A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      A White Bird Flying (1931)
Author:     Bess Streeter Aldrich, 1881-1954
eBook No.:  0500861h.html
Edition:    1
Language:   English
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Date first posted:          September 2005
Date most recently updated: September 2005

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A WHITE BIRD FLYING

by

Bess Streeter Aldrich, 1881-1954

1931

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1

It was the first Tuesday in August. The Nebraska heat rolled in upon one like the engulfing waves of a dry sea,--a thick material substance against which one seemed to push when moving about. Two women, standing by the back porch of a house in the north end of Cedartown, commented wearily.

"Hot."

"Awful."

The one, gingerly holding between her thumb and forefinger an egg which she had borrowed from the other, made feeble attempts to pull herself away.

"Too hot to bake. . . ."

"I'll say."

After an interim of dull silence, she effected the threatened withdrawal, and started down the path toward her home. But she had not gone a dozen feet until she stopped, turned back, and called to the other in the low mysterious tones of the chronic tale-bearer: "For the land sakes! Look there. There goes Laura Deal. I do believe she's goin' over to her grandmother's house the same as she always did."

And the other, in equally semi-excited voice (it takes little to bring on an animated conversation in the north ends of the Cedartowns of the country): "Yes, sir! She is. Did you ever! And her grandmother just buried day before yesterday."

For a time the two stood watching the young girl pass by and down the elm-shaded road, but when she approached the gate of the house to the north and turned toward it, they were looking discreetly at a petunia bed. Their conversation, however, was not of those funnel-shaped blossoms.

"She's turnin' in the little gate and goin' up the path between the cedars. Do you suppose she's goin' in the house?"

"On my word, I believe she is. And they ain't a soul there . . . not a soul. Christine Reinmueller even took the cat home with her when she come over to feed the chickens."

"That twelve-year-old girl . . ."

". . . is the oddest."

"You'd think she'd kind of . . ."

". . . at her age."

"Just day before yesterday . . ."

". . . buried."

Neither one made a complete sentence nor waited for the other to speak. Their conversation was rather a duet, the parts similar and in perfect rhythm.

"She's got the key . . ."

". . . all by herself."

"Well, on my soul!"

". . . kind of spooky."

Laura Deal, having unlocked the side door of the old house behind the cedars and disappeared from view, the two loitered expectantly for a time; but when she did not reappear, they reluctantly returned to their labors, with special attention to the sweeping of east porches.

Laura softly opened the side door of her dead grandmother's house, stepped in, closed the door gently, and stood with her back to it.

The hot afternoon sunshine lay in long streaks across the floor of the sitting-room with the cross shadows of the window-casings in them. There was a faint odor of flowers in the air--roses and tube-roses and the cinnamon-like odor of carnations. It was deathly still. A fly bumbling against the pane with little bumping noises was the only sound in the house. The clock was not even ticking. Everything was just as Grandma Deal had left it. The old chintz-covered couch in one corner had Grandma's shawl folded neatly over the back. The rocking-chairs were in their places. A little square stand with a red spread on it held the church papers and seed catalogues and an old song book, and on the mantel shelf were the two flowered vases and the turkey-feather fan. Not a thing looked different. Everything seemed just as it had the week before when Grandma was going in and out, putting away the eggs and washing her dishes and sorting poppy seed into paper folders. On Friday morning she had done all her work and called them up on the telephone. In the afternoon she had visited with the grocery boy and called to Mrs. Johnson to come over and get some turnips any time she wanted them. Mrs. Curtis had seen her reading the newspaper on the screened porch--and then when old Christine Reinmueller had come over about supper time, she was gone. Gone. Gone where?

Heaven, of course, for Grandma was the best person that ever lived. But where was Heaven? And how could you go? Miss Bliss, her Sunday School teacher, said it was beyond all the worlds. She couldn't comprehend that distance. Miss Sherwin, a friend of her mother's, said it was here and now within one. That was still harder to believe. Grandma wasn't here, so why did they try to tell you that?

But in one way Grandma didn't seem to have gone away at all. That was the queerest thing. She could summon Grandma into her mind just as clearly as though she were standing over there by the table,--small, shrunken, shoulders rounded, a little white knot of hair at the nape of her neck, wrinkled face, bright brown eyes, slender hands, veined and trembling, with queer brown spots on them, and long tapering fingers twisted a little with rheumatism. Just last week Grandma had stood right by that table and laughed about a funny thing Christine Reinmueller had said--Grandma could laugh so heartily. It almost seemed that if she would call her now, Grandma would just walk in from the kitchen and--

"Grandma," she called softly, scarcely above a whisper. Her heart beat rapidly at the sound of her own voice in the stillness.

There was only a great silence, deep and unfathomable--the same vast quiet that has confronted all humanity--that always will confront it, until one by one each hears a voice in the silence.

For a few moments longer Laura stood rigidly with her back to the door. Then she moved quietly over to the bedroom and looked in. This was the room where old Christine Reinmueller had found her--over there lying across the foot of the bed. She had been all alone. Every one of Grandma's children had felt so troubled that she died alone. They all talked about it a great deal--her own father, and Uncle Mack, Aunt Margaret and Aunt Isabelle and Aunt Grace. It worried them all the time as though the being alone was the sad thing. That wasn't the sad part. Why did they think so? To die with no one else looking on at you--that was the best way. Just doing it yourself. You had to do it by yourself anyway. Nobody could help you do it. You'd rather do it by yourself maybe.

She went into the bedroom, looked about her a moment, then carefully opened the wardrobe doors. Grandpa Deal had made the heavy old piece of furniture for Grandma years and years before. It was walnut, and the two had planted the trees from which the lumber was sawed. Grandma's things were hanging limply on the hooks,--the black silk and the second best silk and the house dresses. It gave her a queer feeling to see them. The new lavender silk wasn't there. Grandma had it on the other day when--when she was taken to the church and cemetery. Aunt Emma Deal had brought it down from Omaha two weeks before for Grandma to wear to Cousin Katherine's wedding,--the dress and a lace cape collar from Vienna. Did you wear the things that people put on you right up to Heaven? If you did, Grandma wouldn't feel very comfortable in the presence of God,--Grandma would have felt more like herself in the second best with a plain white fichu. She could scarcely remember how Grandma looked in the strange lavender and lace, but she could see her just as plain as day in the second best and the white fichu with her cameo pinning it.

She was half enjoying herself in an emotional way. There was sort of a gruesome ecstasy in making herself sad with memories. She would like to write about it. "The girl moved about from room to room, touching the things lovingly" went through her mind. She was in one of those familiar moods when she looked upon life in a detached way as though she herself were not a part of it. She could never talk to any one about it, but in some vague way she felt withdrawn from the world. She lived with people, but she was not one of them.

There was the old sewing-machine and the little red pincushion on it, bristling with black and white pins like a variegated porcupine. Queer, how things lasted longer than people. To-morrow the house was to be dismantled. Tomorrow Aunt Margaret and Aunt Isabelle and Aunt Grace were all coming to divide the things. It seemed a horrible plan,--to talk of separating the old things. They ought to be left together. She wondered if they would miss each other after nearly sixty years of standing side by side. How could the sewing-machine get along without the little red pincushion? Or the blue flowered vases without the turkey fan?

Aunt Isabelle had said she wanted this tallow lamp. It was a queer old thing, with the wick hanging out like a tongue. Grandma had told her it once hung in her Grandmother's house, an Irish peasant's hut among the whins and silver hazels of Bally-poreen. She loved the musical sound of those words, and said them over: "the whins and silver hazels of Bally-poreen."

From under the bed she drew out a little calf-skin-covered box with the initials M.O.C. on it in brass nail heads. This was the one thing she wanted,--this and Grandma's scrap-book. To-morrow when they divided the things, she was going to say right out at the start that Grandma had promised those to her. She sat down on the floor and pulled the little trunk into her lap and thought of all that Grandma had told her about it; how Grandma's mother, Maggie O'Conner, an Irish peasant girl, had taken it with her to the big estate in Scotland when she married Basil Mackenzie. Basil's mother, a grand lady, Isabelle Anders-Mackenzie, had given her little Irish daughter-in-law a white silk shawl and a jeweled fan and a breastpin and a string of pearls, and she had brought them all to America in this very box. When she had given the things away to her daughters, the pearls had come to Grandma. And now only two weeks ago, when Cousin Katherine Deal was married, Grandma had given Kathie the pearls. She felt no jealousy about Katherine owning the pearls. She did not care for jewelry and wanted only the funny little hairy trunk.

She shoved the box back under the bed and went out to the kitchen. It was clean and neat and very quiet out there. The old Seth Thomas clock stood silently there with its little brown church painted on the glass. She had heard them talking about it,--how strange it was that it had happened. Several old ladies said it often happened. There it was, showing fourteen minutes of six. And Christine Reinmueller had found her about half-past six. The doctor said she had been dead less than an hour. So it must be true--clocks stopped when people died. How did they know to stop? Grandma had brought the clock into Nebraska in the covered wagon--sixty years before--and to-morrow the house would be dismantled, and the clock and all the other things that had lived together so long would be divided. The house would be empty, for Herman Rinemiller's hired man was going to move here.

She ought to be going now for she had been here for quite a while. The sun was lower and it was almost supper time. She walked over to the door and turned back to the rooms. She could imagine how this would be in writing: "The girl hesitated at the door, at a loss to know how to proceed." She said aloud, "Good-by, little house." She threw out her hands in dramatic gesture. "Good-by to all the days that have gone by, and all the Christmases here and all the birthdays . . ." She loved the sad emotion which she was feeling. She would write a poem about it as soon as she got home. It would begin:

"The little house held its memories . . ."

She would enjoy doing it. And when it was finished she would read it to--

Why, no,--how terrible--there was no Grandma to read it to. She had completely forgotten for a minute and was planning to bring it here and read it to Grandma. Oh, no, no! For the first time the tears broke,--wild, uncontrollable little-girl tears. She could not stand it,--not to have Grandma here to talk things over with and read things to. Nobody else cared about her writing,--no one in the world understood it but Grandma and herself. She always read everything to Grandma. And Grandma would never listen again. There was no one, then. She was shaken with grief and threw herself down on the old chintz-covered couch. Great engulfing sobs tore at her sturdy little body and she moaned aloud. This was her real self,--the real Laura Deal,--not that other queer person who dominated her, who felt emotions play about her as a swimmer feels the waves. This was the first time Grandma's death seemed really to have happened. She had witnessed the sorrow of all the relatives but she herself hadn't seemed to comprehend it before. And now she did. Grandma was gone--forever. There was no one to take her place. No one else to turn to. No one else understood.

