Land of the Burnt Thigh Part 7

After supper we counted the dimes we had earned from the postcards--more than $50. And far into the night we talked of the people who had invaded the Strip.

Next spring there would be life again over the plains when the "lucky numbers" came out to live on the Strip. Would the reporter from Chicago be among them, and the mystery girl with the baby in her arms, and Pa Wagor--and a young cartoonist from Milwaukee?

It was something to look forward to when the blizzards shut us off from the world.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

V

NO PLACE FOR CLINGING VINES

The settlers of the McClure district went on with their work as though there had never been a land opening. The men fed their stock and hauled fuel for winter, while the women tacked comforters and sewed and patched heavy clothing.

Ida Mary went on with her school work and I continued to wrestle with the newspaper. We put a little shed back of the shack where we could set buckets of coal and keep the water can handy. With the postcard money we bought a drum for the stovepipe, to serve as an oven. One either baked his own bread or did without it.

Huey Dunn did some late fall plowing. "What are you plowing your land for now, with winter coming?" neighbors asked.

"For oats next spring," Huey replied; "if the d.a.m.n thres.h.i.+ng machine gets around to thresh out the oatstack in time to sow 'em."

The homesteaders shook their heads. There was no figuring out when Huey Dunn would do things. This time he was far ahead of them. They did not know that fall plowing, to mellow and absorb the moisture from winter snow and spring rain, was the way to conquer the virgin soil. They had to find it out through hard experience. Fallowing, Huey called it.

La.s.so said, "The range is no place for clingin' vines, 'cause there hain't nothin' to cling to." Ida Mary, under that quiet manner of hers, had always been self-reliant, and I was learning not to cling.

I lived in the print shop a great deal of the time that winter--an unusually open winter, barring a few blizzards and deep snows. I slept on a rickety cot in one corner of the room, cooking my meals on the monkey stove; and often I ate over at Randall's, who served meals for a quarter to anyone who cared to stop, the table filled with steaming dishes of well-cooked food. I liked to take the midday meal there, and meet people coming through on the stage. They furnished most of the news for the McClure _Press_.

Driving back and forth from print shop to claim on Pinto was like crossing the desert on a camel. Pinto was too lazy to trot uphill and too stiff to trot down, and as the country was rough and rolling, there was not much of the trail on which we could make any time. He could have jogged up a little, but he was too stubborn. He had lived with the Indians too long.

That old pony had a sly, artful eye and a way of shaking his head that was tricky--and try to catch him loose on the prairie with a bucket of oats as a coaxer! There were times on the trail when one could not see him moving except at close range. When he took such a spell, one of us drove while the other walked alongside, "persuading" him to keep ahead of the buggy. As there wasn't a tree or shrub in that part of the country, we were reduced to waving a hat in front of him like a cowboy taunting a bucking horse in the ring, or waving a dry cornstalk at him--but all with the same effect.

A little brown-and-white spotted animal with long brown mane and tail, he was the most noticeable as well as notorious piece of horseflesh in that region, and according to a few who "knew him when--," he had a past; a reputation as an outlaw and a dislike for the white man as a result of his part in an Indian skirmish against a band of white settlers. Now, like the Indian, he had become subdued with age and conquest; but like the Indian, too, stubborn and resentful. From him we learned much about how to deal with the Indian.

One evening when I had stopped at the school for Ida Mary we saw a snowstorm coming like a white smoke. We were only half a mile from home, but in blizzards, we had been warned, one can easily become lost within a few feet of his own door. Many plainsmen have walked all night in a circle trying to find a familiar shack or barn and perished within a few yards of shelter. Even in daytime one did not dare, in some of those blinding furies, to go from house to barn without holding on to a rope or clothesline kept stretched from one building to the other for that purpose.

We could not take a chance on Pinto's slow pace, so we got out of the buggy and ran as fast as we could, leaving him to follow. We were barely inside when the storm broke over the shack. As the snow came in blinding sheets we became anxious about the pony, but there was nothing we could do that night. We opened the door a crack and looked out. We could not see our hands before us, and the howling of the wind and beating of snow against the shack made it impossible to hear any other sound.

