when he arrived there was no question about Matthias interviewing the father this time, for Wilhelm Stoltz was away,--gone to one of the church friend's home many miles up the river. It gave Amalia a delicious sense of freedom so that she was as gay as a child.

She had a wonderful piece of news for him,--she had used the thimble and one of the needles. Already she had started a quilt,--the Tree of Life pattern,--Baum des Lebens. Even now two finished blocks were in the shell box.

"Ever since I was a tiny girl I have sewed," she said to him. "It comes very easy to me. Many times I have made things for my hope chest"--hoffnung Kiste, she called it--"knowing I must some day wed but not knowing who the man would be. When I knew it was but my father's friend Herman . . ."

She sighed, so that Matthias' arms went around her again and he drew her close. "But it will be no Herman now . . ." (kleine Taube) . . . "little dove."

"No . . . never. And this is so different . . . to think of you as I sew."

But even while she clung to him she told him this: "I wake in the night and think of this which I am doing contrary to my father's wishes. I feel then that I am wicked . . . but when morning comes I know that it is not wicked at all . . . just happiness and right."

And when Matthias said nothing could come between them now, she confessed: "Of that I am sure . . . and yet I am sad to part from my young brother Fritz. That is my greatest sorrow. As for leaving our good people . . . they will all be angry and hurt . . ."

But Matthias turned that away with lover-like speed. "When they know how much we love each, other . . . they will see that it could not be otherwise." Of such are the simple rules of youth.

"But my father has so often said only woe comes to those who marry outside the church."

"Love . . . our kind of love . . . is greater than the teachings of a single church."

And now that the afternoon was waning she was anxious and alert about her father's return.

"What was that, Matthias?" she would say, startled.

"Nothing . . . some little wild thing . . . a chipmunk or a squirrel."

And because of her constant watchfulness on this Sunday, Matthias was firm. "You shall cease your worries," calling her liebes Kind. "It is not good to fear so. It shall not go on longer. Next Sunday I shall tell him, and we will face the consequences. If he is too angry, I shall take you home with me on Trixie with no baggage. My aunt will take you in and we shall be married at once."

He kissed her again and again, held her close to him, could scarcely bear to leave her. Even when he had mounted Trixie and was riding into the timber road he turned back for the last sight of her.

She stood just in front of an alder thicket, and as he looked, she raised her hand high in farewell.

He carried that picture with him all the way home: Amalia, a little blue and pink and golden figure against the green of the new leaves, as though Spring herself had just stepped out of the alder thicket. His kleine Taube,--little dove!

CHAPTER IV

The week dragged for Matthias,--seven days that were weighted down with the iron of horseshoes and kettles, plowshares and skillets. The first part of it was all sunshine and mild showers, but on Thursday night a storm broke. The rains came in torrents. All day Friday they lashed and tore at the woods and the prairies. All night and all day Saturday and all that night they beat in a fierce onslaught. A part of the mill-dam went out and a weakened span of the river bridge could not stand the pounding of the flood waters. On Sunday morning the water was roaring and lashing through all the creek-beds and then spreading less turbulently over the valley, inundating all that which had been pasture lands.

Matthias made every attempt to make the trip to Amalia. All day he worked, hoping to find some means whereby he could get through. Many times he rode back and forth seeking some more narrow place where Trixie could make the crossing. But always it was too wide or too turbulent. He tried getting her into a flat boat but she reared and kicked and was completely beside herself with fear. He knew that even if he had been able to manage a boat through the roaring waters for himself the distance for walking was so great that it would have taken into the night to get there.

When he gave up the attempt, he stood for a long time on the bank as the water swept by. In a mental rage he watched a pigeon fly straight for the Big Woods community. How impotent was man. Only the birds could lift wings and soar high over the flood waters. Amalia was waiting for him over there but he was helpless in the face of nature. A winged thing could fly to its mate. Only man and the beasts must cling to the earth and crawl.

But on the next Sunday he could get through. The river was still high and the creek-beds running full, but man's ingenuity had made the river passable with a temporarily trussed-up bridge span.

He took a lantern with him for he knew he might be well into the night getting back. This was the day he was to confront Amalia's father, possibly the day he was to bring her home with him. He had a feeling that there would be a scene, ending, no doubt, in his taking Amalia away without baggage. If it came to that, he was prepared to do so.

Two weeks not to have seen her! The time had been interminable. But he was on his way at last even though the going was formidable. Sometimes Trixie sank in mud so deep she nearly floundered. Sometimes he had to dismount to clear fallen branches away from the wet timber road. Then he would mount and ride on with the air of a conqueror glorying in this journey which was to end by his claiming that which was his own,--the girl who had been his from the moment he first saw her. Occasionally he felt a bit of the winner's sympathy for his fallen adversary. But to have pledged a little sixteen-year-old girl to a mere family friend was unthinkable. Yes, if there was to be a scene, let it come to-day.

These terse thoughts went through his mind like so many pigeons going over, homing always to Amalia. He tied his horse in the dripping woods. This was the end of secretiveness,--on that he was determined.

She was not in the clearing. That would be on account of the dampness. He strode over to the sheep-shed. She might be there hiding mischievously from him. But she was not at that trysting place either. Might she be ill?

With that disquieting thought he started walking over toward the road that led to the house. Suddenly he stopped short. There was no kettle hanging there in the clearing,--only the tipped-over tripod of hickory sticks and the sodden black ashes of the last fire. Something seized him,--a premonition of impending disaster, so that he started on a lope toward the home buildings. A tow-headed young boy, the same who had directed him on his first visit, was coming toward him also with some haste. They met almost at the edge of the timber where the plowed land began.

"You didn't come last Sunday," the boy said in English. "I about give you up to-day, too . . . was just comin' to the clearin' once more. She said to give you this."

And he thrust into Matthias' hands a note directed in the precise and shaded letters of the German script.

As Matthias took the letter and tore hastily into it, the boy stepped away and began pulling bits of bark from the shaggy coat of a soft maple.

Even before he had read a word, Matthias knew it contained nothing but disaster. For a few moments, then, he stood looking at the neat script, frozen to immobility, too fearful of the contents to read.

To speak the language was easy enough,--he had heard it on all sides from boyhood. But the reading was more difficult for he had been to English schools, even to the Princeville Academy for a short time, and the writing of the language had been confined to early copy-book work. So it seemed that he must translate into English as he read.

In his agitation some peculiar instinctive knowledge of what had happened helped him to make the translation. By a labored reading, skipping some of the phrases, he got the gist of it:

This is news . . . convey to you . . . wagons of church people ready now . . . make long journey . . . new land. Men did not return . . . sent word by letter . . . meet them Nebraska City, Nebraska Territory. There they await us . . . show way to new lands. It is there in Nebraska City I marry.

And something more at the last pertaining to God and forgiveness for which Matthias at that moment was neither interested nor caring.

The words were all swimming together and the earth was falling away from his feet. He felt giddily ill. The boy who had been watching him covertly came up importantly then and Matthias saw him as through a haze. "She said she wanted I should get this one to you, too."

The second note was neither precise nor neat. It was ink-blurred, hurriedly folded, almost it might have been tear stained. In a fever of anxiety to release himself from the shock of the stunning news of the first letter he tried to read it quickly.

In his haste the translation seemed to be:

Matthias, my cruel note under command my father was written. This one I send after. The wishes of my father . . . can no longer hold out. Many times myself I ask why we met when nothing could be. I better could have gone on not knowing you,--indeed, I had not been too unhappy.

One sentence stood out with grim sardonic insistence--"One must not marry outside the church."

Near the last there was a sentence over which he labored to get just what she meant: "Manchmal sage Ich mir vielleicht ist es besser unsre Liebe zu gedenken als es war im Frühyahr." And when he got it, he knew it was: "Sometimes I tell myself perhaps it is better to remember our love as it was in the springtime."

There was something, too, about the quilt blocks: "Unless I can be with you again, I shall never finish. The pieces will lie in my box. I think my heart lies there too."

Matthias looked up through the wavering tree trunks. Dimly he saw the boy walking away. He called to him and gave him a small coin. "Thanks for coming. What day . . ." his throat was so dry the words seemed to crackle ". . . did they go?"

"Two weeks come next Wednesday."

The Wednesday after the Sunday in which he had left her standing so lovely there, in the clearing. Involuntarily he turned his eyes toward the alder thicket not far distant. For a moment he could see her as plainly as though she were there in reality. Then the picture grew dim, and nothing remained but the green dripping boughs of the alders.

Mechanically he turned toward Trixie, stumbling blindly into the protruding roots of a tree stump. When he reached the mare he did not mount her but walked along with the bridle over his arm, taking the right trail only because Trixie led him into it. Occasionally she touched his shoulder with her cold soft nose.