She sobbed and cried again in the loneliness she had just realized was hers. She wished she could talk to some one about it. But no one would understand. Only Grandma herself would understand. She wished she could talk to Grandma herself about it. How queer! To want to talk to Grandma herself about Grandma's own death. But it wasn't just the fact that Grandma had died that made her feel so terrible. She could even imagine having a good time without Grandma. It was something else,--something strange that only they two knew about,--some great desire in life that just they two had,--some vision,--some longing that none of the other Deals had,--to write lovely things. Only Grandma understood it and now Grandma was gone. If Grandma could only come back to talk to her about it,--Grandma always knew such comforting things to say. Suddenly she sat up. She wiped her swollen eyes, and when vision was clear again, went over to the square stand, pulled out the scrapbook, took it back to the couch and began turning the pages.

Grandma had always cut out everything she especially liked and pasted it in this big catalogue. She turned the familiar pages. The first of the old articles were brown with age, cut from newspapers of the past. A conglomerate collection of things they made,--poems and obituaries, news items of the Deal clan and bits of sermons. Grandma had pasted them all in neatly with home-made flour paste. There was the death of Grandma's mother,--Mrs. Maggie O'Conner Mackenzie, who "died far from her native land,"--patriotic verses, letters from Laura's father when he was in Alaska and printed at Grandma's prideful request in the local newspaper, an account of the death of Grandma's husband with a crude water-colored border of everlastings around it in neat cramped design, and more verses from newspapers and magazines. But these were not what she wanted. She was wondering what things Grandma had recently pasted in the old book, so she hurried over the pages and came immediately to the last work that had been done. There was no mistaking it, for the verse stood out clear and clean on a new page, the wrinkled clipping scarcely dry from its pasting.

It said:

Pain has been and grief enough and bitterness and crying,
Sharp ways and stony ways I think it was she trod,
But all there is to see now is a white bird flying.
Whose blood-stained wings go circling high,--circling up to God.*

* Margaret Widdemer.

She read it through twice, her heart beating fast in response to the attractiveness of it. She and Grandma always liked the same things. Grandma had found it in a magazine, loved it, and evidently saved it for her to read.

As always, the rhythm and exquisite loveliness of the thought caught and held her emotions. She thrilled to the lilting symmetry of it and the sadness of its beauty. Nimble in committing verse, already she could say it without looking. The line that captured and held her fancy the most was the third one:

But all there is to see is a white bird flying.

A white bird flying! That was like Grandma's death. Nothing was left to her now of Grandma,--nothing remained of Grandma's love and sympathy, of the dreams and desires Grandma held for her,--nothing but the memory. No one else had understood her so thoroughly, had liked the same things so well, had talked to her as Grandma had,--not her own mother, nor her father, nor a single one of the Deal relatives.

The subjects she and Grandma had talked about together,--the dreams they had for her future, the desires that life would give her some of the things Grandma had missed,--could never be talked over again. For Grandma was gone. And all there was to see now was a white bird flying.

It was as though Grandma had left her a message,--as though Grandma, in going away, had not taken the lovely strange desire with her. She felt a vague sensation of relief and comfort. Grief no longer seemed tearing at her very soul and body. She would never tell any one about it,--no one would understand,--but in some unexplainable way everything was just as it had been before Grandma died,--all the dreams and desires were still there, all the vague yearnings for something fine and big in life. A white bird flying. That was what Grandma had left her. Well, she would always see it--always keep her eyes on the sheen of its silver wings.

She put the book back under the little stand, slipped quietly out of the side door, locked it and put the key in her pocket. She walked quickly down the path between the cedars, turned west on the grassy path toward the setting sun, averting her head when she passed Mrs. Johnson and Mrs. Curtis so they would not see her red eyes, and came then to the paved street that led south and toward home.

When she went into the house, her father and mother, her brothers, Wentworth and Millard, and her visiting Aunt Grace were all getting up from the supper table.

"Laura Deal, where have you been?" It was Eloise Deal, her mother, exasperated and worried. "I phoned Kathie's and two or three other places, and even ran over to old Oscar Lutz's. You ought to be more thoughtful than to worry us after all we've been through with Grandma's death. She ought not to do a thoughtless thing like that to worry me, had she, John?" Eloise always picked a subject to pieces, squeezed the parts dry and then put them together again. "I always tried to teach you children to be considerate of me and your father and of each other. And it isn't considerate just to disappear at supper time. The worry itself of where you are is bad enough, to say nothing of your not helping. First, I was afraid you were at Katherine's bothering just when she's beginning to settle her new house, and when I found you weren't there, I hardly knew where to think you were, now that Grandma's gone." Having practically exhausted the various ramifications of the subject, Eloise fell back on the initial question: "Where were you?"

John Deal stood by the chair he had just vacated, silently regarding his young daughter. Wentworth frowned with the critical displeasure of twenty-one for errant twelve. Millard grinned with the malicious satisfied glee of eight that temporarily he was not as other men. Aunt Grace looked on accusingly with her most austere expression.

Laura averted her head. The painful flush of embarrassment flooded her face, so that her eyes, already swollen, felt hot and bursting.

How could she tell them? How could they understand? How could she explain that she had been on a long emotional journey and back again? How could this energetic, efficient mother without imagination, this grim, silent father with the burdens of the whole community on his shoulders, and this stern uncompromising teacher-aunt, comprehend or sympathize? How could they know that a little girl, with a head full of fancies and a heart full of longing, had climbed a ladder reaching from the depths of a grave to the top of high heaven?

She turned to them all:

"I went for a long walk . . . out by Grandma's old house."

How could they see a white bird flying?

CHAPTER 2

Grandmother Deal's old home behind the cedars was dismantled, with every one hot and hurried and uncertain what to do with things. Margaret Deal Baker, wife of Dr. Frederick Baker of Lincoln, and Isabelle Deal Rhodes, the singer from Chicago, were there. Grace Deal, the University teacher, was there. Eloise, Laura and Millard went out to the house in the morning. Mackenzie Deal, the Omaha banker, and Emma, his wife, drove down in the late afternoon. John Deal, Laura's father, came when he had closed his law office. Katherine Deal Buchanan, Mack's and Emma's daughter, a bride of two weeks, drove over in her sport roadster, although there was practically nothing she wanted, the old things giving no promise of fitting in the smart new English cottage with any degree of artistry.

In the beginning, the daughters and daughters-in-law were a bit red-eyed and tearful. At the first sight of her mother's clothes in the old walnut wardrobe, Margaret Baker thought she could not go on with her sorrowful task. Isabelle Rhodes had a bad moment or two as she took down the recipe books and saw her mother's cramped handwriting. The rather austere Grace broke down when she took the glasses off the old Bible in the bedroom and put them in the case. It was almost as hard for Emma and Eloise, the daughters-in-law. Mother Deal had been good to them. Mack and John tramped around out doors, taking down tools that had been their father's and, uncertain what to do, with masculine helplessness, put them all back again. Katherine sat on the kitchen table with the declivity in one corner in which old Doc Matthews had rolled pills in Civil War times, swung her chic-looking feet and, to keep the tears back, made snappy remarks about the dismantling. Millard ran in and out, with Eloise calling: "Millard Deal, do stay in or out."

It was all very confusing, and very strange, with the familiar things in a queer rearrangement, clustered together in piles on the floor. Laura went in and out of the rooms with something tearing a little at her heart every time an article was taken from its old place. Once she took the red pincushion from a pile and placed it back on the sewing-machine, and once she surreptitiously slipped the turkey-feather fan into a blue flowered vase. She could think of nothing but that Grandma was looking on and saying: "You'd better let Annie Johnson have the cape. She could make it over for Dottie." Or, "Tell Mrs. Curtis she can have the geraniums." Yes, that was just what Grandma would have said. It seemed queer to think she could almost hear her. How could it be? Because all the Deals were there together, it seemed that Grandma was there, too. How could some one who was dead live on and move among them just as she had always done?

Everything seemed as natural as though nothing had happened. After the first few attempts to stop the tears and keep from breaking down, the whole clan grew brisk and talkative. In the stress of sorting and making disposition of things the conversation became practical and cheerful. After awhile they even began the old joking way of the Deals. Katherine laughed gayly and made extravagant statements about the old-fashioned clothes which her mother was unearthing in bundles from a closet shelf. Aunt Margaret and Aunt Isabelle even staged a well-bred but intensive argument over which one could have the old tallow lamp with the wick hanging over the side like a dog's tongue hanging out of his mouth. Life always closes over the vacancy and goes on.

Christine Reinmueller, Grandma's neighbor and friend for sixty years, came over, her blue calico dress gathered on full at the place where her waistline should have been, her colorless hair braided in moist flat strands and wound from ear to ear, like a miniature braided rug that had been pinned on the back of her head.

"Ach . . . solch ein aufbrechen . . . such a splitting . . . breaking up . . ." She wrung her hard old hands.

They gave her countless things,--clothes and dishes and garden seeds tied up in rags, and fruit jars. And although she still owned three eighties of land after giving away eight other quarter sections to her children, she was glad to get the things; said they would help her out through the hard winter. Old Christine always thought she was poverty-stricken, on the verge of entering the county home.

While every one was sorting, warm and hurried, old Oscar Lutz came tap-tapping with his cane around to the door. The remarks on the side concerning his arrival were more frank than polite: "Good-night! . . . old Uncle Oscar."

"Of all days!"

"He would."

Old Oscar Lutz came tap-tapping smilingly into the confusion of the dismantling. He had string beans in an old pail with a rope for the handle. He had brought them as a gift for any one who wanted them, but no one seemed overjoyed at the donation.

Old Oscar Lutz was Cedartown's oldest inhabitant. In every town and village west of Iowa there is still some old man who has seen the beginning and the growth of the community, who has watched little saplings grow to ancient trees, and the boys of three generations slip into manhood. Even east of the Missouri River they are gone. But west of the Missouri you will still find them, a few old men who have seen everything from the beginning, who once climbed down from covered wagons into the waving prairie grass, to turn the first furrows in the virgin soil. Some of them are still active. Some mill around like restless old buffaloes. And some sit on their porches watching the stream of life go by.

There are old men of the sea and old men of the mountains,--but here in the midwest live the old men of the prairie. The old salt tells of the mightiness and fascination of the sea, the hillman of the majesty and the lure of the mountains, but the old man of the prairie lives over his days on the plains. One recalls strong ships scuttled on far shores, one the rockribbed fastness of the hills, but the other remembers the wave of the grass on the prairie. To one there is no memory so lovely as the moonlight on the sea, to one the dawn breaking over the mountains, but to the old man of the prairie it is the sudden hush of the winds at twilight.