Cowering in that tiny shack, where thin building-paper took the place of plaster, the wind screaming across the plains, hurling the snow against that frail protection, defenseless against the elemental fury of the storm, was like drifting in a small boat at sea, tossed and buffeted by waves, each one threatening to engulf you.

Next day the blizzard broke and we found Pinto standing in the hayshed, still hitched to the buggy, quietly munching hay.

When the landseekers had left and the plains had seemed emptier and more silent than before, it had seemed to Ida Mary and me, let down from our high-pitched excitement, that there was not much incentive in doing anything. But, after all, there was no time to be bored that winter. The grim struggle to hang on demanded all our energy.

When I had first visited the McClure _Press_, I had looked distastefully at Myrtle's ink-stained hands and face, and at the black ap.r.o.n stiff with ink which she wore at her work. Now there were nights when, after turning the press or addressing papers still wet with ink until midnight, I fell upon the cot and slept without was.h.i.+ng or undressing.

At such times Myrtle, with her cheerful unconcern, became an exalted creature.

The next morning I would make a stab at cleaning myself up, eat breakfast on the small inking table drawn close to the fire, with a clean paper over the black surface for a tablecloth, and go to work again.

When blizzards raged they drove the snow through the shack like needles of steel. There was not a spot where I could put that cot to keep dry, so I covered my face with the blankets, which in the morning were drifted over with snow. Where did the lumber industry get hold of all the knotholes it sold the poor homesteader?

For a girl who had come to the prairie for her health, I was getting heroic treatment, wrestling all day with the heavy, old-fas.h.i.+oned, outworn printing press, heavy manual labor for long hours, sleeping with the snow drifting over me at night.

It was during one of these great storms that I rode in one of the last covered wagons, one of the few tangible links between the pioneers of the past and the pioneers of the present--and a poignant, graphic reminder that men and women had endured storm and discomfort and disaster for decades as we were enduring them now, and as people would continue to endure them as long as the land remained to be conquered.

One morning after the hardest snowstorm I had seen, I awoke in the print shop to find myself corralled by snowdrifts which the wind had driven up over the windows and four or five feet high in front of the door. I could barely see over the top of the upper panes.

That was Friday. Until Sunday I waited, cut off from the world--wondering about Ida Mary! If she were alone in that tar-paper shack, what chance would she have? Was she cold and frightened? With the snow piled in mountainous drifts she would be as inexorably cut off from help as though she were alone on the plains. The things that happen to the people one loves are so much worse than the ones that happen to ourselves--but the things that may happen are a nightmare. As the hours dragged on I paced up and down the print shop, partly because being hemmed in made me restless, partly to keep warm, wondering whether the neighbors would remember that Ida Mary was alone--fearing that they might think she was in McClure with me.

On Sunday, a pa.s.sage was dug from the print shop so that I could get out--not a path so much as a canyon between the walls of snow, and a neighbor with a covered wagon offered to take me home--or to try to.

He drove a big, heavy draft team. The horses floundered and stuck and fell; plunged out of one drift into another. Galen got out and shoveled ahead while I drove, resting the horses after each plunge. The ravines we skirted and finally got up onto the ridge.

It was mid-afternoon when we arrived, and already the skies were closing in, gray upon the white plains. The grayish-white canvas of the wagon, and the team almost the same color blended into the drab picture, darker shadows against the gray curtain of earth and sky, until we came to the shack.

The Dunns had remembered, as they so often did, that Ida Mary was alone, and they had shoveled a path to the door for her. And she was safe, waiting tranquilly until it would be possible to return to the school again. In such weather the school remained closed, as there was no way for the children to reach it, through the deep drifts, without the risk of freezing to death.

With Ida Mary safe in the covered wagon, we started back at once to McClure. Having broken the drifts on the first trip, it was not hard going, but it was midnight when we reached the print shop.