The pungent odor of the loosened moist leaves under them came up to him with every step. A meadow-lark sang its liquid notes at the edge of the clearing. Gone. Amalia was gone,--into the great unsettled west,--to be married there. It was a nightmare from which he would soon waken. No, it was true,--the reality after a short sweet dream.

Shaken to the depths, his thoughts tumbled about uncertainly in a whirling world. One emotion after another went flooding through him as the creek waters had flooded the lowlands. A sickening sense of loss and disappointment. Astonishment,--he had never dreamed of any other turn of events than that the seekers for land would first return home as Amalia had said. Self-remorse that he had been so slow. Self-chastisement that he had not forced some means of crossing the river. And then violent anger at man's feeble efficiencies,--at a God who had sent the water to overflow, at the tyranny of the father, at the narrowness of the church, at the weakness of the girl.

His body seemed drained of blood so there was no strength left in him, and he threw himself down on a wet and matted bed of oak leaves where they had turned to brown pulp.

Over and over in his mind he relived the circumstances of their meeting: the love that seemed to spring between them from that very first day, the trysts in the woods, the softness of her lips and the feel of her body in his arms. His kleine Taube, little dove.

All these weeks. And now he would not hold her in his arms in another week, nor in another month, nor a year, nor a decade, nor ever. Never! It rang in his mind like the brassy sound of a jangling bell. There was hollowness in the spring, mockery in the song of the meadow-lark. Life was empty, drained of its reason for being. He threw an arm across his eyes and turning his face down to the sodden earth, shed wild and angry tears.

For a long time he lay there in the midst of the fallen world in which disappointment and disillusion were the only factors. What matter now that the meadow-lark trilled the prairie's love song to the spring? Of what portent that the sun shone? That the sweet odors of the waxy white May flowers near by were heavy on the air? These were not of his man's mind. Over and over he lived the imaginary scenes of the journey upon which Amalia was being taken,--saw the covered wagons pulled through the stickiness of the mud with the father loudly chiding the lovely girl by his side,--visioned the arriving at the territorial town, the Herman of her betrothal meeting her, the marriage against which she was revolting. At that, in his sick imaginings, he felt himself snatching her away bodily from the outstretched arms of this strange man--

Suddenly a thought struck him with lightning-like effect. Immediately he sat up and brushed a hand across his eyes, a dozen things crowding his mind at once. The colonists were to meet the men in that far-off Nebraska City. Amalia couldn't be married until the wagons reached there. How long would it take them to make the trip? Four weeks, perhaps, if there were no delays. They had been gone twelve days.

The town lay hundreds of miles across the Illinois and Iowa plains on the Missouri River, a long, long journey. It had become a sort of gateway to the new country, the hub of the overland trails which stretched from it and on to the west beyond. It was the beginning of the young man's country, the young man's hope of wealth. Hundreds of them were seeking their fortune out there. Why not do so, too? What matter that his uncle expected him to stay and take over the business eventually? The Unknown Land was calling. This accounted for his restlessness, his vague irritation at everything about the little foundry. He, too, must answer the call.

If he could but get to this Nebraska City in some way before the wagons!

He read the note for the dozenth time. Amalia had told him the father's plans for her. Was it a veiled suggestion that he try to follow? To have said "Unless I can be with you again . . ." Did she hope? Did she have it in mind even as she wrote? Well, then, he would not fail her. He did not know just how or by what way, but he, too, would go. Perhaps by taking the river route he could arrive there ahead of the caravan. Then there would be no marriage to a member of the colony. He would snatch her from them, carry her away.

A wild exuberance seized him. His grief passed into a sense of exaltation, as though the thing were already accomplished. He jumped to his feet, shook the soggy leaves and twigs from his clothes, mounted Trixie and was off, crashing through the narrow dark timber road.

CHAPTER V

To the Lutheran homesteaders the journey out of Illinois and into the plains of Iowa had been a tedious and apparently endless trip. For weeks now they had lurched over trails which took them through prairie grass and sunflowers, down creek-beds and across gulleys, into tangled clumps of wild growth and past an occasional settlement. It had rained much of the time and the crude wagons drawn by stolid oxen and heavy-footed plow-horses jerked through thick black mud or jounced over the uneven dry ground until some of the women were ill from the torture of the constant shaking.

Day after day the prairie-schooners had crept on to the west,--a winding procession like so many tiny, gray-colored bugs following a twisting line on the wide expanse of a school-room map. The cracking of the blacksnakes, the stentorian calls of the drivers, the creaking of the wagons, were all the sounds heard as the caravan made slow and tortuous progress toward the ever-receding rim of the world.

Night after night they had formed in a wide circle around the fires, their cattle and horses corralled by this human perimeter, more safe from any potential marauder than if left outside of it. There was no danger from the redskins in Iowa, they felt,--but of Nebraska they were not certain. It had been only a few years since the alarm had been spread in the town of Omaha concerning the report of Indian outrages, and the militia had gone out to subdue the Pawnees at Battle Creek. No more Indian troubles had been known in the eastern third of the territory for a half-dozen years, but the men said no one could ever tell when it might break out again. On beyond there were tribes of them always ready to steal cattle and to commit various offenses, but it was scarcely to be supposed that they would attack so large a group.

Today, Amalia, riding beside her brother in one of their two wagons, was shaken almost to the point of illness, for never had the trail seemed so rough. Although the household things had been packed together as solidly as possible, sometimes when the horses forded a creek-bed or lumbered down a rough incline the chairs and walnut bureau knocked together, and the new soap-kettle with its perfect rounded bottom took to rocking back and forth perilously.

The menfolks had said they thought they must be getting near the Nishnabotna River region which lay only a few days' journey this side of the Missouri. All indications seemed to point that way. They were rather excited about a possible sight of the Big Muddy in a few days now.

But Amalia took no great interest in this news. She made no inquiry, commented on nothing,--merely clung to the seat of the lurching wagon and lived over again the days of her leaving,--days whose happenings would be forever burned in her memory.

She had been working on her Baum des Lebens--Tree of Life--quilt-block in her bedroom, had hidden it quickly as her father came to the door. She could still see him standing there, big and bustling, filling the doorway, dominating the scene, his sandy beard and thick mustaches almost bristling with importance.

"Well, Amalia, I have news."

"News?" she had said, her body going suddenly cold.

"Yah, the men do not wait to return. Instead they have sent word to us. They have found suitable lands many miles to the west of the town of Nebraska City. We are to go as soon as possible and meet them there in that territorial town."

Sitting here beside her brother now, on this endless, lurching journey, she could feel again the faintness stealing over her at his "We go now."

He had shouted it, excited because of the coming important event. "Fritz brings me the letter just now. You I tell first." He laughed at his joke: "You are the favored,--the one of all honored by me to know first."

"We go?" She had repeated it in a whisper.

"Yah! Fritz at once rides to the homes of our people. It is like the Paulus Rewere Fritz told us from school. To-day I give the command. Each knows his part. There shall be no delay. It is, as I have said, like an army under orders,--the army of the Lord. You know your part well. At once the extra baking and roasting of the meat. Then, even as these cool, the last of the packing. The sacks of oats and the seed corn at once Fritz loads in the second wagon. Myself I oversee all. Come Wednesday morning we start . . . Thursday at the latest. That day come the Dunbars to take over the house."

Riding silently by Fritz she was living it all over again, trembling a little now even as she had trembled then. She had tried to tell him.

"Father, I must tell you at once. I do not go."

"Do not go?" The syllables had been lightning bolts.

"No . . . for I cannot now marry Herman Holmsdorfer."

"Have you lost your reason?"

"Nein." At the dear thought of Matthias she had gained a bit of courage. "It is only that the young man at the foundry . . . you recall where we bought the kettle . . . ? Do not be angry, Father . . . he has been here several times since."

"Has he . . . ? He has . . . molested you?"

Amalia flinched again with pain at the memory of the evil thing her father had suggested. How could he have so translated a beautiful thing? How could there ever be evil when two people loved the way she and Matthias did?

"Father! He loves me . . . and I . . ."

"Go on . . . lest in my anger I strike you."

". . . I love him, too, Father . . . so much."

"Du Narr!" he had flung at her, calling his Amalia a fool for loving.

Lurching through the sodden wild grass of the Iowa prairie, she closed her eyes now as though she might forever shut out the period that followed, a time as of a great storm which lashed and beat with words, which closed over her in its fury of commands and threats, so that rather than drown in the beating stress of it she had promised obedience.

If only she had acquiesced for once and all at that time, but she must do something which merely made matters much worse. On the evening before they were to leave she had rolled a few things into a little bundle, slipped out and started down the timber road toward Matthias so many miles away. At the sound of a horse's hoofs thudding behind her she had slipped into the underbrush at the side. But she had not been quick enough, for the lantern's light had focused itself upon her like an evil eye, and her father's cold voice had ordered her to come forth. Well, her spirit was crushed then. There was nothing more to do.