Old Oscar Lutz was Cedartown's last old man of the prairie. Tall, gaunt, as gnarled as the cottonwoods he had planted, he looked akin to the elements with which he had once wrestled. Furrows in the virgin soil, and furrows in the red-brown face! Eyes the color of the gray-blue ice on Stove Creek. Hair and beard like tangled wheat stalks under the snow. Hands hard and calloused as old buffalo hide. He wore two buttons in the lapel of his shiny old coat,--a G.A.R. token, and a little button with the number "68," the year he had settled in the state. He was as proud of one as the other; a war record on one, and the record of an equally harsh war on the other,--the tussle with nature to make a home on the prairie.

Old Oscar Lutz spent his winters in California, but about the time that countless tiny maltese kittens scrambled over the branches of the willows down by Stove Creek, old Oscar would arrive from the Far West. These were the things in Cedartown's calendar of events which proved that spring had come: a robin or two suddenly swooping down onto some one's leaf-covered lawn, an intermingled odor of bonfires and subsoil from over the meadows, pussy-willows at the creek bend, and old Oscar Lutz's cane tap-tapping on the sidewalk.

There was scarcely any one but old Christine Reinmueller left now in the community who had been his friend of the early days. But he came back to his old haunts every spring, spent a day each with the Mackenzie Deals of Omaha, the John Deals of Cedartown, the Bakers of Lincoln, and a day with a son or two of some old companion of his plainsman's days, regaling them with accounts of their ancestors' uprisings and downswings and his own first early experiences; tap-tapping through the town with his cane ("yes, sir, whittled from a young elm branch down by the creek") to his own old closed and musty dwelling. Sturdy as an old hickory limb, he would go through the house, open up doors and windows, beat some of the ancient rugs and hang his dead Marthy's quilts out on the line. There they would swing all day in the fresh spring wind and the sunshine,--the Rose of Sharon and the Dutch Puzzle, the Log Cabin and the Rising Sun. His rather superficial house-cleaning done, he was ready for the garden. The bursting of the first wild plum blossoms, and the bumbling of the first honey-bee always found him in his garden behind the fussy old house.

There were those he bored with his constant talk of the early days. Because time hung heavily on his hands, his greatest delight was to have a listener. The ratio of his happiness in declaiming his experiences rose in proportion to his audience. One person was a pleasure, two a greater satisfaction, three or more standing about listening to his tales, taking in attentively all he had to say, lifted him to a heaven of rare delight.

And now he was here to-day, tap-tapping up the cement walk to the side door. And the Deals in unison groaned.

"Well, well," he tapped in smilingly, unaware of his lack of welcome, "and so you're getting the old household things divided up?"

"Hello, Uncle Oscar." He was Mrs. Mackenzie Deal's uncle (she had been Henry Lutz's daughter), but he was "Uncle" to the others in name only. Emma pushed forward a chair. He lowered his gaunt frame into it heavily.

"Well--well--the time goes by and one by one we all pass on. . . ."

"And out," Katherine whispered to Laura. Kathie's recent honeymoon had in no way mellowed her flippancy.

"Well--well--it seems like only yesterday. I mind as how--"

"Old-Mind-As-How is all wound up ready to go," Katherine muttered.

". . . we all come across the prairie from Plattsmouth,--Marthy and me and the three little tads . . . my brother Henry and Sarah, his bride, and Will and Abbie Deal, your folks, . . . and you and Gus, Christine. I mind as how, Christine, you and Gus had a boat for a wagon-box, the stern next to the oxen's hind quarters."

"Nein . . . no." Christine spoke up. "De bow . . . he vas next."

"No, I think it was the stern, Christine."

Christine was adamant. "Nein . . . de bow he vas next."

"My money is on Christine," Katherine whispered. "She'll never give up. She'll die saying 'De bow he vas next' if old Mind-As-How doesn't give in."

Old Oscar went on unperturbed. "We met at the Weeping Water and traveled all day against the sun. We could see a faint fringe of trees outlinin' the horizon and we knew it was Stove Creek. We camped by the creek bed . . . made a campfire . . . the stars come out . . . and the Injuns come . . ."

Every one went on about his work. Margaret sorted clothes, Grace packed dishes, Isabelle, books. They all went in and out unheeding the old man's tale.

It made Laura feel sorry for him. People were always that way with old Oscar. Something about the disinterest they seemed to show brought out her sympathy. She wondered how it would feel to be old and to bore people. Of course, he didn't realize he bored them,--that was one good thing.

"I mind as how when Henry and I first come we got a house nigh about where Plattsmouth stands . . ." He was going on and on with no one giving him any special heed. "Stayed all night with some folks by the name of . . . wait a minute . . . name slips . . . tell you in a minute . . . A B C D E F G . . . Gunwall . . . always run down the alphabet if you can't locate a name . . . works every time . . . stayed with a family by the name of . . . what's I say a minute ago?" he asked Laura. "Gunwall . . . that's it. Slept on the floor, had a latch . . . a wooden latch you run a leather thong through to hook the door . . . like this. . . ." With his cane and fingers he showed definitely the form of the latch. "Toward daylight . . . come clear daylight, mebbe, I should say . . . saw the leather thong on the latch keep moving . . . somebody workin' away on the latch . . . pretty soon the leather pulled outwards, and the door opened 'n' in come four o' the biggest Injuns y' ever saw . . . feathers 'n' moccasins 'n' tommyhawks 'n' all. For two cents I'd crawled out 'n' drowned myself in the Platte. Come to think . . . don't know's I could a drowned . . . water was lower 'n' git out. This man . . . what'd I say? . . . A B C D E F G . . . Gunwall . . . this man Gunwall met 'em 'n' talked to 'em. They grunted 'n' stepped around over the beds on the floor . . . made known they wanted something to eat . . . ate a handout . . . laughed a bit. You always think of Injuns serious I bet, don't you? T'ain't so . . . full of jokes . . . if you don't mind the kind they sometimes perpetrated."

He stopped and fell into an absent-minded mood as though he were actually seeing the scenes of which he talked so fluently. The Deals moved all around him, back and forth, sorting, packing. Soon he came to the present with "Goin' to take a flower down to lay on Gunwall's grave some of these days; think I can locate it . . . it'll be som'ers on the north side of a bunch of cottonwoods at the old Prairie Home cemetery."

Out in the kitchen Isabelle Rhodes was saying: "I could scream to have to listen to him. He doesn't live in the present . . . just inhabits another world."

Eloise said stiffly: "He's like house-cleaning and taxes and being fooled the first of April,--you just have to have them all whether you want to or not."

"If he starts visiting me," Katherine, the bride, made her definite pronouncement, "I'll simply disappear when he arrives. Great-uncle or not, life is too short to be bored by the old pest."

It made Laura feel sorry for the old man. "I kind of like him," she admitted. "He sort of fascinates me, now that Grandma's gone. When he's gone, too . . . did you ever stop to think, Katherine, that when your old Uncle Oscar Lutz and old Christine Reinmueller are gone, there won't be any one . . . not a soul left that came here in wagons, and started the community. Just think, we'll lose connection forever with the pioneer days."

"You can sever the connection any time, Lolly, as far as I'm concerned," was Katherine's rejoinder. "Nothing bores me to a state of coma quicker than a rehash of this native-sons-and-daughters, heroic-lives, corn-bread-in-a-sod-house stuff."

It was getting late and the Deal clan stopped work for the day. Old Christine took her things and waddled down the lane toward home, her blue calico dress switching the tall grass at the roadside. When the Deals all left, the old man was still mulling over his recollections, and no one had taken the string beans.

There were a half-dozen cars in the lane road. Every one offered to take him home.

"No," he said, "I'll walk. Don't stop walking and you'll never get rusty in the joints."

When the John Deal car turned out of the lane road, Laura looked back. The old man was leaning on his cane and looking across the fields and meadows to the sun slipping low in the west. A sudden mist came to her eyes. She wished the others liked him better. Poor old man. When she got home she would write about him:

Poor old man, looking toward the sun,
What do you remember, now that life's done?

CHAPTER 3

The Deal clan worked three days before they had finished dismantling their mother's home and getting it ready for occupancy by Herman Rinemiller's hired man.

"I never saw so many things in my life," each one insisted. "Loads and loads of the accumulations of years. Every magazine, every paper, every string and button that ever came into that house Mother had hoarded."

And so the old things, once so precious, each one representing sacrifice for the purchase, were scattered to the four winds,--to children, grandchildren, neighbors, friends, church organizations, Salvation Army, the junk pile down by Stove Creek,--like leaves from some sturdy old oak blown hither and yon in the dead of the year. Margaret took the clock with the little brown church painted on the glass, Isabelle the tallow lamp, Mack the thumbed-over Shakespeare,--"Mother used to make me read it when I didn't know what it was all about," he explained,--and John the blue plush album, with Eloise deeply annoyed at his absurd choice. Katherine deigned to admit into the lovely new home of English architecture, the newest looking of the pieced quilts,--of Jacob's Ladder design. Grace, choosing the scrapbook, was surprised beyond measure when Laura, usually quiet and shy as a little brown quail, pounced upon it with an almost tearful ferocity: "Oh, no, Aunt Grace, not the scrapbook. It's mine . . . please. Grandma always read them all to me . . . she said I could have it. . . ."

Eloise was upset beyond measure and was ready to insist upon Laura's turning it over to her Aunt Grace with apologies, but Aunt Margaret intervened, and Laura bore home her two possessions in peace,--the little hairy calf-skin trunk with the nailhead initials on it, and the thick old scrapbook with all the lovely verses.

Eloise did not understand Laura. Mother and daughter, they seemed not even remotely related. Brisk, practical, efficient and humorless, Eloise, by some strange joke of nature had given birth to a child of emotions, of fancies and dreams. And no barnyard hen on the river's brink was ever more worried and exasperated over her swimming duckling than was Eloise over Laura's disinclination to show any characteristics of her own (the Wentworth) side of the house.

Toward the last of that month, when all seemed normal again after Grandma's death,--so soon does Life slip back to its regular routine--in the privacy of her upstairs blue and white room, Laura began writing a long story. It took her several days, and Eloise went many times to the stairway with: "Laura, whatever are you doing? Do get at some work. We all have to work,--people in our circumstances, at least. If we were better off maybe you could sit around that way, but we might as well face facts that we never will be wealthy and able to enjoy life." There are those who would have taken exception to Eloise's statement. But that was Eloise's philosophy: great wealth brought comfort and happiness. And having no great wealth, she resigned herself, perforce, to a state of no great comfort and no deep happiness.

Laura would dutifully get up, stir things around a bit in her room and then settle down to the absorbing story. It was entitled "A Love That Never Came to Pass" or "The Professor's Life Tragedy." It involved the unrequited love of a college professor for a fellow member of the faculty. To be sure, no obstacle seemed to stand in the way of a happy culmination of the affair, excepting the advice against marriage freely given by a villainous unmarried roommate of the wooed-but-not-won lady, the former resembling Aunt Grace so thoroughly in Laura's mind that she felt a little guilty over the accurate description.