On cold, bad days the Dunns, getting their own children home from school, would see to it that Ida Mary got back safely, and Mrs. Dunn would insist that she stay with them on such nights. "Now you go, Huey, and bring Teacher back. Tell her the trapdoor is down so the attic will be warm for her and the children to sleep." And when she came, Mrs. Dunn would say, with that clear, jolly laugh of hers, "Now, if you're expecting Imbert Miller, he can come right on over," which he did.

Imbert Miller was a young native westerner whose family had been ranchers out there for a good many years. He was a well-built, clean-cut young man who had been attracted to Ida Mary from the beginning, and whatever her own feelings for him, she liked claim life a lot better after she met him. All during that bitter winter Imbert came over every Sunday, dressed in neat blue serge and white collar. Some of the settlers said that was how they could tell when Sunday came, seeing Imbert ride by dressed up like that. He dropped in, sometimes, through the week in clean blue s.h.i.+rt and corduroys for an evening of cards or reading or talking.

In fact, the evenings were no longer lonely as they had been at first, nor were we always exhausted. We were young and demanded some fun, and feminine enough to find life more interesting when the young men who were homesteading began to gather at the shack in little groups. In spite of the difficulties of getting any place in the winter, and the distances which had to be traveled, the young people began to see a lot of each other; the romances which naturally developed made the winter less desolate.

Sometimes we would gather at Wilomene's for supper--honey served with flaky hot biscuits baked in one of the very few real cookstoves to be found on a homestead. Wilomene had a big shack, with blue paper on the wall and a real range instead of a monkey stove with a drum set up in the stovepipe for an oven--not many settlers could boast even a drum.

And always the supper was seasoned with Wilomene's laughter.

In fair weather I printed both back and front pages of the paper, and in storms, when ink and machinery froze up--another complication in dealing with the press--I printed the front page only, with headlines that rivaled the big dailies. There was no news to warrant them, but they were s.p.a.ce-fillers. A dance at McClure would do for a scarehead. I put in the legal notices, whatever news items I had handy or had time to set up, and stuck in boilerplate as a filler. I could not count the times I used the same plate over--but the settlers didn't mind reading it again; they had little else to do in midwinter.

One day there came an indistinct message over the telephone line, which consisted mainly of barb-wire fences, saying that the railroads were blocked by storm and the stages were delayed. I threw down my mallet and went home. There would be nothing on which to print the paper.

On the first stage to get through, four or five days later, there was a note from the proof king: "Do not fail to publish last week's paper, properly dated, along with the current issue." As long as there was one proof notice running, the newspaper could not skip a single week.

When the two editions were printed I went home very ill. During the course of a busy and eventful life I have managed--perhaps I should say happened--to be a trail-breaker many times. And always I have had a frail body which seemed bent on collapsing at the wrong time. Robust health I have always coveted, but I have come to the conclusion that it is not an essential in getting things done, and I have learned to ignore as far as possible my lack of physical endurance.

The Widow Fergus came over and waited on me all night, using her simple home remedies. It cost at least $25 to get a doctor out there, and many times the emergency was over one way or the other before he arrived.

Homesteaders could not afford to call a doctor except in critical cases, and they relied for the most part upon the amateur knowledge and help of their neighbors.

From the beginning cooperation had been one of the strongest elements in western life. When no foundation for a civilized life has been laid, when every man must start at the beginning in providing himself with such basic necessities as food and shelter, when water holes are few and far between and water to sustain life must be carried many miles, men have to depend on each other. Only together could the western settlers have stood at all; alone they would have perished. In times of sickness and individual disaster, it was the community that came to the rescue.

If only for self-preservation, it had to.

The next time the prints were held up by a storm I bought a roll of wrapping paper at Randall's store, cut it into strips, and got the paper out.

When I took the papers into the post office to mail, Mrs. Randall laughed out loud, but Mr. Randall said rea.s.suringly: "That's right, Miss Ammons; learning to meet emergencies in this country is a valuable thing."

The proof-sheet king wrote: "It is regrettable that a paper like that should go into the government Land Offices--such an outlaw printer--"