In two things only had she been deceitful,--in writing a second letter to Matthias after the dictated one, and in bringing the shell box with her. She had written her heart out to her lover in a note dictated by no one, and, when ordered to leave the dear gift behind for Mrs. Dunbar, she had pretended to do so. But even now it was in the wagon wrapped in many layers of unbleached muslin sheeting.

"What have you there?" her father had asked as she brought out the yellow-white bundle.

It was then that she had openly lied. "The freshest of the bread," she had answered. And if God would not forgive her, she did not even care.

For the first time after all the tragic days, riding now with Fritz, they spoke of the unhappy situation. The fifteen-year-old brother had something on his mind which had worried him for weeks. He could scarcely speak for the closing of his throat against the words. "I . . . myself I hate, Mollia. This you do not know before. It was I who told Father I saw you go down the timber road. I did not then know the reason. I would not . . . would not . . . have harmed you."

"Do not worry. Nothing was your fault."

"Are you then so unhappy?"

"I can never know happiness again, Fritz."

The youth shook his head. "It is bad. You should not be unhappy. You are so pretty. We could have managed . . . Father and I. I am a man now."

It broke something in Amalia, some tight-bound band around her heart and throat which had not been loosed for days. She, who had been like a dead woman for all this time, wept wildly. Her young brother needing her,--her lover wanting her. The church pulling her one way,--Matthias another. Obedience asking one thing,--love another. Why did God bring such agony into the world? They taught you God was good. Was it true?

The wagon lurched on through the miles of sodden grass and sunflowers, thickets of sumac, wild plum and Indian currant.

After a while she calmed. "Fritz, I confide in you. You will never tell on Amalia?"

"Nein, sister."

"I am praying that I shall see him again," and did not notice that she was turning to the God about whom she had so recently questioned. "Is it too much to ask?"

"How can that be? So far away?"

"Always in the back of my mind, Fritz, I have it that he might come too, that getting my letter on Sunday after the Wednesday we left he would try to overtake us even though so far away and seek me out."

"It is a big thing to hope for."

"He was like that." She spoke proudly. "And his love was like that."

"I wish for you it could be." He glanced shyly side-wise at his sister.

"Perhaps I wish it so much that I make myself think it could be. Do you think it could come true, brother?"

"It could come true," he answered simply. And if he kept to himself the thought that it was not likely, that no one could ever overtake another in this vast ocean of prairie country, it was out of boyish sympathy for Mollia.

Ahead of them lumbered slowly as always through the sodden grass the other wagon belonging to their father and the two of the Schaffers.

Amalia turned now and glanced back across the wide spaces of the prairie. Behind them on the trail came the three wagons of the Kratzes, the two of the Rhodenbachs, the two of the Gebhardts,--four of them oxen-drawn, three with teams of horses. She knew the outfits, every horse and ox as well as their own. As always there were only these same plodding creatures,--no other.

CHAPTER VI

Matthias Meier was standing on the dock at St. Louis, surveying the scene before him with both impatience and satisfaction.

A wilderness of steamboats confronted his vision. Some were just leaving dock, the hoarse coughing of their exhaust-pipes making discordant notes. Others were coming in, the screeching of their whistles adding to the already deafening din. Small boats slipped in and out and between the larger freighters like busy waterbugs, twisting and turning with insect abandon. The air was charged with the electric-like energy of movement.

As he surveyed the vessel Missouri Queen, in which he was to make the rest of his trip up the Big Muddy, he had the complacent feeling of already having accomplished his objective.

He had arrived in St. Louis without mishap and the overland travelers would be moving much more slowly than he,--of that he was sure. The stolid oxen and heavy-footed horses pulling their clumsy prairie-schooners would do scarcely more than sixteen miles per day. There would be the long halts to make camp. Added to that would be the perverseness of the cattle the settlers were driving, their stubborn stops and futile meanderings off the trail. The rains, too, were delaying the caravan, no doubt. Black Illinois and Iowa mud would be an obstacle with which to reckon. Even at this date he would wager anything they had not gone one-third of the way across Iowa.

Rains would not delay the steamboat, he thought exultingly. She would slip up the Big Muddy and land him in Nebraska City before the colonists had arrived. To see Amalia face to face,--to confront her father,--nothing could then keep her from him. He thought rather shamefacedly of his agony there in the woods when all the time the remedy of it was possible.

He surveyed the vessel now with a boyish sense of proprietorship. Never having been on a Missouri River steamer before he eagerly took in the details of this one that was to house him for his long journey.

She was an attractive-looking craft, one deck above the other, the pilot-house and texas still above those. The whiteness of her newly applied coat of paint made her look very aristocratic riding there majestically on the slow rise and dip of the river, a little like the birthday cakes his aunt had made,--the main deck one layer, the boiler deck another, then the texas, containing the suite of rooms for the vessel's officer, topped by the pilot-house high over the river so that the height of the pilot might stress the clarity of his vision in seeing down into the sandy channels. High above all these towered the two lofty smokestacks carrying their sparks away from the roof and giving a strong draft to the furnace,--the candles on the cake, he thought, and grinned to himself at his whimsy.

Two cannon faced bankward in both directions, probably used now only for the purpose of firing salutes, but carrying withal that gesture of authority for any loitering miscreants.

She was about two hundred feet long and perhaps thirty-five wide, he decided. The bottom looked flat. His curiosity keen, he asked a Negro crew-hand near how much water she drew and was told with much grotesque flapping of large hands that she was "drawin' thirty inches now, boss," but would be down to fifty when the five hundred tons of cargo were all aboard.

That cargo was now being loaded,--great hogsheads of molasses, household goods, horses, wagons, mules, bales of hay and oats for the stock aboard, these latter supplies to be replenished in St. Joseph.

The vessel was propelled by a steam wheel,--two engines on the respective sides connecting directly with the wheel shaft. The last word in river craft, she had steam capstans in the forecastle and two huge spars for that possible occasion when she would have to be pushed over the tricky shifting sands of the river.

"Dis old ribber . . ." the deck-hand contributed, "she done be onreli'ble as a gal."

It set Matthias' mind to working again, momentarily drawn away by the reference to woman and her caprices. Where was Amalia now? Where the ox-train creeping over the plains? What if it were farther along than his judgment had told him? He grew anxious at the thought.

"There must be no delay," he said. "It's necessary that I get to Nebraska City as soon as possible."

At which the dark boy gave a white, flashing smile and threw out those expressive brown flappers. "Yas sah! Ah'll tell old Missie Ribber about dat."

And then they were leaving,--with the hoarse sound of whistles, bells, chugging of wheels, Negroes' songs, laughter, sobbing, farewells. It gave Matthias a momentary pang in remembering his recent parting from the good uncle and aunt whose disappointment at his going had been so keen, the latter of whom had given him a needle-book, admonitions, a New Testament, mittens, advice and packages of quinine, calomel and catnip.

Leaning on the railing now, Matthias' blood beat warm within him. This was the real part of the journey. On to a new country,--a new start in life! On to Nebraska City in the raw new territory to be there when the Lutheran settlers came in! His enthusiasm over the future knew no bounds. Some of it was an impassioned emotion over the fact that he would still have Amalia, some the natural reactions after his grief and disappointment, some his forward-looking plans for a new business in a new country, and some of it was merely Hope of Youth.

The gang-plank was up now. They were really under way. Crowds thronged the rails. Almost all were calling out their last farewells. It seemed that Matthias was the only one without friends left behind. No, there was one other,--a sun-burned, leathery-looking sort of young fellow apparently about his own age. They were not far apart, and through some interchange of thought, perhaps, just now their eyes met in a quick appraising look. So friendly did each seem to find the other's expression that almost simultaneously they drew together at the rail.

"First trip?" the young chap asked Matthias.

"Yes. Yours?"

"Nope. First one was ten years ago when I was nine. Mother was a widder woman. Took us up the Muddy to find a home. Landed at Plattsmouth. Just three or four houses there then,--Mother knowed one of the families. Had to sleep on the floor with several other newcomers. Toward mornin' door opened and three old Injun bucks come in and stepped around all over us lookin' down in our faces. Had the hardest time gettin' Ma to stay and settle. She was all for leggin' it back to the steamer still tied up to the post and vamoosin' in favor of returnin' to civilization." And the young fellow laughed long and hilariously.

They told each other their names and destinations.

"Charlie Briggs."

"Matthias Meier."

"Plattsmouth in the main, but stoppin' in Nebraska City, claimin' my team I left there and pushin' on to Plattsmouth 'cross the prairie."

"Nebraska City is where I'm stopping for a time."

There was other information Matthias gleaned from his new-found friend that first afternoon of their acquaintance. Charlie Briggs had learned surveying. He had a homestead not far from Plattsmouth but mostly his younger brothers looked after it while he was off on all sorts of surveying, freighting and scouting missions.

"Volunteered a year ago last October to help put down the Sioux Injuns. Saw the Plum Creek massacre in Phelps County,--got home the very day last April year, the life o' the best president of these here United States got snuffed out."