On the third day of the composition period, the embryonic author grew so upset over the tragic affair that she cried too copiously to see the pages clearly. It was in this state that her mother found her. Exasperated mother and embarrassed daughter took part in a dialogue which got them nowhere; indeed, which only seemed to push them farther apart in their understanding of each other.

"That child worries me so," Eloise told John that evening.

"Do you suppose anything could be"--Eloise was pale in her earnestness--"wrong with her?"

"Of course not. She's a smart kid."

"But where did she get it . . . that foolish emotion? Not from my side of the house, that's certain."

"Oh, we'll assume responsibility . . . the Deals." John grinned.

"The Wentworths are all so practical. Look at Uncle Harry Wentworth--worth a half million, if a dollar."

"I thought that money originally came from his wife." John could not resist. At which Eloise closed her mouth with the unspoken eloquence she sometimes assumed, and John went silently back to his office.

When Laura had carried the sad life story of the professor to a close which ended in a grave under a weeping-willow tree with the erstwhile juggler of his happiness planting bleeding-heart bushes on the grave, she washed the visible liquid form of her emotion from her eyes, and went down to cousin Katherine's.

Katherine's and Jimmie Buchanan's new home was lovely and modern and smart, just as Katherine herself was lovely and modern and smart. Its lawn was only beginning to emerge, pretty and green, from the recent dirt of the excavation. But the house itself was a finished affair from the beveled glass of the front door to the green and white incinerator.

Laura opened the immaculate white front door and stepped into the hall with a little, "Hoo-hoo!" She reveled in the sight of the lovely rooms with the gay wedding gifts all about, the inner doors with their sparkling glass and filmy lace, the mahogany and white stairway winding to the upper rooms, the long lovely sitting-room with the one end taken up by the fireplace and the open bookcases. No one was in sight, but immediately she heard a door open, and Katherine's head appeared around the corner of the upstairs hall to be followed by the rest of Katherine in an orchid-colored underslip.

"Oh, it's you, Lolly." That was Katherine's pet name for her cousin. Millard, she had long ago dubbed "The Tribulation," shortening it later to Trib, a nickname which half the town called him now.

"Come on in and make yourself homely, Lolly," she called down.

Laura giggled appreciatively. Kathie was always so funny. She wished Kathie liked her better. No, that was not quite the right thing to think. Katherine liked her, but she took no pains to conceal the fact that she thought her odd. "You're the queerest little duck," she would say whenever Laura ventured one of her mature opinions on any subject.

"I'm going out, Lolly." Kathie looked down at her as she dropped a lovely orchid afternoon gown over her head. "Bridge at Mrs. A. R. Brown's,--that's short for Ashes of Rose, I suppose." Laura giggled. "My word, Laura, this little burg has as much going on as Omaha,--that is, providing you count every church supper and every study club and every female tea. Jimmie wants me to toddle to everything . . . good business, he says . . . the old diplomat in international relations . . . so I run around to them all . . . blue blood, red blood, Catholic, Protestant, Republican, Democrat, wet, dry, our bank's customers, t'other bank's customers. . . ."

She was downstairs now, lovely and slim and sparkling. Laura thought she had never seen any one so gay and pretty. And she smelled like the violets at the foot of the old trees by the creek bed. She threw her arms around Laura now and gave her a swift caress. Laura was surprised and embarrassed beyond measure. So seldom did Katherine notice her except to tease. "How old are you, Lolly? Twelve?"

"Thirteen last week."

"Imagine! Bless your little kid heart. Well, all I can ask for you, Laura," she was suddenly sweet and serious, "is that seven or eight years from now, you'll be as gloriously happy as I am."

"If you mean getting married," Laura said, with the crimson creeping under the olive of her skin, "I'm never going to. I'm going to do something else." She loved watching Jimmie and Katherine--they were a handsome couple. She liked the thrill it gave her to look at them together, but she could not imagine herself under the same circumstances. She shrank from the thought of placing herself in the picture--wanted only to look at others.

Katherine laughed, "You're a queer little duck." She threw her arm around Laura again. "Well, I must go, honey. There isn't anybody here. My butler, maid and chef have all gone. They're all one person, you know,--I call her my 'unholy trinity.'"

"Do you care if I stay and read?"

"Of course not. But . . ." Katherine paused in slipping on a white coat. "What makes you read so much, Lolly? Why don't you get out and do more?"

There it was again,--the thing her mother always said. "Oh, I don't know. I guess I like people in books better than the ones outside," she admitted.

There was the sudden sound of tap-tapping on the cement walk running around to the rear of the house, and Katherine looked out to say: "Oh, darn! There's old man Whiskery-Whee-Come-Wheeze. Stay here, Lolly, and don't squeak, or we'll have to march with Sherman to the sea all afternoon."

Katherine slipped out to the back door, accepted with thanks the beets all washed and clean, took them gingerly out of the old bucket with a rope for the handle, kept surreptitiously closing the door a little more while the old man was talking and finally escaped back to Laura.

"It wasn't Sherman. It was eatables. 'Knew some families further out on the prairie had a worse time than us.'" Katherine imitated the old man's high husky voice to perfection. "'Didn't have nothin' to eat . . . no money . . . last resource was to go out on the prairie 'n' gather up the bleached bones o' the buffalo, haul 'em to town and get a dollar a load. Nature is kind under her harsh exterior. . . . Always leaves somethin' around . . . even if only bones bleachin' on the prairie.'"

Laura laughed. Katherine was so droll. But something hurt her, too. It troubled her to think of the old man trying to tell that to Kathie in her orchid-colored chiffon dress and her lovely white coat. It was true about the buffalo bones. Grandma had said so, too.

Then Katherine, gay and lovely, left for the bridge party. When Laura saw the car go out of the drive, she locked the front door and went into the long living-room. But she did not read.

She tiptoed down the length of the room as though even then some one might be listening. In front of the fireplace she stopped and looked up at the huge portrait which filled the entire space above the mantel.

It was the painting of a lovely lady in velvet draperies, her reddish-brown hair curling over her shoulder and a string of pearls at her neck. In her slender tapering hand she held a hat with a long drooping plume.

It was no ordinary painting,--but an heirloom that had come to Katherine on her wedding day,--the picture of lovely Isabelle Anders-Mackenzie, Katherine's and Laura's own great-great-grandmother. Standing there alone in the silent house and looking up at the lovely lady, Laura recalled all that her Grandmother had told her about it,--how the lady had been an aristocratic Scotch woman; how her only son, Basil, riding to the hounds, had met and wooed and won a little sixteen-year-old Irish peasant girl on the Scottish moors, married her and taken her home to the great estate near Aberdeen; how this lady of the picture had tried to make a grand dame of the little Maggie O'Conner, but had not succeeded, for the little bride would put on her peasant dress and shawl and run away over the moors to her own folks. Isabelle Anders-Mackenzie died, and the young Basil and his Irish wife had seen all the property slip away and revert to the crown. They had come to America then with their children, and Grandma herself had been born soon after they landed.

It was only because Grandma had told about hearing of this huge painting that used to hang on the landing of the great house in Aberdeen that Kathie knew about it. She had teased her father to find it. Uncle Mack had set agents to work and though it had cost a great deal of money--he never would tell how much--they had found the painting and shipped it to Katherine. That was just like Kathie. Kathie always got everything she wanted. She wondered if Kathie cared very much for the painting, now that she had it.

For a long time Laura stood and looked up at the lovely lady. The lovely lady looked back at Laura. But Laura was the first to speak.

"Isabelle Anders-Mackenzie," she said aloud, and the sound of her voice in the silent lovely room half startled her. "I'm an author."

Isabelle Anders-Mackenzie gazed back from heavy-lidded eyes, her cupid's-bow lips smiling mysteriously as though she possessed the concentrated wisdom of all the ages. One could not conscientiously say that she seemed pleased at the news and approving of it, but neither could one justly contend that she was annoyed and distressed. She merely smiled that puzzling smile as though, sphinx-like, she knew the secret of deep mysteries.

"I live in a little house all by myself," Laura told the lady confidentially, "no one can touch me when I am there. And no one can come in." She was enjoying herself, dramatizing the situation. She could see herself, a member of the fifth generation beyond the lady of the portrait, standing in front of the ancestor and confiding in her. "I hereby take a vow . . ." she went on. All at once it struck her that there should be some special emphasis to such a serious statement, some rite performed which would verge on the sacred. She ought to do it with human blood, but she did not quite relish the thought of puncturing her own anatomy. She wished she had something that would make a good imitation of blood. Perhaps Kathie had beet juice. She tiptoed to the icebox. There were potatoes and head lettuce, pickles and pie and cold meat, but not a single red condiment. In the medicine closet her quest ended. With the cork from a bottle of disinfectant she went back to the scene of her solemn promise. "This is a symbol," she said, touching her forehead with the scarlet-colored drug: "Laura Deal . . . I hereby plight my troth to a career. Nothing shall keep me from it. If love comes by, I shall spurn it."

She liked the sound of that statement so well that she repeated: "If love comes by I shall spurn it . . . him . . ." Of course, love had to be a him. She fell to wondering what he would look like, providing he did come by. In fact, it would be rather disappointing if he did not come by to be spurned. It made the tears come to her eyes to think how terrible he would feel. But she would be obdurate. Obdurate.--that was her new word. She mustn't forget it.

The door bell ringing suddenly and harshly threw the author into something of a panic. She hastily drew a handkerchief from her blouse pocket and wiped from her forehead all pharmaceutical manifestations of the oath of allegiance to a career. Her heart thumping rapidly, she tiptoed to the door and peeped cautiously out through the lace-covered glass. It was no one at all but Allen Rinemiller, dressed in brown corduroys and a blue shirt open at the throat. Allen had graduated that spring from High School and the captaincy of the football team. He was big and blond. There were three distinct waves in his close clipped hair; his eyes were crinkling and jolly looking and his tanned skin was smooth and firm. She opened the door.

"Hello, Allen."

"Hello, Laura. I went to the back door first where all decent tramps and peddlers go, but nobody came. You the hired girl?"

Laura laughed. She didn't know Allen Rinemiller so very well, but she had watched him lots of times at football games and heard the older girls talk about him, and sometimes when she had been at Grandma's he had plowed or used the disc or picked corn close to Grandma's yard, for his father's land joined it.

"Cousin Kathie's gone away," she volunteered. "What did you want?"

"I didn't want anything. She's the one that wanted it. Wood." And Laura noticed for the first time the truck in the driveway. "Dry elm wood for the fireplace. I want to know where to put it, but first I want to try a chunk in the fireplace if I can, to see if the size is right."

