Blanche was a little embarra.s.sed when Rivers replied: "I don't like to agree to do that. Mebbe you'd better come over to make sure I do."

"All right. I'll come over in time for supper." Burke's simple, good face glowed with enjoyment of the fun. He smilingly went back to beating his plough-share with hammer and wedge as Rivers drove away with Blanche. The clink of his steel rang through the golden light that flooded the prairie, keeping time to his whistled song.

In the months of April and May the world sent a skirmish-line into this echoless land to take possession of a belt of territory six hundred miles long and one hundred miles broad. The settlers came like locusts; they sang like larks. From Alsace and Lorraine, from the North Sea, from Russia, from the Alps, they came, and their faces shone as if they had happened upon the spring-time of the world. Tyranny was behind them, the majesty of G.o.d's wilderness before them, a mystic joy within them.

Under their hands the straddle-bug multiplied. He is short-lived, this prairie insect. He usually dies in thirty days--by courtesy alone he lives. He expresses the settlers' hope and sense of justice. In these spring days of good cheer he lived at times to sixty days--but only on stony ground or fire-scarred, peaty lowlands.

He withered--this strange, three-legged, voiceless insect--but in his stead arose a beetle. This beetle sheltered human beings, and was called a shack.

They were all alike, these shacks. They had roofs of one slant. They were built of rough lumber, and roofed with tarred paper, which made all food taste of tar.

They were dens but little higher than a man's head, and yet they sheltered the most joyous people that ever set foot to earth. In one cabin lived a girl and a canary-bird, all alone. In the next a man who cooked his own food when he did not share his rations with the girl, all in frank and honorable companionship. On the next claim were two school-teachers, busy as magpies, using the saw and hammer with deft accuracy. In the next was a bank-clerk out for his health--and these clean and self-contained people lived in free intercourse without slander and without fear. Only the Alsatians settled in groups, alien and unapproachable. All others met at odd times and places, breathing in the promiseful air of the clean sod, resolute to put the world of hopeless failure behind them.

Spring merged magnificently into summer. The gra.s.s upthrust. The waterfowl pa.s.sed on to the northern lake-region. The morning symphony of the prairie-chickens died out, but the whistle of the larks, the chatter of the sparrows, and the wailing cry of the nesting plover came to take its place.

The gophers whistled and trilled, the foxes barked from the hills, and an occasional startled antelope or curious wolf pa.s.sed through the line of settlement as if to see what lay behind this strange phalanx of ploughmen guarding their yellow shanties.

Week after week pa.s.sed away, and the government surveyors did not appear. The Boomtown _Spike_ told in each issue how the men of the chain and compa.s.s were pushing westward; but still they did not come, and the settlers' hopes of getting their claims filed before winter grew fainter. The ma.s.s of them had planned to take claims in the spring, live on them the required six months, "prove up," and return East for the winter.

In spite of these disappointments, all continued to be merry. No one took any part of it very seriously. The young men went out and ploughed when they pleased, and came in and sat on the door-step and talked with the women when they were weary. The shanties were hot and crowded, but no one minded that; by-and-by they were to build bigger.

And, then, all was so new and beautiful, and the sky was so clear. Oh, that marvellous, lofty sky with just clouds enough to make the blue more intense! Oh, the wonder of the wind from the wild, mysterious green sea to the west! With the change and sheen of the prairie, incessant and magical life was made marvellous and the winter put far away.

Merry parties drove here and there visiting. Formalities counted for little, and yet with all this freedom of intercourse, this close companionship, no one pointed the finger of gossip toward any woman. The girls in their one-room huts received calls from their bachelor neighbors with the confidence that comes from purity of purpose, both felt and understood. Life was strangely idyllic during these spring days. Envy and hate and suspicion seemed exorcised from the world.

III

JUNE

The centre of the social life was Bailey's store. There stood the post-office, which connected the settlers with the world they had left behind. There they a.s.sembled each day when the flag ran up the long pole which stood before the door as a signal for the mail. On the treeless, shrubless prairie one could see the flag miles away, as it rose like a faint fleck of pink against the green of the prairie beyond or the blue sky above.

Twice a week Rivers drove out with supplies. These were the eventful days of the week, and it was significant to observe with what tasteful care the young women thought it proper to dress on this day. Hats, dainty and fresh, cool muslins, spotless cuffs, ribbons. They came out of their cabins with all the little airs and graces of their Eastern homes. Bailey shared their good opinion, but he was always silent and a little timid in their presence, and usually disappeared as soon as Rivers came. "The social responsibilities belong to you, partner," he was accustomed to say.

As the summer wore on, the number of those pathetically eager for letters increased. The sun-bright plain, the beautiful, almost cloudless sky, and the ever-flooding light wore upon them. They began to recall wistfully the cool streams of New England, the wooded slopes of Wisconsin, the comfortable homesteads and meadows of Illinois, and they came for their mail with shining eyes--and when forced to say "Nothing to-day," Bailey always suffered a keen pang of sympathetic pain.