Both were silent for a few moments,--that wordless reverence of all Union men for the fallen leader.

But not for long could Charlie Briggs remain silent.

He knew--and talked of--the great Platte Valley, had been up the Elkhorn, taken one trip to the Republican Valley. The Platte, he said, was flat and by nature treeless. It had shallow, muddy water, swarms of mosquitoes and greenhead flies, prairie-dog towns and rattlesnakes,--the country of the Elkhorn was rich and fine with quite a bit of natural timber along the creeks and rivers. He explained the trails, north and south of the Platte River,--the one on the south with its converging trails like the tines of a fork starting from Independence, Missouri, St. Joseph, Leavenworth, and Nebraska City.

He had all the information of the new country at his tongue's end,--the difference of the soil in the Platte, the Elkhorn, the Republican, and the Loup Valleys. He knew where the native trees thrived--the cottonwood, and the oak, the elm and the ash. He knew the Indian tribes, their locale and their habits,--told Matthias about the old Pawnees that had once lived in the Valley of the Republican, the Kitkehahki tribe, and the chief who at the instigation of the young Lieutenant Pike had ordered down the Spanish flag flying in front of the lodge and raised the Stars and Stripes; related the story of the attack on the Arikara Indians by the soldiers from Fort Atkinson who were joined by the Sioux enemies of the Arikaras, how they overpowered them and feasted on the Indians' roasted corn while the peace treaty was being negotiated.

He had at his tongue's end the history of much of the territory since the days of Coronado and his Spanish horsemen who had once set out to discover the mythical land of Quivira with its silver and precious stones and its king who slept under a great tree with golden bells on its branches, and found instead a vast plain with wild grass and Indians and queer cows with humped backs.

He enjoyed the telling of these tales and not in all the afternoon did he cease from imparting them. "Follow the prairie-dogs and Mormons and you'll find good land," was one of his sage pieces of wisdom.

It rather fascinated Matthias, the young man's ready knowledge of the territory since an earlier day,--and his own more recent adventures.

"Killed buffaloes? Lord, by the dozens. Pick on your animal, shoot, skin the carcass, let it freeze, chop off a hunk with your ax, throw it in a Dutch oven and a couple hours later get busy."

With no recess for his monologue, he went on:

"Buffalo used to be swimmin' along here where we are most any time. They tell a yarn about a greenhorn seein' 'em once for the first time when he was off in a yawl with a passel o' old timers. This fellow could handle a rope right smart, so they got him to set in the bow with a lasso and the first one they should wound could be roped. Some of the crew fired and wounded one but the greenie threw the rope over the head of one that wasn't hit. The crew shouted and backed oars to get old man Buffalo in deeper waters, but his feet touched bottom and he went up the bank with the boat tied to him and would have took it on a cruise all over the prairie if the stem of it hadn't been wrenched off and carried away by the mad animal. Fellows was left shipwrecked far away from their steamboat."

Matthias grinned his skepticism. "Funny how the fellow couldn't have let go of the rope."

Charlie Briggs spat over the railing: "Never spile a good story . . . and besides rope wa'n't so plentiful they wanted to give any away."

"Any hostility along here now from Indians?" Matthias had carried the question in his mind for some time.

"Naw. Only a few years ago they was barricadin' decks and state-rooms,--keepin' up day and night vigilance. Mostly now any hostilities is above the Niobrara from the Sioux tribes on farther west. Pawnees is friendly."

By dusk the boat tied up for the night,--navigation through the treacherous sand-bars was too precarious. If Matthias chafed at the lost hours, he had only to remember that the overland travelers were making camp too.

He and Charlie Briggs sat out on the deck talking until the mosquitoes drove them in, when they joined the other passengers in the too-crowded parlor-like cabin,--for the most part a motley crowd of fussy old ladies with poodle-dogs, anxious mothers with sleeping children, planters, giddy young girls, whole families moving to the new country, many unattached men. Immigration to the territories of Kansas and Nebraska was heavy.

There was some attempt at music that evening in the stuffy cabin,--a group of young fellows volunteering the tear-jerking "Thou Hast Learned to Love Another" and "Meet Me By Moonlight Alone" and the rendition of "Marching Through Georgia" with an aftermath of sullen remarks and a miniature reproduction of the late war on an after-deck.

Matthias' eyes swept the clusters of young girls coldly in spite of the evident admiration for his stalwart figure some of them plainly showed. Not one was little, dainty, fair-haired and blue-eyed. How could a man care for any other type?

In the days that followed, the boat proceeded very slowly on its up-river journey, gliding along smoothly enough over the turbid water. On the seventh day it put in at Weston for repairs. Matthias chafed over the delay until Charlie Briggs hinted broadly: "Ye'd think the' was some reason why ye got to git there."

Matthias, however, was non-committal. He would never wear his heart on his sleeve, particularly to one he had known no longer than young Briggs. But unlike as the two young men were, there were qualities which drew them together on the whole trip,--a common love of adventure and progress, sincerity of purpose, and some unnamed characteristic which each felt in the other,--a sort of gallant attitude toward humanity.

It was the morning of the ninth day out before they could proceed. The weather turned cold and disagreeable. There was no more promenading on the wind-swept deck by the giggling girls. There were various rumbles of dissatisfaction from the passengers, too, for eatables were getting low and fare was very poor.

They were in Kansas now. One side of the river bank was sheer steep bluffs, the other vast stretches of prairie, dotted with patches of timber. It all looked very wild.

On the eleventh day they docked at St. Joe. A child died and was taken ashore by a hysterical family. A doctor was called hurriedly from the passengers to attend a woman in childbirth in one of the stuffy state-rooms. A young bride came aboard on her way to California, happy and blithesome, thinking that all California was a paradise. Life is a loom, weaving gay colors indiscriminately with those of somber hue.

And now the long journey was nearing its end. They would get to Brownville on the twelfth day,--the seat of the United States land office in which Daniel Freeman only a little over three years before had obtained the first homestead in the whole territory just after the midnight hour of the day in which the law went into effect,--the place from which the first territorial telegram had been sent six years before. From there to Nebraska City was but a short journey.

Charlie Briggs in his loquacious way was recounting much of this to Matthias now, recalling some of the anecdotes concerning slaves that had been brought through this section by way of the underground railroad.

The two young men were sitting on deck on the Nebraska side looking shoreward, Charlie Briggs pointing out some distant upstream spot.

"Along nigh about a dozen miles over there is the way John Brown brung slaves many's the time from Missouri by way of Falls City, Little Omaha, Camp Creek and Nebraska City to Tabor, Iowa. Can pint out the barn to ye in Falls City they hid in whenever . . ." His high-pitched voice broke off.

There had been a grinding noise, a quivering of the boat's frame. With a sickening shiver, as a huge animal might shake in the steely mouth of a bear trap, the Missouri Queen stopped.

"Sufferin' snakes!" Charlie Briggs jumped up. "We're on a sand-bar."

CHAPTER VII

When the Missouri Queen settled grumblingly into the treacherous sand which had shifted since the steamer's last trip, Matthias was a picture of surprise and irritation. "How long will it be?" he wanted to know at once.

Charlie Briggs who had known the river since his childhood days shrugged lean muscular shoulders. "Can't tell. She may be settin' pretty."

And settin' pretty she was.

Now came the work of the two huge spars which like the legs of some gigantic insect swung into position as though the white bug of a steamer intended to walk over the water and be at once on its way. But the bug stupidly lay thrashing impotent legs and could not move.

With every available means the crew and some of the passengers, including Matthias and Charlie Briggs, attempted to get her off. Men in small boats put out to shore and drove stakes into the bank, around which they would wrap the rope attached to the vessel, and pulling this with mighty tugs attempt to entice the vessel from her sandy bed. And every day she seemed lazily to settle farther into the shifting silt of the treacherous river.

Four full days went by filled with exertion on the part of the workers and with irritation over the delay by all hands.

Matthias was beside himself with anger and worry. Under normal conditions he would have chafed at the delay. Now he was tormented with the thought that after all these days the ox train might have arrived at Nebraska City. Sometimes he tried to comfort himself with the thought that there would be much more delay for the horses and oxen than this unlooked-for delay of the steamer. He reminded himself of all the minute and trying things which would come up to delay their progress. There would be the shoeing of the oxen, tires to be set on more than one wagon, a broken spoke perhaps, the constant delays for rounding up the driven cattle, early twilight stops in order to make camp, none-too-early starts after a cooked breakfast and repacking of the camp utensils and bedding, and always the black Iowa mud after a rain. But once the steamer was off and on its way again nothing would stop it excepting nightfall.

On the fifth day they pulled off. The next day they were caught again by another sand-bar throwing its treacherous arms across a channel which had been traversed easily on the boat's last trip.