Laura told him to come right in and try the chunk and she would phone Kathie at Mrs. A. R. Brown's to see where it was to go.

So Allen Rinemiller, stepping gingerly over Kathie's oriental rugs, brought in a huge chunk, carrying it easily on his stalwart shoulder. And when Laura came back with the message that the wood was to go in the south end of the basement, he had the screen removed and the chunk in place.

"O.K. . . . if this one goes, they all go," he said and stood up, looking curiously about him.

"Gee . . . swell joint." He was evidently appreciating the lovely rooms with their soft rugs and draperies, their attractive furniture, books and pictures and bowls of flowers. "Gosh . . . I'd like a house like this." Without apology, he walked back to the hall and looked out to the diningroom. There were lavender asters on the dark polished table out there and a big bowl of white ones beyond on the bench in the green and white breakfast-nook. He could even catch a glimpse of the white enamel of the kitchen with its dainty green and white curtains over leaded windows. "Gosh," he reiterated ". . . just about perfect."

"I think it's nice, too. I like to come here." Laura was glad Allen Rinemiller liked it so well. She had been in his house with her grandmother and knew that it was scrubbed to a shining neatness but terribly plain, straight wooden chairs, shining oak table and sideboard, coarse lace curtains ruffled and starched.

When he was going back to the fireplace for the chunk, he stopped short. "Who's the dame?"

Laura almost blushed in her fear that the lovely lady in the picture might suddenly open her cupid's-bow mouth and start to tell all she knew.

"That's Kathie's and my great-great-grandmother," she told him. And for the first time she sensed a rather snobbish pride in the aristocratic ancestor. No one could say Allen's ancestors, on his father's side at least, were aristocratic. Old Christine Reinmueller, his grandmother, was "Dutchier than sauerkraut" every one admitted. She had never even learned to talk all English, but would mix her German words atrociously with the American ones. They said Gus, his grandfather, who died a few years before, had wound rags around his feet for socks.

"Her name was Isabelle Anders-Mackenzie, and she lived on a big estate in Scotland. My Uncle Mack in Omaha had this painting sent over from Scotland this summer when Kathie was married. And those pearls she has around her neck in the picture are the very pearls Grandma Deal gave Kathie for a wedding present."

"Can you beat it?"

"It was painted lots more than a hundred years ago, about a hundred and fifty, I guess, and the agent Uncle Mack hired had an awful hard time finding it." Laura was surprised at her own talkativeness. After all, it wasn't hard to talk to any one who was really interested in the same thing you were. And Allen Rinemiller acted interested.

He asked her another question or two, said "My gosh," and "Can you beat it?" and suddenly came to the present with a cheerful: "Well, this'll never buy the baby a shirt," shouldered his log lightly and started away. At the door he paused. "Did you know I'm going up to the University to school?" It was the pride of the male of the species strutting a little before the other sex, even though the female was a plain brown wren of a girl.

"Why, Allen, I'm glad. Isn't that nice?" Laura was genuinely surprised. Not many of the Reinmuellers had gone away to school. But Laura was forgetting something. Laura was forgetting that it was the Reinmuellers who seldom went away to school. And Allen, of the third generation, was a Rinemiller.

"Is Verna Conden going too?" She asked the question teasingly. It still seemed slightly audacious for her to be talking to the big High School football captain.

Allen grinned. "No, she's looking for a job . . . clerking or something. Say, Laura, I'll appoint you a committee of one to keep an eye on my girl when I'm gone."

Laura laughed at the frank retort.

They talked a few moments more about the University, and then Allen went singing to the truck and the piling of the wood.

For a long time she could hear the chunks whacking against the cement and a gay unmusical voice singing of a lady in a balcony in a little Spanish town.

CHAPTER 4

When Allen Rinemiller left Katherine Buchanan's home, he drove around by the Conden cottage and dated Verna to go down to Weeping Water to a show in the evening. Verna was pretty in a wind-blown fashion, with fly-away hair upon which a beret was usually perilously perched. She was gay and noisy, conscious always of her own vivacity. Her eyes were hard and bright, her generous mouth too scarlet.

"Landed a job yet?"

No, Verna had not landed a job. She guessed she'd just have to go in some one's kitchen. Maybe it ought to be her own kitchen. She believed maybe she'd advertise for a man. Her hard bright eyes laughed at Allen. Allen liked her--he liked her a lot--but whenever she talked that provocative way it made him uncomfortable.

When he left her and started home, driving the little truck fast over the graveled roads, he gave her no more thought. In fact he was thinking of the home in which he had just been. He wished their own house looked like the Buchanans'. There was something about it that you just absorbed into your system,--it was so satisfying. Several of the members of his old High School class had some homes similar,--all low-shaded lights and cushions and book-ends and rugs that were soft as Turkish towels. He believed he'd talk to his mother about getting some new things.

His drive on the highway was very short, only a half mile beyond the town limits. But there was another quarter of mile drive on their own land, for the Rinemiller house sat back so far that one approached it down a long private lane bordered by walnut trees. The house itself was plain, a white box so symmetrical that, save for the narrow porch across the front, it looked like a child's huge cubic-shaped block set down in the exact center of the Rinemillers' holdings. Old Gus Reinmueller, dead these many years, had come over sixty years before into the young state with Christine, "his woman," driving oxen hitched to a rowboat on wheels with a dingy cover over it.

They had been part of that great general movement in settling Nebraska. Bison herds, bands of Indians and wild fowl had held complete possession of the land until the first isolated settlements, clinging to the banks of the sluggish Missouri, made their advent. Indian trails then became trails for adventurers, Mormons, gold hunters, freighters. These were followed by the settlers with the homing instinct of so many birds of passage. Covered wagons jolted over the old trails and made new ones through the prairie grass. Many of these homesteaders were of the old stock of corn farmers from Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Wisconsin. Many more were of foreign blood. These latter, because of their common language and background, tended to group themselves in the same regions. Thus, Kearney County became predominately Danish; Phelps County, Swedish. The Mennonites grouped in Fairbury, the Bohemians in Saline and Butler Counties, the Hollanders in southern Lancaster. All were highly efficient farming people. But everywhere came the Germans, equally efficient and thrifty. Of these were Gus and Christine Reinmueller, Allen's grandparents. And a far cry it now seemed from old Gus and Christine to young Allen with his finer sensitiveness, his clear-eyed modern viewpoint, his flexibility toward all the modes of the times.

In those old days Gus and Christine had built a dugout at the end of a ravine by digging into the low hillside, setting sturdy tree trunks a short way from the opening and covering the top with poles cut from the branches of the few trees growing along the creek bed, across which they packed a solid roofing of sod. Into this, with only the hard dirt floor and the one opening, they had moved from their wagon. For several years they lived there with their babies, like so many rabbits in a hutch.

Gus and Christine worked early and late; Christine in the field by the side of Gus, staying away from her man's work only when her babies were born, proud of the small number of days she took off for those events. They bought almost nothing. Clothes were handed down from child to child. They ate what they raised. They suffered with the rest of the pioneers through all the long hardships of drouth, grasshoppers, blizzards, crop failures. They suffered with the other early settlers, it is true, but with one difference,--their hardships were all physical. There was no suffering of the spirit, like that which came to the Lutzes and the Deals. They were stolid, inured to poverty, cared nothing that they were deprived of food for the mind, thought being able to write one's name on a receipt the only necessity for schooling. When money came in they hoarded it. They thought only of one thing. Land. Before Gus had quite finished paying for the first eighty acres of land he was contracting to go in debt for another. To enlarge their holdings became a fetish with them. Two eighties now.

"That's like paying for a dead horse," Will Deal, his neighbor, had once told him.

"Ya--dead horse." Gus had shrugged his shoulders. "But purty soon already . . . that dead mare she come to life. Ya?"

The dugout gave place in time to a small cheap two-roomed frame house in which they all huddled. They were up at four o'clock in the morning, routing out the children, too. The little boys husked corn with half frozen hands. Three eighties. Four eighties. Later they added two more rooms. The girls could husk now. Five eighties--six eighties.

They bought Abbie Deal's land. Seven eighties. It was across the road on this eighty that they built the white house as it now stood, large, cubic-shaped, as long as wide and as high as long, a cheap narrow porch across the front, four square rooms downstairs and four square rooms up. They bought more land of Oscar Lutz. Oscar was living in town now, merely holding his land for investment. Eight eighties. Some of the boys could work away now, the girls take places in town, and all bring home their wages. Nine eighties. There were no conveniences in the house; water was carried from the well in buckets. Small kerosene lamps made glow-worm lighting in the rooms when, indeed, lighting became necessary. It was extravagant to sit up and use kerosene. "Get to bed, all of you. To-morrow yet the husking begins."

They kept the two front rooms closed. Too much fuel to have them open. "Keep hustling . . . all of you. If you're cold already yet . . . work faster some more. Get out at that milking." Oscar Lutz still owned two eighties. Gus and Christine could not stand it to see the black loam across their barbed-wire fence; could not bear to see Oscar Lutz's tenant plowing up close to their own holdings. They made Oscar an offer. "Too much he wants. For himself he say he keep two eighties. To come back from California summers and see some of his own land yet he wants. I no more ask him," Gus had said. But Christine's mind had harried her with land gluttony; her little eyes glinted with the thought of the ownership of the mellow soil. "Du narr . . . Some more you ask." She had urged Gus. "A little more you offer. Go on . . . qvick."

And finally Oscar Lutz had sold. Ten eighties. Eleven eighties. No one in this end of the county owned so much. Only one boy was left at home at that time,--the youngest, Herman. For some unknown reason, Gus and Christine had been a little more lenient with Herman. There had been a bit more leisure for Herman, not quite so much "Get to work . . . you" for the youngest. Herman had gone into town almost every day to school, riding his pony and carrying rye bread and sausage in a tin pail. They had only required him to stay out at husking time and for plowing. Herman had gone clear through the eighth grade, had even gone on into High School for one year, but Gus and Christine had put an end to that foolishness. "For what good you think them Latins is?" Christine wanted to know. And Gus had laughed, "Ya, Herman . . . that Latin make you pick more corn faster and bring you in more pigs . . . huh?"

So Herman had dropped the subject of going on through High School and had cut alfalfa all that first day when his class entered as sophomores. But as time went on, there had been something in Herman that would not prostrate itself so thoroughly before the god of Work. He had labored hard enough, when he was at it. But he had done other things too. He had taken farm papers. He had put a tin bathtub in one of the empty upstairs rooms, fixed it with a plug to let the water run out even though he had to carry the water up to it, had "slicked up" and gone to all the town doings, left the church of his fathers for an English-speaking one, had begun going with gentle Lucy Steele without a drop of German blood in her veins. About this last procedure, Gus and Christine had made a great many caustic comments.

