A Little Norsk Part 4

"W-e-l-l, yes" (after a close scrutiny). "Yes: I should."

"And this a s.h.i.+mmy?"

"Well, now, you've got me, Ans. It seems to me I've heard the women folks home talk about s.h.i.+mmies, but they were always kind o' private about it, so I don't think I can help you out. That little thing goes underneath, sure enough."

"All right, here goes, Flax; if it should turn out to be hind side before, no matter."

Then again little Flaxen would want to wear her best dress on week-days, and Ans was unable to explain. Here again Bert came to the rescue.

"Git her one dress fer ev'ry day in the week, an' make her wear 'em in rotation. Hang 'em up an' put a tag on each one--Sunday, Monday, an' so on."

"Good idea."

And it was done. But the embarra.s.sments of attending upon the child soon pa.s.sed away; she quickly grew independent of such help, dressed herself, and combed her own hair, though Anson enjoyed doing it himself when he could find time, and she helped out not a little about the house. She seemed to have forgotten her old life, awakening as she had from almost deathly torpor into a new home--almost a new world--where a strange language was spoken, where no woman was, and where no mention of her mother, father, or native land was ever made before her. The little waif was at first utterly bewildered, then reconciled, and by the time spring came over the prairie was almost happy in the touching way of a child deprived of childish things.

Oh, how sweet spring seemed to those snow-weary people! Day after day the sun crept higher up in the sky; day after day the snow gave way a little on the swells, and streams of water began to trickle down under the huge banks of snow, filling the ravines; and then at last came a day when a strange, warm wind blew from the northwest. Soft and sweet and sensuous it was, as if it swept some tropic bay filled with a thousand isles--a wind like a vast warm breath blown upon the land.

Under its touch the snow did not melt; it vanished. It fled in a single day from the plain to the gullies. Another day, and the gullies were rivers.

It was the "chinook," which old Lambert, the trapper and surveyor, said came from the Pacific Ocean.

The second morning after the chinook began to blow, Anson sprang to his feet from his bunk, and standing erect in the early morning light, yelled: "Hear that?"

"What is it?" asked Bert.

"There! Hear it?" Anson smiled, holding up his hand joyfully as a mellow "Boom--boom--boom" broke through the silent air.

"Prairie-chickens! Hurrah! Spring has come! That breaks the back o'

winter short off."

"Hurrah! de 'pring ees come!" cried little Flaxen, gleefully clapping her hands in imitation.

No man can know what a warm breeze and the note of a bird can mean to him till he is released, as these men were released, from the bondage of a horrible winter. Perhaps still more moving was the thought that with the spring the loneliness of the prairie would be broken, never again to be so dread and drear; for with the coming of spring came the tide of land-seekers pouring in: teams scurried here and there on the wide prairie, carrying surveyors, land agents, and settlers. At Summit trains came rumbling in by the first of April, emptying thousands of men, women, and children upon the sod, together with cattle, machinery, and household articles, to lie there roofed only by the blue sky.

Summit, from being a half-buried store and a blacksmith's shop, bloomed out into a town with saloons, lumber-yards, hotels, and restaurants; the sound of hammer and anvil was incessant, and trains clanged and whistled night and day.

Day after day the settlers got their wagons together and loaded up, and then moved down the slope into the fair valley of the sleepy James.

Mrs. Cap Burdon did a rus.h.i.+ng business as a hotel-keeper, while Cap sold hay and oats at rates which made the land-seekers gasp.

"I'm not out here f'r my health," was all the explanation he ever made.

Soon all around the little shanty of Anson and Bert other shanties were built and filled with young, hopeful, buoyant souls. The railway surveyors came through, locating a town about three and another about twelve miles away, and straightway the bitter rivalry between Boomtown and Belleplain began. Belleplain being their town, Bert and Anson swore by Belleplain, and correspondingly derided the claims of Boomtown.

With the coming of spring began the fiercest toil of the pioneers--breaking the sod, building, harvesting, ploughing; then the winter again, though not so hard to bear; then the same round of work again. So the land was settled, the sod was turned over; sod shanties gave way to little frame houses; the tide of land-seekers pa.s.sed on, the boom burst, but the real workers, like Wood and Gearheart, went patiently, steadily on, founding a great State.