This time Matthias slumped into the depths of despair. This time he was moved to confide in Charlie Briggs concerning his love for Amalia, his friendship for the young chap having progressed to this point. Once he even wildly suggested the possible purchase of a horse from some passenger, swim it to shore, there to take to land. Charlie Briggs dissuaded him from this, pointing out his lack of knowledge of his surroundings, called to his distracted mind that when they pulled off, which might be any time now, their progress would be better than Matthias' blind ride through an unknown country. It took all the weight of his argument to make Matthias realize the folly of the plan. Movement was what Matthias wanted,--to feel his legs moving, the motion of a galloping horse under him,--wings.

Charlie Briggs tried to cheer him. "I know that there Iowa gumbo," he would say: "Haint no mud like it anywheres. As bad any day as a little sand for holdin' you aback. They'll be slowed up fit fer goin' crazy, any the time there comes a rain."

It drew the two young men together,--Matthias' confidences and worry, and Charlie Briggs' sympathy and encouragement because he had nothing more practical to offer. Although they were unaware of it at the time, it was, in truth, the beginning of a long friendship interrupted only by death,--a friendship which was rather unexplainable to the casual observer in the later years of their lives when they appeared to have so little in common.

Charlie Briggs was right. The delay was not so long this time, and the second day they were out of the treacherous sucking sands and into deep water, passing a large Indian encampment on the Nebraska side almost at once.

No more heart-breaking delays! No more anxieties and nervous questioning. The next day--Brownville. A few hours after that--Nebraska City, there to wait for Amalia.

CHAPTER VIII

And now near the Iowa bluffs the overland travelers had broken camp for the last time before they were to sight the Missouri River.

Slowly the eleven wagons had crawled up and down the last of the unending Iowa trail. Ploddingly men had walked beside the oxen and cracked the long bull whips which circled over the stolid beasts' backs but never touched them. Patiently the women had sat in the covered wagons for all these weeks waiting this day of entering the new territory in which they were to make homes for their men. Most of them had come on the long trek against the desires of their hearts, for always the woman clings longer to the old hearth.

Young Mrs. Henry Gebhardt had given birth to a child on the way. Anna Rhodenbach had become betrothed to Adolph Kratz. Old Grandpa Schaffer, taken with summer complaint, had died and been buried in eastern Iowa.

But now the endless journey lay behind them,--with the worried forebodings of young Mrs. Henry Gebhardt, with the childhood of Anna Rhodenbach and Adolph Kratz, with the unbroken sleep of old Grandpa Schaffer beside the trail in eastern Iowa.

They were soon to see the Big Muddy. And although several days' journey lay beyond it, still it was the gateway to the new home.

Fritz was continually straining his eyes toward the west hoping to catch the first sight of the river. But Amalia turned often to look back along the trail where the other wagons of the train stretched out like the long lash of a whip.

"Always, Fritz, I foolishly look for the strange wagon or the lone rider. Sometimes I think I see it so plainly that I wonder if I am a little mad."

"There's the river way, too, Mollia. Some one of the men had a paper printed in the big town of Omaha many miles to the north. There it said river crafts come up from the towns to the south and unload their goods."

He unwittingly gave her renewed hope, against which she strove to turn, fearful that it might buoy her up too much and make her suffering more keen when it should come to naught.

And then suddenly from the top of a rise they saw it,--the River! Almost simultaneously some one ahead had shouted back the news. And soon others behind were shouting, too. There it was ahead of them,--the Big Muddy, its waters tawny with the clay of its high banks,--rolling on to its union with the Father of Waters. On the far side,--the Nebraska Territory.

They could see cabins across the wide expanse of water. Nebraska City that was,--cabins and shacks in a sheltering cluster of trees, and a ferry-boat which must be summoned from the far side.

Wilhelm Stoltz, as master, was to go across first with his wagon and the heavy mares whose shaggy legs were like pillars.

There was the long wait, and then: "Come, Amalia," he called loudly. "We go now. You are the first woman of our people to cross. It is good luck for you. Good luck to meet Herman there, too, huh?" He repeated "Gutes Glück" many times. He was jovial, excited that the Nebraska Territory was in sight,--had almost forgotten his daughter's foolish idea that she had liked the young foundryman. Verrückt, she had been.

The ferry came over, so very slowly. But it did not come too slowly for Amalia. Rather she would have waited here on the Iowa side, prolonged the time before she must meet Herman who might even now be among those people over there on the levee.

They were down on the platform-like boat now, Amalia and her father and the one covered wagon with the shaggy-haired team. So many trips it would take to get all the colony across the river. Fritz must stay on the Iowa side with the other wagon, awaiting his turn.

They were crossing the muddy water now with that feeling of being too close to the dark turbulent waves. Amalia looked down at the turbid waters. They were thick, impenetrable. One could not see one inch beyond the muddy surface. Nor one hour into the future of one's life.

The coming of the ferry-boat had brought a scattering group of people down to the dock. From shore came a confused noise of laughter, braying stock, rumbling wagons, and the pounding of hammers far up on the hill. The wind was blowing hard on the river and Amalia with one hand held to her sunbonnet which rattled starchily in the breeze,--with the other she clutched a hard bundle of unbleached muslin.

The ferry-boat docked with a rattle of chains and the crowd idling about the wharf, pressed forward.

"Prettiest gal I've seen yet. She can have me, Pete," Amalia plainly heard an uncouth tobacco-stained individual say.

"Sst! Careful!" his companion idler whispered. "This here fellow comin' is lookin' for her."

CHAPTER IX

The Missouri Queen had passed Brownville. Charlie Briggs in his self-appointed duty of handing out data to any and all who would listen had been regaling several passengers during the afternoon with all the information he possessed concerning Nebraska City, the destination of many. He was still going strong when the town itself was sighted from the steamer's deck.

"The old Nuckolls House burned six years ago. You should a' seen it." As a matter of fact Charlie Briggs had never set foot in its interior, but that did not deter him from his description.

"The night o' the dedicatin' made river history, I guess. All the toniest of the folks on the river from Brownville, Omaha, St. Joe, even as fur away as St. Louis come. They say champagne flowed upstream agin the current from St. Louis,--that many a sedate and long-faced citizen was cuttin' capers agin mornin' come."

"Did you say it burned?"

"To the ground in the big fire that destroyed most all the early buildin's of the town. Raged for hours, but volunteer fire boys couldn't save 'em."

It was sunset when the Missouri Queen docked at Nebraska City, greeted with artillery and a self-elected welcoming committee of countless men and boys on the levee. Most of the passengers who were going on to Plattsmouth, Omaha and Sioux City came on shore to bid good-by to these acquaintances of several weeks. Young girls who had not known each other at the beginning of the journey clung together in tearful farewell. Men promised to send for others if ventures proved successful. Women parted with promises of undying friendship and favorite recipes. Two engagements were announced between fellow passengers. Life acquaintances had been formed.

But Matthias had little time for all this display of emotion. He was anxious to get located, to see the town, most of all to ascertain whether the caravan of Lutheran settlers had come in.

The founders of Nebraska City had displayed a good deal of optimism in its baptismal name he decided. It was not much of a city, he could see, although the town proper looked to be on the bluffs back from the river while crude shacks and cabins clustered around the lower village. Twelve years old now, it had a courthouse, several stores and churches, a school and hotels, so Charlie Briggs had told him. But if Matthias' youthful interest in the little city was keen, it was superseded by the important fact that his rival for Amalia was probably somewhere here in the town at this very moment. He might even be one of these many men down at the wharf.

Just where to go for information concerning the Illinois homesteaders he was not sure, so the immediate call for action was to take his valise and seek out the hotel. He said good-by to Charlie Briggs who was to stay with a cousin in a log-cabin in the lower town which he now pointed out to Matthias.

"If you hear any news of these people I'm looking for, you would let me know?" Matthias questioned.

"I'd do that very thing." Charlie Briggs' little blue eyes twinkled under the tumbled forelock of his red hair.

"As for me, I'll clean up and eat and then start out. Maybe I can hear something." And then Matthias was on his way to the hotel.

At the hotel,--a two-story structure with a porch across the front,--Matthias washed and ate his supper alone under the kerosene lamps' glow. The dining-room was well filled. These were the more comfortably fixed travelers eating here he knew,--most of the incoming settlers would be camping just outside the town.

Apparently that was a bride and groom nearby,--he in broadcloth, white-collared and beaming, she in her bridal suit with pale-blue plumed hat,--and the conversation too low for Matthias to catch excepting the fact that they were hiring some one to take them over the Cut-off trail to Otoe County. Matthias wondered how the brave blue plume would face the prairie winds just now so vigorous.

At the other nearby table a group of men discussed the construction of the new Union Pacific Railroad. The names of Durant and General Grenville Dodge were being used freely, but whether they were two of the men present or were merely being discussed he did not know. The conversation included references to General Dodge having come on to Omaha to take charge of the entire construction of the road, and a protracted discussion as to the respective merits of building it out the north Fork Platte toward Fort Laramie, out the south Fork Platte, or due west where the Platte divides at Lodge Pole creek.