"Why don't you get yourself a German girl?" Gus had wanted to know. And "Ya!" Christine had snorted. "A stark . . . strong one mit some harte muskeln--muscles."

And then, while Herman was still going steadily with the pretty and refined Lucy Steele, old Gus had suddenly died.

Death played old Gus a mean trick by slipping up on him unawares, with no more advance notice than the scratch of a shingle nail. Herman, looking at the red wound, had wanted his father to go right over to town to the doctor. But Gus and Christine had said no, the doctors just took your money whether you needed any treatment or not and they would put plenty of fat pork on it to draw out the poison. But the drawing qualities of the butchered hog had failed to materialize, and quite suddenly old Gus was dead. "At the seedin' time, too," Christine had wailed. "Mit the calves comin' in . . . and all. How ve get along already? Mein Gott!"

Surprisingly, old Gus had made a will. John Deal had drawn it up. It had been signed by Gus and duly witnessed,--signed with a cross and a notary public's affidavit that the cross was the signature of one Gus Reinmueller. The land was left to Christine to do with as she wished. Gus had realized that Christine was the more crafty of the two.

And old Christine had land then. Old Christine had her life's desire. Lots of land. The boys were all on the various eighties. Heinie here, Fritz there, Ed on another, Emil farming two quarters, the girls' husbands on others. All had bought more land of their own. All but Herman were getting toward middle age. They were hard working, well-to-do. Their homes were beginning to have conveniences, and they were sending their children on through High School. Christine deeded over an eighty to each of six, but gave two, including the home eighty, to Herman. Three adjoining ones she kept for herself.

Then Herman married the soft-voiced Lucy who had gone through High School and taught a year, and brought her home to the cubic-block of a house, up the long road by the walnut trees.

Old Christine had said a great many things about it. She had gone over to her neighbor, Abbie Deal, many times in her grief and distress.

"Ach . . . Gott!" She had wrung her hard hands in distress. "Sale carpets on de two front rooms . . . mit green roses every t'ree or four feet already. Curtains by de vindows . . . mit ribbons tied back. Närrish . . . voolish."

"But, Christine, that's nice." Abbie Deal had comforted her. "You ought to be glad. You ought to be happy because Herman is happy with such a nice wife and that she is fixing it up so comfortably."

But Christine could not be comforted. She had waddled in disgust back down the lane road at the Deals', her blue calico dress gathered at the waistline, angrily switching the dusty jimson weeds. Each time she had gone over to the Deals' there was more distressing news to convey,--the advent of a piano and a piece of furniture in the dining room she thought they called a "boardside." But of them all, nothing seemed to irritate her so thoroughly as the carpet "mit de green roses every t'ree or four feet," as though the multiplicity of flowers added insult to the general prodigal expenditure.

Old Christine had lived with Herman and Lucy the greater part of a year. And then Herman, seeing that his beloved Lucy was ill and nervous, and that Christine was making her more so, quite firmly had moved his mother to a small tenant cottage across the road, and had seen her comfortably settled there in the little house where the wastefulness of fuel and the lavish squandering of money for kerosene need not distress her. That was the year--eighteen years before--that Herman and Lucy's only child had been born,--Allen.

That was also the year that Emil and Fritz and Ed and Herman and all the rest of the Reinmuellers met together and decided to drop the superfluous letters from their name. Their young folks were marrying here and there, some were changing their memberships to English churches, several going away to school. The young folks preferred the English spelling.

The Reinmuellers had become Rinemillers.

At home now, Allen put the truck under the shed and went into the house, looking about him with the eye of a critic. He saw the shining oak chairs and sideboard, the scrubbed oilcloth, the rope portieres hanging between the rooms, the axminster rugs which had long since replaced the carpet that had so distressed his grandmother. He knew nothing was right. You couldn't just get something new and put in as he had planned on the way home. It wouldn't improve things a rat-i-tat--that was a cinch, he said to himself. The only way to go about it was to ditch everything out and start new. Even then,--and he made himself imagine the square rooms divested of furnishings,--even then nothing was right; the shape of the rooms, the windows, the floors, the ceiling. Oh well,--this was kind of a silly thought, but if he ever had a home of his own,--it was going to be just right, like the Buchanans'.

His mother came in with her egg-basket: "You back, Allen?" She was sweet faced and pleasant looking--a plump little lady with neat light brown hair and wide humorous blue eyes. Allen resembled her but he had his father's physique. "Eighty-six. I think the White Wyandottes are the best breed I've ever had. Was the wood all right?"

"Yep--and gee, Mother, you ought to see the bride's house. Looks like the pictures in your women's magazines."

"Yes, I can just imagine it. I hope the Woman's Club will meet there so I--oh, Allen," she broke off with a girlish squeal of excitement. "How could I forget? Your letters! Papa brought in the mail when you were gone." She picked them up from the oak sideboard and held them out,--two square white envelopes, almost similar in size and texture.

Allen tore into one. "A University fraternity party card," he said in an awe-struck voice, "--the Xi Kappas."

He tore open the other. "Another one," his voice shook a little, "--the Pi Taus. The Pi Taus." He repeated it with reverential disbelief.

For a moment, with eyes glued to the white card, he had a fleeting vision of driving past an aristocratic looking building up at Lincoln the night after a basket-ball game at the University Coliseum. It had great cathedral-like pillars in front, and was brightly lighted on three floors. Cars were drawn up at the curb and fellows in dress suits were getting in and out of them. There were girls in velvet evening wraps--.

He raised his head and spoke eloquently: "Oh, my good gosh!"

CHAPTER 5

Miraculously, to Allen's way of thinking, he was pledged Pi Tau and the aristocratic house with the cathedral-like pillars became his home. But Fate, that old woman of the loom, snapped the bright colored thread of her weaving in the spring after his initiation. For Allen's father died suddenly, and Allen went back to the square white house at the end of the lane of walnut trees to take complete charge of the work.

But something had happened to Allen. He was not satisfied,--not with himself, not with the old-fashioned methods of his father, with the machinery on the farm, nor with his limited knowledge of the management of the business side of it. To his surprise and deep mystification he was not even satisfied with Verna Conden. He lived only for the day when he could go back to school,--could tie together the broken strands of the weaving and see the whole of the design.

Herman Rinemiller's death had done something to Old Christine, too. She spent most of her time over at the square white house talking of Herman, handling things that had been Herman's, recalling childish anecdotes about him. "A calf . . . he vas sick once . . . my leetle Herman t'ought he vas todt . . . dead. Und he took off his coat and put it over him . . . and ven ve looked out, leetle Herman's coat vas all around de yard runnin'." She told it gently in pride and sorrow. It had come to her out of a harsh past, from the life of her little son whose boyish playtime had been given to work,--a sacrifice on the altar of greed. Poor Christine! She had long ago spent the days of her young motherhood in the marketplace, and now that they were all squandered, she had so few pleasant things left to remember. So she crouched low over the dull embers of a few half-memories in order to warm her old heart.

Lucy, Allen's mother, was always kind to her old mother-in-law, as hard as it was to do anything for her. "You can come here and live with Allen and me now, Grandma. You know you're as welcome here as though Herman was alive."

Old Christine's pale blue eyes filled with unaccustomed tears. Two or three dropped down on her leathery red-brown cheeks with immodest abandon. "A good girl you are," she said suddenly, and wiped the miscreant water away with the back of a red hand as hard as wood.

Allen, always tenderhearted when it came to old people and children, seeing her unusual distress, added his own brisk: "Sure, Grandma, I'll set you up a little stove in the east room and make you a wood-box so you can have your own heat and not depend on ours."

After which, old Christine tied a veil over her head, took her basket of eggs, and in her blue calico dress trudged over to town, went into John Deal's office and gave Allen two eighties of land via a will to which so many codicils had been added that, with more amendments than body, it looked much like the Constitution of the United States. She signed her name with a cross, saw it witnessed, and trudged stolidly back to the farm in her blue calico dress gathered full at the waistline.

High School to Laura Deal proved to be what High School is to any young person in the Cedartowns of the country,--a period of youthful ups and downs, illusions and disillusions, of long-lived friendships and short-lived enmities, of study so interspersed with play that youth does not always understand where the one leaves off and the other begins.

Laura's achievements in those four years were of extremely varied results. She was the shining star member of all English classes and the dumbest integral portion of all mathematical ones. Composition? Although verbally as noncommunicative as her father, she wrote reams on any and all topics with girlish abandon. Algebra? Eloise, varying her home instruction with scolding, sarcasm, and plaintive encouragement, managed to assist in pulling her daughter through it. American Literature? Laura had read and absorbed most of the assignments before they were assigned. Physics? Her father, beginning with extreme patience to try to augment the teacher's instructions, admitted toward the middle of the term an inglorious defeat, and quite frankly worked out the rest of the problems for her. Shakespeare? She read all the plays demanded in the curriculum, and all the others not so nominated in the bond. Plane Geometry? John and Eloise together in combined effort, dragged, tugged, and pushed their offspring through part of that science which treats also of the magnitude of space and its relations, to a passing grade. Advanced composition? Laura dashed off essays, poems, parodies, stories and biographies, both for herself and for such of her girl friends as stood in dire need of material assistance. Solid Geometry? Instructor and parents, for once in peaceful united decision, gave up with calm resignation and allowed her to substitute something which, like that portion of her mathematical head, was not so solid.

Laura was prettier now in her Senior year than she had ever been. Her clear olive complexion with its warm underlying pink, her brown eyes, the softness of her well kept dark hair, the suppleness of her body, all helped to make an attractive whole. But Laura herself was odd. Every one said so. For one thing, in an age when High School dating was the most important of the extra curricular events, Laura did not enter into the pastime with any degree of pleasure. She did not care for boys. Dating, perforce, meant boys. And because things that are equal to the same thing are equal to each other, it followed that Laura did not care for dating. Q.E.D. As skating companions, tennis partners, and members at large of any other form of out-door sport, she not only tolerated them, she liked them. But when it came to rear-seat riding, semi-gloomy-corner sitting, and all similar modes of entertainment, Laura was just not among those present. More likely, she was curled up in some cushioned corner reading or dreaming dreams of her own. She was used to hearing people say she was odd. But for the most part she did not even care.

"When Laura gets her nose in a book, she's just dead to the world," was Eloise's complaint. "She's not wide awake about housework, either. She does her work mechanically as though she didn't have the slightest interest in practical things. At times I think she's lazy."

"Oh, I don't know," John returned, "she's young. She isn't lazy about things she likes to do. Maybe we don't understand her. Mother always seemed to understand her so well."