He himself watched the eastern horizon, incessantly and unconsciously, hours before the wagon was due, and, when it came in sight at last, ran his flag up along its mast joyously.

It was a great pleasure to him to sit and talk with his partner, and he looked forward to his visits eagerly. To Jim he could utter himself freely. They had known each other so long, and he believed he understood his partner to the centre of his heart.

He usually had supper ready--often he had help from the girls or Mrs.

Burke, and while a dozen hands volunteered at the team and with the mail-bag, Rivers was free to hurry to his table, whereat he fared like a pasha attended by the flower of his harem. The girls pretended it was all on account of his office as mail-carrier, but they deceived no one, much less an experienced beau like Rivers. He accepted it all with shameless egotism.

To Bailey's mind Jim was too well attended. He seemed to see less and less of his partner as the season wore on. They seldom sat down to talk in the good old fashion, wearing out half the night smoking, listening to the slumber-song of the night plain, for Rivers got into the habit of walking home with some of the girls after the mail was distributed, leaving his partner to do the trading. Sometimes he went away with Mrs.

Burke, if she were alone; sometimes with Estelle Clayton, whom Bailey thought the finest woman in the world. He secretly resented Rivers'

attention to Estelle, for he had come to look upon her as under his protection. Her coming raised mail-days to the level of a national holiday.

She scared him, and yet he rejoiced to see her coming down over the sod so strong, so erect, so clear-eyed. She wore her hair like a matron, and that pleased him, and she looked at him so frankly and unwaveringly. She had been a school-teacher in some middle Western State, and had been swept into this movement by her desire to go to an Eastern college.

Bailey contrived to look very stern and very busy whenever she came in, but she was wise in ways of men, and treated him as if he were a good comrade, and so gradually he came to talk to her almost as freely as with Blanche Burke.

He did not know that Jim almost invariably went over to Burke's shanty--even when he walked home with Miss Clayton. Rivers did not impress Estelle favorably. She was not one to be moved by flattery, nor by dimples in male cheeks. She accepted his company pleasantly, but there were well-defined bounds to her friendship, as Rivers discovered one evening as they were walking over the plain toward her home.

On every side the vivid green stretched away, smooth as the rounded flesh of a woman, velvet in texture, glorified by the saffron and orange of the sunset sky.

At the cabin they met Carrie, for whom Estelle was both sister and mother. The little shanty slanted on the side of a swell like a little boat sliding up a monstrous mid-ocean wave. Around it lay a little garden inhabited by a colony of chicken-coops--"All my own making,"

Estelle said. "Oh, of course, sister held the nails and bossed, but I did it. I like it, too. It's more fun than working red poppies on tidies--that's about all they'll let you do back East."

"It doesn't matter much what you do out here," said Rivers, meaningly.

"Oh yes, it does. Some things are wrong anywhere; but there are other things which people _think_ are wrong that are only unusual," she answered, and he knew she knew what he meant.

The talk moved on to lighter themes, and then died away as the three sat in the doorway and saw the light fade out of the sky.

Carrie's thin, eager face shone with angelic light. She seemed to hold her breath as flame after flame of the marvellous light was withdrawn.

"Oh, the sky is so big out here," she whispered. Estelle locked hands with her and sat in silence. Rivers, awkward and constrained, respected their emotion. At last he rose.

"I'm going over to Burke's a little while, so I'll have to be moving."

"Mrs. Burke is very strange," said Estelle; "I can't seem to get on with her. She seems very lonely and restless. Her husband is away a great deal, but I can't get her to talk, when I call, and she never returns my call."

"She never seemed that way to me," Rivers said, having nothing better in mind at the moment.

"I think she's homesick. I wish I knew how to help her, but I don't."

Rivers walked away with two thoughts in his mind. One was the girl's sentence about things that were wrong and things which people thought were wrong, and the other was the question about Blanche--was she homesick? That puzzled him. Had he only seen her in her joyous moods? It was not pleasant to think of her growing sad--perhaps on his account.

Burke sat on a bench outside the door, smoking silently in the dusk.

Blanche was stirring about inside.

"h.e.l.lo, Rivers!" Burke called. "Take a seat." He pointed at a vinegar-keg.

Blanche hurried to meet her visitor, a beautiful smile on her face.

"Come inside," she said. "I've got some work to do, and I want to hear you men talk." They obediently complied, and she lighted a lamp. "I like to see you when you talk," she added, flashing a smile at Rivers.

He saw the change in her for the first time. She certainly was paler, her face less boyish, and a deeper shadow hovered about her eyes.

"I came over to see if you wouldn't come down and help us get up a jollification at the store on the Fourth," he said.

"Why, of course. What shall I do?"

"Oh, stir up a cake--and make some ice-cream. Can you make ice-cream?"

"You bet I can--with ice. Bring on your ice."