He soon knew that General Dodge was not present in the group but rather under discussion.

"He knows more of the possibilities of the country from the Missouri River to Salt Lake than any other American engineer," he heard, and several references to Dodge's former experiences as an engineer among the Indians who had given him the name "Long Eye" after seeing him use his surveying instruments.

The men seemed elated over the fact that the first sixty miles as far as North Bend had been completed, damned the redskins superbly for giving constant trouble, discussed the possibility of the Union Pacific beating the Pacific Central being pushed eastward in California, referred to "The Moving Town," calling it "Hell on wheels," and laughed long and hilariously at the reply some Jack Casement had given General Dodge when he asked if the gamblers were now quiet and behaving,--"You bet they are, General, they're out in the graveyard."

All this overheard talk of large spaces and big projects filled Matthias with a renewed interest in this raw country to which he had come. What his own part in its upbuilding would be he did not even know yet. He must get into something right away,--something important so that his life work would be started early. He was not without a substantial sum of money,--for that he was thankful. Amalia, first,--to see and take Amalia from her people,--that was of primary importance just now. Then to get into the work of this big opportunity-filled territory and make a place in it worthy of them both.

"You're Mr. Meier?"

Matthias looked up to see a waiter addressing him.

"Yes, sir."

"A gentleman outside to see you, sir."

He pushed back his chair and went immediately to the door which opened on the hotel veranda. It gave him an excited feeling of anticipation as though even now he knew there was to be news of Amalia.

He stepped outside where June bugs thumped about clumsily and the sound of voices and a banjo came harshly from one of the saloons across the street.

Charlie Briggs stood there in the pale light which the hotel's lamp cast across the wooden platform. He came up soberly, turned his lean and freckled face away.

"Reckon' I got bad news for ye, Matt."

Even then Matthias knew he would always remember the expression of unspoken sympathy on the young fellow's homely weather-beaten countenance. Twisted, his face looked, as though he might be in physical pain.

With no word Matthias stood tense and expectant.

"The Lutherans got in day afore yistiddy." Charlie Briggs dropped his usual high-pitched voice to a hissing whisper. "Yistiddy they went on west to their land. The girl was married here . . . just afore they pulled out."

Matthias stood with no word, staring at the burned and leathery face of his informant, just as he had stood in the Illinois woods weeks before and stared unseeing at a younger boy, so that it seemed he was living some portion of his life all over again. But it went through him swiftly that this time there was no way out,--no recourse now from a decision which was beyond his changing. He had a distinct sense of finality, as though life were ending here on the porch where Charlie Briggs' weather-beaten face screwed itself into pain and the June bugs thumped on the wooden porch floor.

There was, then, to be no full fruition of any hope for him,--ever.

With a last grasping effort, as a drowning man clutches for something solid, he asked: "You're sure? There's no . . . no mistake?"

"There's no mistake. My cousin's woman's sister saw the ceremony from her cabin. Two couples was married. 'Twas out by the wagons by the side o' the new Nebraska City Cut-off trail . . . Luther'n preacher . . . 'n all kneelin' near the wheel ruts fer the prayin' afterward. One of the brides' faces was whiter'n limestone, my cousin's woman's sister said, and a Luther'n woman standin' by told her it was account o' a team o' horses sudden rarin' nearby . . . but my cousin's woman's sister said it had looked thataway long 'fore ever the horses acted up."

For a time the two men stood with no more words between them. Through Matthias' mind went a kaleidoscopic turning and twisting of parts of pictures, never forming any whole, merely grotesque and fragmentary shapes,--swollen streams--crumpled letters--rushing waters--dripping timber--covered wagons--driven cattle--Amalia's white face, whiter than limestone,--high cliffs--muddy waves--and always a nightmare of clutching hands pulling his body down into a maelstrom of smothering quicksands.

Sand! Sucking sand! It always held you back from your heart's desire.

Sand! Moving sand! It ran forever through an hour glass.

Queer he had never realized that about sand before. Some sands held you in their slimy grasp and would not let you go. And while they clutched you tightly, horribly, other sands slipped down, down through the hours, pushing time on until everything was too late.

Too late! Too late . . . too late . . .

"Sorry, Matt. If I can ever do anything more fer you . . ." Pain in Charlie Briggs' leathery red face.

"Thanks, Charlie." Mustn't let Charlie see that no one can ever do anything more.

They were shaking hands. The tight grip of Charlie Briggs' two iron hands couldn't help.

Matthias turned and went back into the hotel and up to his room. For a long time he stood in the middle of the floor looking at the wash-bowl and pitcher and the grayish-white towels on the rack and tried to think just what had happened. He had come too late. On account of sand! Sand! Sand that held you back like the tight grip of two iron hands. So that other sand could run through the hour glass and make you too late . . .

Too late . . .

He dropped on his knees, by the side of the bed, burying his face in his arms.

Oh, kleine Taube, little dove . . .

CHAPTER X

Amalia rode quietly at the side of her new husband, Herman Holmsdorfer. She had no spoken reproach for her father, uttered no word of rebellion toward the man who had acquired her body.

Herman possessed her now,--he had a woman to keep his house and cook his food and lie by his side at night. He was secretly proud of her prettiness, too, but it would not have done to tell her so. Far more than the prettiness was the fact that she could cook and sew and scrub, tend chickens and help plant when he needed her. Also she would bear him many sons. Seven,--ach in the Fatherland one would get something for that. Here they would give bounty only for coyote skins.

Riding along the Cut-off trail he was fully satisfied with life as he knew it. One-hundred-sixty acres of good rich Nebraska Territorial soil for his portion at the end of the journey, a team, a woman of his own,--one of only two children, too, so that when Wilhelm Stoltz died Amalia would get half of her father's homestead. And Amalia being his, the land would be his. Must discourage any sign of remarrying in Wilhelm,--that would not do.

One-hundred-sixty acres, a good team and a woman,--thus did Herman Holmsdorfer gloat on his good luck and although he did not analyze the statement, thus did he grade them in point of value.

Loudly jovial he was on the trip. Amalia had gone to his head like a drink of Roggen Branntwein.

"The best cabin of all for you I build. Not a house of sod as the people far out on the prairies away from a stream, nor yet dugouts from the earth with only boards and branches and strips of sod over them. What think you? Of good logs from the natural timber along the river and creek-bed where is the fine land we have chosen. Say something, woman." He dug a heavy forefinger playfully into Amalia's pink cheek. "Is it not good?"

"It is good," Amalia said quietly.

Very quiet she had been ever since the day by the Cut-off trail near Nebraska City. Tractable, too, she was, and carefully polite to Herman. But something had frozen in Amalia's being that day, as the roots of the lilac bushes back home freeze in the winter. Outwardly pleasant and obedient, her heart had crept into an inner room, hurt and bleeding, to hide forever from the people about her. The kleine Taube, little dove, had been wounded,--but only wounded, so she could not die.

Thereafter she lived in two worlds,--the practical one in which all these others moved and had their being, working hard when the wagons stopped, taking her turn at the cooking, washing out the necessary clothing in the streams for her father and Fritz, and now Herman,--and another world in which she existed apart from them, entirely aloof in her thoughts and with nothing in common in her emotions. With characteristic docility she submitted to the rough caresses of the heavy-jowled man beside her, but by some cool withdrawal of the spirit found it possible to remain forever away from him.

For several days the ox train headed west on the trail, turned from it at the point designated by Herman and rode miles again across the wild treeless prairie, the long grass dotted with the white of daisies and the blue of prairie gentians.

Twice they sighted small bands of Indians and were frightened, and twice the scare went into nothing.

For a way beyond the Big Muddy the country had been undulating, a succession of rolling hills and prairie land. They rode through hills and valleys, uplands and lowlands, dark sandy loam and black bottom lands, blue joint verdure, and course slough spikes. And the feet of the oxen crushed a thousand wild blossoms in the prairie grass.

Sometimes the way was as level as a floor,--sometimes they went up and down through gullies and creek-beds. Sometimes the skies opened and the wagons stuck fast for hours in the black mire. Sometimes the sun shone and the drying winds blew, and they made fourteen miles a day. Sometimes they passed greenish sloughs, and occasionally near the streams, a virgin timber,--boxelder, elm and willow, burr oak, hackberry and ash, and the tangled vines of undergrowth. A few times they passed cabins, two or three were occupied, some were abandoned claim shanties. Once they halted by a pond of muddy water, warm and brackish, and once by the clear sparkling water of a spring-fed stream. All this where one day there would be villages and towns, churches, schools, countless farms, paved highways, concrete bridges and searchlights sweeping the night skies for the guidance of the mail planes.