Immediately he saw that he had said the wrong thing. Eloise's firm lips gave an example of one of the few theorems which had been comprehensible to Laura,--that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. "I'm sure, John, that no one can understand a child so well as the mother who gave it birth."

To which conclusive biological statement John made no reply. He had long ago learned that it was less trying not to argue. And for that matter, he did not understand Laura himself. He loved her devotedly in his busy way, but he did not understand her. But Eloise would not let the subject lie. She had to dig it up again and worry it around as a dog digs up the bone he has buried and stands barking foolishly at it.

"I'm as fond of books as Laura. She takes that from me as much as the Deals. But I don't moon over them. I go in for knowledge and data and not the emotion to be obtained from them."

Eloise took a keen delight in her club assignments. For days before the club meetings, she would work on her paper surrounded by an array of text books and encyclopedias. She would write and rewrite, hitching a sentence from one text book onto a sentence from another in an intricate form of rearrangement, and read over the result with deepest pride.

"When I go into a subject, I go thoroughly," she would say, "I marshal all the facts to be obtained."

"Facts--facts . . . what good are just facts?" Laura would say to herself, for to her a new phrase of lovely words was infinitely more alluring than all the facts of her Mother's cherished club work. "Mother never wrote an original thing in her life," she would admit to herself. And then in a sudden feeling of revulsion at the disloyalty of the thought, would throw her arms around Eloise, who stiff as a ramrod, would submit to the hasty caress with: "There, there, Laura, let mother get at something practical now."

Eloise's life seemed not rounded out. One may work at trivial uninteresting tasks and be neither small nor tiresome. But Eloise chose to dwell on the fact that she was doomed to a life of trivialities. She gave the impression that Providence, through some oversight, had neglected to place her in the way of a larger life, whatever that was. One inferred that having been formed of more artistic, less dusty dust, as it were, than the Deal family into which she had married, by some great voluntary loss of potential possibilities, she had made herself more practical than they.

She dilated long and enviously upon the fact that her Uncle Harry and Aunt Carolyn Wentworth had a great deal of money, lived in the East, traveled long distances frequently, and that by comparison, her own life in Cedartown was a constant sacrifice, but cheerfully borne. A card from the Wentworths mailed at Havana or Miami or San Diego always set her off. "Just think of it, some folks have all the luck. At least they have plenty of money which amounts to the same thing these days. Where will Uncle Harry and Aunt Carolyn go next? They've been everywhere--just everywhere. Japan . . . Philippine Islands. Imagine just packing up and going places like that. I haven't seen them for years. I do wish we could all see them." To be sure, Eloise had other uncles and aunts but only these two possessed the golden aura so necessary to peace and comfort.

In the former years she had harbored a secret ambition to get her Uncle Harry and Aunt Carolyn interested in her oldest son, Wentworth, inasmuch as he carried the family name, but for some reason Uncle Harry never seemed to warm to the subject of Wentworth via letter, inquired more often about Laura, when he saw fit to write at all. And now that Wentworth was in the South these years, married there and settled down, Eloise had given up the thought of connecting him in any way with the affluent uncle.

Laura, however, she urged to take time and pains to write to Uncle Harry. "How can I correspond with some one when I don't know what they're like?" Laura would insist.

"You seem able to write everything else," Eloise would point out. "Why not to as important a man as your Uncle?"

"Because I have to know the kind of person any one is, and then I can be like them. I can feel just like anybody," she explained. "I can feel like an old lonely person, or a happy young one, or any kind, and then when I get into the feeling of it, it is easy to write it."

Eloise often grew out of patience with her, and because she could not understand her little daughter, there were many trying scenes. And because there were many trying scenes, Laura retired more constantly into the privacy of her own thoughts and dreams. "I like to talk to people that nobody understands or likes," she confided to Katherine one day, "and make discoveries about them. It interests me just as it interests some people to dig for Indian curios along the Platte and the Missouri."

"You're the oddest creature, Lolly. Well, what do you find when you dig into Old Uncle Lutz,--buffalo bones and chunks of sod houses and skeletons of those grasshoppers that 'et all the crops in 1874'?"

Laura laughed as she always did at Kathie's light and airy chatter and her imitation of old Oscar Lutz's high cracked voice.

Katherine was laughing a great deal these days, too, and almost entirely at herself. To hear Kathie's comments on the subject one would have thought that the process of reproduction was the joker in life's deck of cards.

For in the tag end of the winter, with almost as much pomp and ceremony as royalty demands, Katherine's daughter was ushered into the world. She was christened Patricia and arrived home from Omaha a month later with the highest priced carriage in Nebraska and a nurse whose services, as well as those of the smart vehicle, were presented to the little Buchanan family by that unfailing source of all luxuries,--Mackenzie Deal. Kathie having given life to her child, proceeded to call the obligation square and to take up her countless social duties exactly where she left off.

It was spring again, with Laura seventeen now, ready to graduate, and old man Lutz home.

From March until the last of October the community would see him: dreamy old man Lutz sitting on the porch in the sunshine watching Cedartown go by, rugged old man Lutz walking over the paved streets, his cane thump-thumping on the walks that lay over the prairie where the oxen had traveled, grizzled old man Lutz laboriously climbing Cottonwood Hill to stand with his hand on the gnarled old trunk of the cotton-wood tree he had planted over a half century before, wistful old man Lutz thump-thumping along the graveled walks of the cemetery where all the old friends lived in their little narrow houses.

He lived next door to the John Deal family so that Laura saw him often.

His house was as old-fashioned as he himself. Many years before, the Cedartown newspaper had carried the item that "Our distinguished citizen, Henry Lutz, is moving into the beautiful mansion which he has just completed. This is now the finest house in Cedartown," and other descriptive matter in small town hyperbole.

One year later, the same paper carried an item so similar that it might have been the identical one with the name changed,--"Our distinguished citizen, Oscar Lutz, is moving into the beautiful mansion which he has just completed. This is now the finest house in Cedartown." If any sinister motive of brotherly competition lay under these items, no one of Cedartown's citizens was bold enough to mention the possibility, for Oscar and Henry Lutz had been unusually close companions. If, perchance, there flowed any competitive corpuscles of blood through the veins of Martha and Sarah Lutz, the brothers' wives, no one felt equal to the task of mentioning that, either. And, in any event, Oscar and his Martha held the advantage over Henry and Sarah, for they waited until the latter had expressed themselves in a cupola and fancy cornices and gingerbread rosettes, and then put on two cupolas, made the cornices more fantastic, and spiced up the gingerbread with what was supposed to be an Egyptian lotus effect, but which proved, when Asy Drumm, the local architect-and-carpenter, had finished the job, to look more like the heads of wild cows which needed dehorning.

Laura in her pretty white sport dress was sitting on one of these gingerbread railings of the old man's porch now. He was in his element to have an audience.

"When Marthy and me moved to Nebraska, we built a little pine and cottonwood house over there on the hill north of what's the cemetery now. Nothin' to be seen but the prairie grass a wavin' and a scraggly fringe o' trees along Stove Creek. Henry and me built together,--that is, we all lived in our wagons while we was gettin' his house ready; as soon as his was done we all moved in it and worked on one for Marthy and me. Hauled the lumber from Weeping Water by oxen,--it was only ten miles but it took all day to get down and another day to come back."

Laura let the old man ramble on with no comment from her.

"Lots of wind those years. Just had a little thin layer of ship-lap between us and the wind. Nebraska and wind used to mean the same thing. Died down now all these last decades. No more wind here than anywhere else. That's what trees does for you. You can thank J. Sterling Morton and a whole lot of others of us for that,--your grandfather Deal and Henry and me set out hundreds through this part of the county and got a lot more to take time to set 'em out. But in them days the wind just blew across the country most of the time with the tumble-weeds comin' along for company. Marthy's and my home was pretty thin, I'm tellin' you. Used to lay and listen to the wind. Told Marthy once, it seemed like we was in a great holler drum with the Lord a tappin' and rappin' on the drum."

Laura, listening, said, "Why, that's quite a clever thought, Uncle Oscar." And immediately she was thinking out a poem:

"The little house was like a drum . . ."

That was the way Grandmother Deal used to be,--sort of poetical. She wondered,--did living close to the prairie soil the way they had done, give them some inner consciousness of the beautiful?

She liked to remember how she and Grandma Deal held the same liking for lovely things in literature. It was queer that an old woman like Grandma with very little education would like the things she did. There had never been any one since who could fill her place,--to whom she could talk so readily. But she could not have held converse with Grandma Deal ten minutes without deep interest. They would have touched upon some topic attractive to both, laughed at some anecdote toward which they displayed the same sense of humor, winked back a tear over some happening about which they felt the same sympathy. Yes, there had been some deep and definite understanding of life in Grandmother Deal to which she herself held the key. She did not know what it was, could not define it, found it impossible to put into words. She only knew that in this kinship, mortal or spiritual, there had been a unity of thought and expression, a oneness of dreams and desires. And because she could not describe the unusual relationship between them, which had seemed so much more important than the mere relationship of blood, she made no attempt to tell any one about it. And because, even to herself, she could not put into the limitation of exacting words the vague yearning for something beautiful which life was to give to her, she thought of it always as a white bird flying. It seemed in some indefinable way to connect itself with the dreams and desires of her Grandmother. It was like a legacy from her, a benediction. She would say to herself:

"Pain has been and grief enough and bitterness and crying,
Sharp ways and stony ways I think it was she trod,
But all there is to see now is a white bird flying,--
Whose blood-stained wings go circling high,--circling up to God."

She knew that in some vague, undetermined way she was always to follow with wistful eyes this far-off sheen of silver wings, that by some unexplainable magic she was always to see from the window of her heart, a white bird flying.

CHAPTER 6

And then, one day in the summer after Laura's graduation, with no previous announcement of their coming, and as nonchalantly as though they were arriving at a large hotel to which they had wired for accommodation, Uncle Harry Wentworth and Aunt Carolyn, a chauffeur and a maid, came into the driveway. Cedartown is used to good-looking cars slipping unconcernedly along the graveled highways which cut through the town. Indeed, Cedartown's residents, themselves, and the owners of the surrounding farm land close their garage doors on as many fine cars as do their city neighbors. But the Wentworths' car, an audaciously long affair that sported more de luxe equipment and trimming per square foot than the most pretentious one in the community, made all the children stop their play to stare, and the old men on the post-office corner temporarily cease whittling out the affairs of the nation.