CHAPTER VI.

A QUESTION OF DRESS.

One morning eight years later Flaxen left the home of Gearheart and Wood with old Doll and the buggy, bound for Belleplain after groceries for harvest. She drove with a dash, her hat on the back of her head.

She was seemingly intent on getting all there was possible out of a chew of kerosene gum, which she had resolved to throw away upon entering town, intending to get a new supply.

She had thriven on Western air and gum, and though hardly more than fourteen years of age, her bust and limbs revealed the grace of approaching womanhood, however childish her short dress and braided hair might still show her to be. Her face was large and decidedly of Scandinavian type, fair in spite of wind and sun, and broad at the cheekbones. Her eyes were as blue and clear as winter ice.

As she rode along she sang as well as she could without neglecting the gum, sitting at one end of the seat like a man, the reins held carelessly in her left hand, notwithstanding the swift gait of the horse, who always knew when Flaxen was driving. She met a friend on the road, and said, "h.e.l.lo!" pulling up her horse with one strong hand.

"Can't stop," she explained; "got to go over to the city to get some groceries for harvest. Goin' to the sociable to-morrow?"

"You bet," replied the friend, "You?"

"I d'know; mebbe, if the boys'll go. Ta-ta; see ye later." And away she spun.

Belleplain had not thriven, or to be more exact, it had had a rise and fall; and as the rise had been considerable, so the fall was something worth chronicling. It was now a collection of wooden buildings, mostly empty, graying under the storms and suns of pitiless winters and summers, and now, just in mid-summer, surrounded by splendid troops and phalanxes of gorgeous sunflowers, whose brown crowns, gold-dusted, looked ever toward the sun as it swung through the wide arch of cloudless sky. The signs of the empty buildings still remained, and one might still read the melancholy decline from splendours of the past in "emporiums," "palace drug stores," and "mansion-houses."

As Flaxen would have said, "Belleplain's boom had bu'sted." Her glory had gone with the C., B. and Q., which formed the junction at Boomtown and left the luckless citizens of Belleplain "high and dry" on the prairie, with nothing but a "spur" to travel on. However, a few stores yet remained in the midst of desolation.

After making her other purchases, Flaxen entered the "red-front drug store" to secure the special brand of gum which seemed most delectable and to buy a couple of cigars for the "boys."

The clerk, who was lately from the East, and wore his moustache curled upward like the whiskers of a cat, was "ga.s.sing" with another young man, who sat in a chair with his heels on the counter.

"Well, my dear, what can I do for you to-day?" he said, winking at the loafer, as if to say, "Now watch me."

"I want some gum."

"What kind, darling?" he asked, encouraged by the fellow in the chair.

"I ain't your darling.--Kerosene, shoofly, an' ten cents' worth."

"Say, Jack," drawled the other fellow, "git onto the ankles! Say, sissy, you picked your dress too soon. She's goin' to be a daisy, first you know. Ain't y', honey?" he said, leaning over and pinching her arm.

"Let me alone, you great, mean thing! I'll tell ol' pap on you, see if I don't," cried Flaxen, her eyes filling with angry tears. And as they proceeded to other and bolder remarks she rushed out, feeling vaguely the degradation of being so spoken to and so touched. It seemed to become more atrocious the more she thought upon it.

When she reached home there were still signs of tears on her face, and when Anson came out to help her alight, and noticing it asked, "What's the matter?" she burst out afresh, crying, and talking incoherently.

Anson was astonished.

"Why, what's the matter, Flaxie? Can't you tell ol' pap? Are ye sick?"

She shook her head, and rushed past him into the house and into her bedroom, like a little cyclone of wrath. Ans slowly followed her, much perplexed. She was lying face downward on the bed, sobbing.

"What's the matter, little one? Can't y' tell ol' pap? Have the girls be'n makin' fun o' yeh again?"

She shook her head.

"Have the boys be'n botherin' yeh?" No reply. "Who was it?" Still silence. He was getting stern now. "Tell me right now."

"Jack Reeves--an'--an' another feller."