Herman rode proudly all this way at the head of the caravan for it was he who knew the way to the new homesteads. On the sixth day he made a sudden halt, got out of the wagon and waved wildly to those few in his vision. One by one the wagons reached those already assembled, the drivers wondering what had caused the mid-afternoon stop.

"It is here that the lands begin," Herman had been saying to Amalia, ". . . here you shall keep my house for me."

"Yes, Herman," Amalia had said,--little Amalia who was to live in the same house with Herman, but always in Another Room.

It was then that three strange young men on horseback rode out to meet them. And now ensued a protracted argument. The young men had arrived during the absence of the Lutheran scouts, broken sod in a sizable area of prairie, built a shack, and what was to be done about it?

It was nightfall before the Lutheran men had come to the conclusion to buy the squatters off. Loath was a hard-working thrifty German to part with good money to English-speaking squatters, but after an assembled meeting of the heads of the Stoltz, Schaffer, Rhodenbach, Kratz, Gebhardt and Holmsdorfer families, they decided to offer the men one hundred dollars to leave. The young men wanted three hundred. The answer to that mathematical problem was as plain as the nose on every German's face,--two hundred.

So the deal went over and the young men settled on land adjoining that of the colonists,--a small enough business deal at the time, but one to be fraught with far-reaching consequences, for it came to be in time that they and their descendants mixed the English language and customs, English schools, and church services, social events and marriages with those of the Germans,--until no longer could one pick out the descendants of those Lutherans from the children of the English.

The business finished, all the new German settlers gathered around the huge central fire which had been built. Wilhelm Stoltz raised his great hand and a hush fell on them. When the least child had grown quiet he thanked God for leading them into the land which would nourish them and their children after them and their children's children,--told Him that He was closer here to his followers than He had seemed in the land from which they came.

Amalia, looking up at the low-hanging stars shining like so many yellow buttercups in a forest clearing, wondered why He seemed so much farther away.

CHAPTER XI

Immediately the settlers went to work to lay out the farms. That all might border the river, they figured out a system whereby they narrowed each holding and allowed it to extend farther back so that every homestead might have its full one-hundred-sixty acres. Thus each family could have access to water, and because of the narrower measurements, be slightly closer to each other for protection from the Indians in case there was trouble. They realized that this homesteading out farther than the Omaha area might bring on Indian depredations any time.

For many days Wilhelm Stoltz and Herman Holmsdorfer, Rudolph Kratz and August Schaffer on horseback, with small pocket compasses and the lines from their horses' harness, laid out the acreage into the eleven farms, for there were that many men in the group over twenty-one. Wilhelm Stoltz nearly shed angry tears that Fritz was only fifteen. It seemed such a waste of years to be but fifteen with all this fine land everywhere.

All camped by the wagons near the river while the farms were being surveyed, with every one anxious for the day to come when that particular phase of the work should be finished so that the building might begin. The women cooked and washed at the river's brink, and gathered for the fires the dead branches of trees along its banks and the dried buffalo chips out on the prairie.

This camp was made in more permanent fashion than those of one-night duration on the way. Now several stoves were set up with quilts hung behind them to lessen the onslaught of the wild winds from across the open country.

Many times the two who had come to pick out the land, Herman Holmsdorfer and Rudolph Kratz, were congratulated for their choice. How terrible, the various members of the company said, not to have had this river with its native timber. Several times they had passed settlers on the way who had chosen land far from trees, claiming it was richer or lay more level. It was because they had not scouted about as Rudolph and Herman had done. There was wide, open prairie land here for the good crops which soon would grow, but there was timber, too, even though not large like the Illinois trees.

On a hot day in July with the wind stilled before the sullen approach of a storm, the work of the surveying was finished. It was a momentous occasion, for now came the choosing of the farms. They gathered about in a close circle. Herman Holmsdorfer placed all the numbers of the tracts on pieces of paper. Young Henry Gebhardt wrote all the names of the families on similar pieces. The numbers were placed in one hat,--the names in another.

"Who shall draw?" they asked.

"The two brides," some one said. "Anna Kratz and Amalia Holmsdorfer."

"The two brides," others chorused. "It is good luck for us all."

"Gutes Glück!" was heard on all sides.

"Hush!" said Wilhelm Stoltz, Amalia's father. "You talk of good luck. Ask instead the good God for His help and protection."

He raised his great hand high above his head and his loud voice rumbled forth, addressing Gott im Himmel. A similar scene had taken place on a far New England shore over two hundred years before. "Thou hast led these Thy chosen people . . ."

Amalia bowed her head. Why were the Lutherans chosen before all others? Was it true? How were they sure?

Love,--a very human love for one not of her church,--made Amalia Holmsdorfer all the years of her life liberal and kind to those who chose to think differently from her own people. Protestant, Catholic, Jew, and Gentile, those of Mormon faith and those of no faith at all found succor at her door until the day of her death.

And now the drawing. Anna Kratz drew a number. "Eleven . . ." she said in a clear, ringing voice.

Amalia drew a name to match with it. "Herman Holmsdorfer," she said quietly.

They all shouted and laughed at the joke. "Amalia is so anxious to get started she draws her own name first."

She looked down at the paper in her hand stupidly. It was true. Holmsdorfer was her own name. She had not remembered for a moment.

In the midst of the laughing and chattering Wilhelm Stoltz raised his hand high again. "Stille!" And there was immediate silence, for Wilhelm Stoltz, by some forcefulness of character even more pronounced than the other men also of domineering ways, was their acknowledged leader.

"Of one thing we have not thought. The years will pass. Our children and our children's children will live here on these farmlands. Better they should live side by side those of the same blood. Look you,--if ought happens to any of us,--to be taken in sickness or by death, it should be better that my Fritz and I dwell beside Herman and Amalia that the land may lie together."

"That is good," Herman shouted, and added to himself,--"Three-hundred-twenty acres of land I own instead of one-hundred-sixty should old Wilhelm and Fritz die before me." Almost he was licking his lips at the thought.

It was better so, the men agreed. The women were mere onlookers, consenting readily to whatever satisfied their men.

But one more question came from the lips of young Adolph Kratz. "I am now husband to Anna Rhodenbach. Shall the homestead I own lie then next to my father or her father?"

It was a weighty subject to be settled as the far distant lightning forked in the western sky. Wilhelm decided, this Lutheran Solomon, as he set himself up to be.

"Woman is frailer. It is thought she will die first. It is even so in the English laws. The homesteads of the younger men who have wives of our families shall lie next to the homesteads of the wife's parents. Thus at the deaths of the elderly women the daughter lives next to her father to care for him in his old age."

It was agreeable to all,--this settling so glibly by a domineering man the entire future of the lives of a dozen families. But this fluent and smooth forecast was by way of being something of a joke,--perhaps the Almighty may have thought so, too,--for it was to be, that years after Herren Kratz, Rhodenbach, Gebhardt, and Schaffer had been gathered to their fathers, hardy old Grossmütter Kratz, Rhodenbach, Gebhardt and Schaffer met summer afternoons on the porches of their fine farm homes, ate their Kaffeekuchen, drank their Kümmel, and jabbered endlessly in the old tongue, rather to the annoyance of a younger and very American generation.

They now rearranged the drawing, grouping them in clusters as agreed upon, three-hundred and twenty acres to the Rhodenbachs, they to settle between the two families which homestead each should have, three-hundred and twenty to the Stoltz-Holmsdorfers, and finishing the others in the same fashion.

The sky was darker now. The low thunderheads were piling up like a flexible mountain range that constantly changed in depth and height and shadows.

They finished the drawing. Wilhelm and Fritz were to be at one far end of the long line of homesteads, Amalia and Herman next, young Adolph Kratz and his bride, Anna, next, and the others in order.

No roads between these homesteads now. Later, along the side of the vast acreage, a rutty road running as wildly as a vagrant gypsy, dusty or muddy in summer, hard frozen or piled with countless drifts in the winter,--then after a time surveyed and "worked,"--still later straightened and graveled,--then leveled and paved so that cars doing sixty or seventy need not slow down and lose time where the oxen and the shaggy-legged horses of the Kratz, the Schaffer and the Gebhardt, the Stoltz, the Holmsdorfer and the Rhodenbach families once came to a lumbering stop in the midst of the prairie grass at the creek's bend.

CHAPTER XII

If Matthias Meier drank the bitter dregs of disappointment during those first days in the raw territorial town of Nebraska City on the Big Muddy, there was too much activity going on about him for any continued quaffing at the cup.

It was a time of action, of great physical deeds. Men hewed and dug, sawed and hammered, broke sod and planted. The little town was filled with the sound of pounding, of the crack of the blacksnake, the call to the ferryman, the bawling of tired stock, the creak of wagon wheels.

Scores of wagons, hundreds of horses, mules and oxen still hauled freight from here across the barren plains to Denver. The hot summer winds carried through the town's straggling streets the odors of the river, of alkali dust, of sweating mules and humans, of upturned grass and loam and subsoil. There was the feel in the air of unseen forces,--the push and pull of strange appeals. There was strength and vigor. It was a masculine world, and all men were young.