To say that Eloise was upset when Uncle Harry Wentworth and Aunt Carolyn arrived is merely to make a trite statement such as "dogs bark" or "the world is round." And to look out and witness the descent of Uncle Harry Wentworth from that leviathan of a car, was as devastating to Eloise's poise as to have been an eye witness through the centuries to the entire descent of man. But not for long was Eloise's mind a mental gyroscope. She took hold of the situation with heroic efficacy. By eleven o'clock, Aunt Carolyn was on the davenport with pillows under her shoulders and a cup of hot tea in her plump hand. Uncle Harry was in an overstuffed chair with a foot-stool under his immaculate spats and a glass of iced lemonade in his slim hand. Watson, the chauffeur, was in the garage rubbing down the car as though it were a thoroughbred horse. Annette, the maid, was unpacking. Lunch was well under way and John was being summoned home from the office. Laura was assigned the task of visiting with the heretofore unknown relatives (although she had begged to fix the salad instead) and Trib, was turning the ice-cream freezer under the grape arbor. Whatever faults may have been Eloise's, she was not inefficient.

Uncle Harry and Aunt Carolyn, having come from Denver, were now about to go up into the woods of northern Minnesota. And so it came about after lunch that Uncle Harry, in as matter-of-fact manner as though he were offering to take them around the block, suddenly decided that Eloise and Laura and Trib were going, too, as their guests. "We'll take them, won't we, Carolyn?" All at once he seemed remembering to ask his wife's opinion, although Laura had a swift intuition that Aunt Carolyn assented to everything.

Uncle Harry was slim, debonair, pink-cheeked, his snow-white hair and snapping brown eyes forming a striking contrast. His hands were long and slim, the nails as pink as his cheeks. He was nervous, unsettled, never still a moment when talking. He rocked up and down on his heels and toes when standing, fidgeted about when sitting. He darted his bright brown eyes here and there as though looking for something he never saw. His mind, too, seemed darting about in the same agile way, seeking something it never found. Aunt Carolyn was a complete antithesis. Physically fat, shapeless, and two-chinned, her mind also seemed fat, shapeless and two-chinned. She answered questions slowly if at all. Much of the time she merely smiled in answer to Uncle Harry's rather exaggerated statements. Having been left behind on most of her husband's mental flights, apparently she had now given up the breathless pursuit and settled back in obese complacency.

Eloise was delighted with the invitation but unable to see how it could be done. Uncle Harry assumed all details of the plan. The front seat was wide,--he and Watson and Annette could all three sit there very comfortably, Aunt Carolyn and Eloise in the back seat, Trib and Laura on the adjustable ones. They would start early the next morning, get to Okoboji for lunch, Minneapolis by night, and the second day easily reach the north woods hotel to which they were bound. Eloise argued that the two should make their stay longer in Cedartown, but apparently Uncle Harry, having thought of the new scheme, wanted to carry it out immediately. He see-sawed up and down on his slim immaculate shoes, waved his hands in illustrative gesticulation, winked a roguish eye at Laura, chucked her under the chin, sat down and tapped the chair arms, stood up and rubbed his hands together in nervous glee. Aunt Carolyn lay shapelessly among the pillows of the davenport and smiled steadily without effort.

To Uncle Harry's sudden inspiration that John go up on the train and meet them, Laura's father only shook his head and named two or three important reasons for not doing so,--the Blackman estate, a guardianship case, preparation for the schoolboard suit. Uncle Harry looked at John Deal with something akin to curiosity. Here was a man who seemed irrevocably tied by a hundred chains to a desk. For a brief moment he might have been wondering how it would seem not to be able to go where he wished, whenever he wished. Then his restless mind was off again on another tangent.

When it was decided that they were really to go, Eloise rose to the management of the preparations like a bass to the lure. Her efficient brain pigeon-holed every activity of the household. Trib was to ride on his bicycle and give certain instructions to the woman who did cleaning for her. Laura was to look over her own clothes and her mother's for any missing buttons or stitch. Eloise, herself, turned off a dozen necessary tasks. Uncle Harry walked nervously about the house. Annette fanned Aunt Carolyn who lay supinely among the pillows, the bustling activity going on around her like so much wind around a granite monument. Watson groomed the flawless car.

In the midst of preparations old Oscar Lutz tap-tapped around to the back door, a mess of spinach in the gray pail with a rope for the handle. Eloise was provoked. "That old codger--whatever is the matter with him? Spinach--the night before we're going away. He knew we were going. Dad told him. I heard him out by the morning-glories. Now he'll have to meet Uncle Harry. And how well they two will mix."

Laura took the spinach. She understood old Oscar Lutz better than her mother. He wanted to do something for them, so he was saying it with spinach. She introduced old Oscar to Uncle Harry and Aunt Carolyn. Uncle Oscar was pleased to meet them, both verbally and whole-heartedly. Here was a fresh new audience,--one to whom no anecdote of his was old material. He had a full life time of experiences upon which to draw, not one of which these people had ever heard.

His hand, as hard and calloused as untanned buffalo hide, shook Uncle Harry's slim bony one and Aunt Carolyn's cushion-like soft one.

It was not five minutes later until Eloise and Laura, going on with their preparations for the journey, could hear his high cackling laugh and his enthusiastic "I mind as how--" It seemed to be something about traveling in the early days, the subject introduced no doubt by the present anticipated trip. "I mind as how I started out doin' all my travelin' on 'Shanks mares' over the hills, wadin' in mud or deep snow." They could hear snatches of the one-sided conversation. "Well, well, travelin' wa'n't what you'd call ideal in them days, but we had lots o' fun . . . more 'n' they have now, seems like. I mind as how I made a cutter out o' good stout lumber, lined the inside with buffalo so's to be warm and comfortable for Marthy. Had a soapstone we'd take along and two or three bricks--heat 'em all in the fire, wrap 'em up good, tuck Marthy in with her feet on the soapstone and put mebbe two buffalo robes all around us and away we'd go, bells ringin', and happy as larks."

There was more monologue on the subject and by the time Eloise had returned to the living room, she found Uncle Oscar going strong on the Easter blizzard of '73, Uncle Harry moving about with the peevish headshakes of an irritated animal, and Aunt Carolyn frankly asleep.

All that evening Laura was thrilled with the thought of the unexpected trip. Just one thing was lacking--her father. She felt a deep disappointment that he could not go--a sympathetic understanding of the cares that harassed him. He was like the old man of the sea,--the burdens of the community the bundle on his back.

It was a gay lark to glide along the country in Uncle Harry Wentworth's great car. Uncle Harry sat with Annette and the chauffeur, a young married couple. He had his arm on the back of the seat and sometimes he would touch the back of Annette's white neck with his nervous slim fingers. Once Aunt Carolyn said, "Annette, if you're crowded, you can come back here." Much of the time he was turned around talking excitedly to Laura and Trib who sat on the smaller extra seats. Aunt Carolyn did not talk a great deal. She sat quietly with the little fixed smile on her fat face. Laura stole surreptitious glances at her sometimes and wondered just what she was thinking. Did she enjoy her husband's nervous chatter? Did she approve of his extravagant statements? Did the little fixed smile mean she was happy? Or was it a mask? Sometimes she went to sleep for a few moments, her head against the gay cushions, and the smile vanished, so that her plump face looked flabby and sad. Laura, stealing a covert glance at her then, tried to picture her in another environment, and invariably she saw her in a washable house dress and big white apron, her plump hands, white with flour, making cookies for hungry little grandchildren. It was a foolish notion, Laura told herself, but it seemed the setting in which she really belonged, rather than the present one of traveling about the country in the palatial car with her silver-mounted luggage and her maid.

It made Laura think how different many people would look in other environments. It was queer what clothes and setting did to one. She pictured Katherine Buchanan in sleazy cheap clothes, and her own father as a section boss in overalls, thought of Allen Rinemiller in his collegiate-looking suits and hats since he had been to the University.

The group of travelers stopped for a little time by the shores of Storm Lake and again at Okojobi and Spirit Lakes. Laura and Trib were charmed beyond words. Children of eastern Nebraska, they had known intimately only the Missouri and the Platte and a small lake or two.

There was a night in Minneapolis at a big hotel, with Uncle Harry in his breezy way creating a stir and commotion in getting settled when there was no need of either, and then the long trip to the north lakes. At the first odor of pines and the first sight of white birches bending above blue waters, Laura felt that old emotional uplift she always experienced when drinking in a new atmosphere. Immediately she was reveling in the "feel" of the setting: picturing sleek-haired Indian maidens and their light-footed lovers meeting here on the sloping shores. Her palm itched for the touch of a pencil and, because she had no means of putting down her emotional disturbances just then, she sat for a long time saying nothing, but mentally composing snatches of description and bits of verse.

The two weeks spent there at the rustic hotel were by way of being a bit of heaven both to seventeen-year-old Laura and thirteen-year-old Trib. The white birches drinking forever from glass-clear waters, the tall pines massed against sapphire skies, the clear spongy carpet of sweet-smelling needles, all filled Laura with the poetry of living that she always experienced when everything was "just right." Trib's sensations were not of a poetical type. The motorboat at the dock, the box of lures, the rods and reels for which Uncle Harry arranged, constituted a large part of his own particular joy of living.

The mornings were spent in fishing, up the long lake in the motorboats, casting for the sporty bass or trolling for the common pike, with the hope always present of getting a wily muscallonge. At eleven there was bathing, and again at four, when the water was full of young people and old with water-wings and joy balls. After dinner, cards for the older people, dancing for the young, inside the hotel or on the screened-in porches into which the mosquitoes could only gaze hungrily.

Aunt Carolyn and Eloise settled themselves each night for bridge. But Uncle Harry danced, always with the prettiest and youngest girls. Sometimes Aunt Carolyn, calm and placid, watching the dancers, would send for him. She wanted a silk shawl or would he please go and see whether Watson had looked over the car in preparation for the trip tomorrow. It seemed queer to Laura. She could not quite sense what was wrong. Aunt Carolyn was pleasant. Uncle Harry punctilious in attendance. But something was not just right.

"Is Aunt Carolyn lots older than Uncle Harry?" she asked her mother once.

"Goodness, no" . . . Eloise laughed, "he's anyway two years older,--maybe three. And you'll have to give him credit for having the same wife all these years, Laura."

Well, why shouldn't he, Laura wondered. Why was that any credit to him? She thought about it a great deal. It worried her,--the something which was not right,--but she could not quite put her finger on the defect. It was a queer marriage,--Uncle Harry, gay and slim and debonair, sipping the tips of the blossoms of pleasure,--Aunt Carolyn, fat and old-lady-like and settled, drinking her tea and cuddling her hot-water bottle.

Laura thought often of her father down home, working at the desk. She felt a great pity for him that he could not be up here, too. She wished he could do something that would make him happy and care-free and boyish. Working and working for other people without a great deal of compensation, always on the town council and the school board, always assigned to church and civic committees, his tasks never finished, a rest never earned. She wished she could do something about it, but not being able to, she did the next best thing--she sympathized with him, writing a note every day telling him of all their activities, never failing to add "I wish you were here, too." She did not know that her father put them all aw