Matthias, at twenty-one, was stunned and disappointed that his plans for marrying Amalia had gone awry, but found shortly that he was not destroyed. A frustrated life was not necessarily a defeated one. He was too busy to be utterly vanquished by the blow. Whom the gods would destroy they sometimes first make idle rather than mad.

And Matthias Meier was not idle. There was too much to do. It was too good to be a part of the great new country. Out here in all this vast newness one might in time become wealthy, influential, important. Free as the prairie wind itself, he could go anywhere with any of these home-seekers or adventurers. He had only to choose. Or so it seemed to youth.

Strangely enough, then, after those first days of crushing disappointment followed by idealistic dreams of great success, it was something of a deflation of his ego, to find himself again at the humble task of shoeing horses. Even then it was the energetic little Charlie Briggs who suggested it.

Plowshares must be pounded out and edged to turn the virgin prairies. Horseshoes must be forged and shaped. Nails must be made by hand. Much of this was to be done with the thousands of people coming through the Nebraska City gateway to settle westward to the Rocky slope. So blacksmith shops sprang up over night. And Matthias Meier started one.

Charlie Briggs pushed on soon across the prairie to Plattsmouth. Matthias had been sorry to see him leave. Out of the milling throngs he was the one new friend.

"Well, good-by, Matt." He had stood by his wagon loaded with supplies for the homestead which lay between Nebraska City and Plattsmouth.

"Good-by, Charlie."

Neither referred to the intimacy of that hour in which the one had glimpsed the heart of the other and given unspoken sympathy, and yet each knew the other was thinking of it.

"Good luck, Matt."

"Same to you, Charlie."

"'F ever I can help ye out . . ."

"Thanks, Charlie . . ."

All that year and part of another Matthias Meier worked at his blacksmith shop, shoeing his share of the countless hoofs that came treading through this important gateway to the great plains.

He lived in a man's world, journeying between his boarding-house and the little shop, contacting only the masculine portion of the groups of emigrants stopping there, although many a feminine eye lingered longer than necessary on the young man's stalwart body and fine head set so gallantly on his wide shoulders. But not yet could Matthias see girlish attraction in any one but the shadowy memory of a fair-haired girl standing in front of green alder bushes and waving a farewell that was to last forever.

And now it was 1867 and suddenly Nebraska was no longer a territory. The territorial legislature which had met as usual in Omaha, having drawn up a constitution containing a clause that only white men could vote, found it returned speedily from congress with the rebuke that no one should be kept from voting because of color. Meeting again, it rectified the mistake, and on March 1, 1867, President Andrew Johnson issued his proclamation. Nebraska was a state.

Came now immigration in earnest. Matthias found that he and the settlers of the previous summer had merely come in like the first ripples in the run of the tide.

The great plains of which the newly born state was a part had been dotted by the foot-prints of thousands of people crossing it to the far west. For years settlers had been thinking of it as a great hallway through which they must travel in order to get to those other and more distant rooms where dwelt the Californians or the members of the new Zion in the Great Salt Lake Valley or the Oregon settlements.

Although the soil over which they trod was black and rich and fertile as any beyond, few had lingered. The very vastness of the prairie regions had staggered the mind. So from the days of the earliest fur traders to the year 1867, the great fertile plains beyond the Big Muddy had numbered only a comparative few.

But now they came. Came by the thousands,--especially young soldiers, who having known adventure and having rebelled against the idea of settling down to their old lives in the villages or on the farms of placid New England, turned eyes to the west and let them linger long on thought of the newly formed state with its rolling hills and vast prairies. Many minds decided that the possibilities there were as vast as the green-grown prairie itself.

So the trek began. In they came by boat and by covered wagon,--these strong young men from the northern and eastern states,--American, German, Bohemian, Danish, some of the sturdiest youth of the nation. Some turned to the founding of the villages,--some to the carving of farms out of the raw prairie land, but all to do their part in the building of a great state.

Matthias Meier by instinct clung to the town. Nor did he intend to shoe horses forever. Already he was thinking that he who would bring in merchandise to sell to these newcomers would make a good profit, or who would loan money out to them for good interest, or set up a lumber business for their homes,--oh, there were many ways to make a good living if one but chose carefully.

Again it was Charlie Briggs who inadvertently helped him decide his course.

The lean-visaged young chap was in Nebraska City en route to Brownville. He sought out Matthias at his shop. It was July and the hot sun beat down on the river town with its dusty streets through which came the never-ceasing procession of ox teams and wagons, with its ferry-boat and its crowded hotels, its steamer in dock from down the river, its bawling cattle in the stockade on the hillside, its unending movement, as though a gigantic gate swung back and forth to let these enthusiastic newcomers through.

Charlie Briggs had news. A committee from the new state's legislature had finally picked the site for the capitol. The news of the decision had just come in. Had Matthias heard?

"No."

"A place on the open prairie out between Salt and Antelope Creeks. Sufferin' snakes, Matt! Open prairie with only three or four log cabins now. Capital of the state! Be a big town some day. 'F I was town-broke . . . But none o' that fer me. I'll take homesteadin' 'n a surveyin' gang 'n a chance to git a gun sighted on a dam' Injun."

Charlie Briggs was right about locating in the newly chosen capital! Three or four log-cabins on the prairie, was it? How long would that be true,--with a capitol building going up, and the legislature meeting there? Why, in no time at all there would be more houses, a hotel for the legislators, stores, a school, maybe a railroad. No capital city ever stayed a village. Three or four log houses, indeed!

CHAPTER XIII

Matthias Meier started April first, 1868, for the village of Lincoln, the new Nebraska capitol site, driving his team with a wagon carrying merchandise of the most staple variety,--unbleached muslin, sugar, salt, boots, flour. The wind was strong and cold, and the trail faintly marked over the prairie was deep mud through which the horses struggled with the loaded wagon. By night he had made nine miles.

He had been told he would find a cabin en route and when he sighted it in the late afternoon, a black dot on the bleak prairie, he urged on the team. There he stayed all night with bachelor brothers, graduates of Dartmouth, who had come west to make their fortunes.

The next morning he started out in the rain which soon turned to sleet. All day his team plodded toward the next settler's, never passing a building or traveler. Now and then at the top of a rolling hill he would glimpse another team ahead, always a little fearful that its occupant was making for the same shelter as he was, and from his experience he knew that any house he might reach would be small.

It was after sundown when he drove up to the door of the soddie. A big bearded man stood in the doorway and called out: "Unhitch 'n put the hosses under shelter, friend. Then come in. Always room for one more at Akins'."

Matthias unhitched, led the team to the rude shelter, fed and watered them and then entered the house.

He found it contained two rooms, both of which were filled with people, all the men in the front room around a box-stove in which simmered green cottonwood, the women in the back room urging a small and apparently stubborn cook-stove to put forth its best effort in the way of boiling water for coffee.

He went back to his stock of groceries and brought in a sack of cornmeal to add to the gastronomical part of the evening's festivities. After what seemed endless waiting, and during which time the feeble efforts of the little cook-stove almost died on the altar of all vain attempts, there was supper after a fashion.

Later for the simple reason that it made economy of space, the women and children lay down crosswise of the two beds, while the men disported themselves on the floor after the manner of the spokes of a wheel, with the box-stove and its sputtering green wood contents as the lukewarm hub. In the middle of the night, with the wind increasing to the proportions of a gale and rocking the little house, Matthias, almost frozen, picked himself out of the wheel-like effect rather like a spoke which can no longer hold out, and went out into the icy night to run up and down a somewhat limited space of the open prairie and beat his arms.

With the coming of the sun, as though the two could not work well hand in hand, the wind went down. Soon the sparkling ice had gone and all started on their way, with loud and hearty admonitions from the Akins to be sure and come again. Hospitality on the prairie in an early day may have been only figuratively warm, but never did it fail its fellow man.

At Balls Crossing on Stevens Creek, Matthias made a short stop at noon, and then rode into the prairie wind, which was rising again, facing its rough onslaught, his strong young shoulders meeting its buffeting much as a swimmer breasts the current. But its very robustness gave him a feeling of exuberance, that he could meet the obstacles which would confront him in the new town in the same way that he met the wild strength of the prairie.

In the west, clouds were piling on the far horizon, gray and pink-tinged and gold-bordered by the sun slipping now over the rim of the world, forming castles no airier than his own. For as he rode he had dreams as wild as the wind: that plows would one day go up and down all these hills and valleys, leaving behind them broad new furrows; that endless fields of yellow grain would shimmer in the sunlight; that villages and towns would cut the horizon which circled him now in one unbroken ring.

Fantastic as it was, it persisted,--the mirage of the fields and farms, roadways and villages,--and the picture gave him companionship and comfort in