Vandemark's Folly Part 23

All through this talk, Gowdy watched my face as if to catch me telling something crooked; and I made up my mind to give him just enough of the truth to cover what he was sure to find out whether I told him or not.

"Did you pick up any pa.s.sengers as you came along?" he asked, with a sharp look.

"Yes," I said. "I had a lawyer with me for a day or two--Mr. Creede."

"Heard of him," said Gowdy. "Locating over at our new town of Lithopolis, isn't he? See anybody you knew on the way?"

"Yes," I said. "I saw your sister-in-law in Waterloo, She was with a minister and his wife--a Mr. and Mrs. Thornd.y.k.e--or something like that."

"Yes," said Gowdy, trying to be calm. "Friends of ours--of hers."

"They're here in the city," said Henderson L. "He's going to be the new preacher."

"I know," said Gowdy. "I know. Able man, too. How did it happen that I didn't see your outfit, Mr. Vandemark? I went back over the road after I pa.s.sed you there at the mud-hole, and returned, and wondered why I didn't see you. Thought you had turned off and given Monterey County up.

Odd I didn't see you." And all the time he was looking at me like a lawyer cross-examining a witness.

"Oh," said I, "I went off the road a few miles to break in some cattle I had traded for, and to let them get over their sore-footedness, and to leave some that I couldn't bring along. I had so many that I couldn't make time. I'm going back for them as soon as I can get around to it.

You must have missed me that way."

"Trust Mr. Vandemark," said he, "to follow off any cattle track that shows itself. He is destined to be the cattle king of the prairies, Mr.

Burns. I'm needing all the men I can get, Mr. Vandemark, putting up my house and barns and breaking prairie. I wonder if you wouldn't like to turn an honest penny by coming over and working for me for a while?"

He had been astonished and startled at the word that Virginia, after escaping from him, had found friends, and tried to pa.s.s the matter off as something of which he knew; but now he was quite his smiling, confidential self again, talking as if his offering me work was a favor he was begging in a warm and friendly sort of manner. I explained that I myself was getting my farm in condition to live upon, but might be glad to come to him later; and we drove on--I all the time sweating like a butcher under the strain of this getting so close to my great secret--and Virginia's.

Would it not all have to come out finally? What would Gowdy do to get Virginia back? Would he try at all? Did he have any legal right to her control and custody? I trusted completely in Grandma Thornd.y.k.e's protection of her--an army with banners would not have given me more confidence; for I could not imagine any one making her do anything she thought wrong, and ten armies with all the banners in the world could not have forced her to allow anything improper--and she had said that she and the elder were going to take care of the poor friendless girl--yet, I looked back at the Gowdy buggy flying on toward the village, in two minds as to whether or not I ought to go back and do--something. If I could have seen what that something might have been, I should probably have gone back; but I could not think just where I came into the play here.

So I went on-toward the goal of all my ambitions, my square mile of Iowa land, steered by Henderson L. Burns, who, between shooting prairie chickens, upland plover and sickle-billed curlew, guided me toward my goal by pointing out lone boulders, and the mounds in front of the dens of prairie wolves and badgers. We went on for six miles, and finally came to a place where the land slopes down in what is a pretty steep hill for Iowa, to a level bottom more than a mile across, at the farther side of which the land again rises to the general level of the country in another slope, matching the one on the brow of which we halted. The general course of the two hills is easterly and westerly, and we stood on the southern side of the broad flat valley.

3

As I write, I can look out over it. The drainage of the flat now runs off through a great open ditch which I combined with my neighbors to have dredged through by a floating dredge in 1897. The barge set in two miles above me, and after it had dug itself down so as to get water in which to float, it worked its way down to the river eight miles away.

The line of this ditch is now marked by a fringe of trees; but in 1855, nothing broke the surface of the sea of gra.s.s except a few clumps of plum trees and willows at the foot of the opposite slope, and here and there along the line of the present ditch, there were ponds of open water, patches of cattails, and the tent-like roofs of muskrat-houses. I had learned enough of the prairies to see that this would be a miry place to cross, if a crossing had to be made; so I waited for Henderson L. to come up and tell me how to steer my course.

"This is h.e.l.l Slew," said he as he came up. "But I guess we won't have to cross. Le's see; le's see! Yes, here we are."

He looked at his memorandum of the description of my land, looked about him, drove off a mile south and came back, finally put his horse down the hill to the base of it, and out a hundred yards in the waving gra.s.s that made early hay for the town for fifteen years, he found the corner stake driven by the government surveyors, and beckoned for me to come down.

"This is the southeast corner of your land," said he. "Looks like a mighty good place for a man with as good a shotgun as that--ducks and geese the year round!"

"Where are the other corners?" I asked.

"That's to be determined," he answered.

To determine it, he tied his handkerchief about the felly of his buggy wheel, held a pocket compa.s.s in his left hand to drive by, picked out a tall rosin-weed to mark the course for me, and counted the times the handkerchief went round as the buggy traveled on. He knew how many turns made a mile. The horse's hoofs sucked in the wet sod as we got farther out into the marsh, and then the ground rose a little and we went up over a headland that juts out into the marsh; then we went down into the slew again, and finally stopped in a miry place where there was a flowing spring with tall yellow lady's-slippers and catkined willows growing around it. After a few minutes of looking about, Burns found my southwest corner. We made back to the edge of the slope, and Henderson L. looked off to the north in despair.

"My boy," said he, "I've actually located your two south corners, and you can run the south line yourself from these stakes. The north line is three hundred and twenty rods north of and parallel to it--and the east and west lines will run themselves when you locate the north corners--but I'll have to wait till the ground freezes, or get Darius Green to help me--and the great tide of immigration hain't brought him to this neck of the woods yet."

"But where's my land?" I queried: for I did not understand all this hocus-pocus of locating any given spot in the Iowa prairies in 1855.

"Where's my land?"

"The heft of it," said he, "is right down there in h.e.l.l Slew. It's all pretty wet; but I think you've got the wettest part of it; the best duck ponds, and the biggest muskrat-houses. This slew is the only blot in the 'scutcheon of this pearl of counties, Mr. Vandemark--the only blot; and you've got the blackest of it."

I leaned back against the buggy, completely unnerved. Magnus put out his hand as if to grasp mine, but I did not take it. There went through my head that rhyme of Jackway's that he hiccoughed out as he drank with his cronies--on my money--that day last winter back in Madison: "Sold again, and got the tin, and sucked another Dutchman in!" This huge marsh was what John Rucker, after killing my mother, had deeded me for my inheritance!

In that last word I had from her, the poor stained letter she left in the apple-tree--perhaps it was her tears, and not the rain that had stained it so--she had said: "I am going very far away, and if you ever see this, keep it always, and whenever you see it remember that I would always have died willingly for you, and that I am going to build up for you a fortune which will give you a better life than I have lived." And this was the fortune which she had built up for me! I hated myself for having been gulled--it seemed as if I had allowed my mother to be cheated more than myself. Good land, I thought, was selling in Monterey County for two dollars an acre. The next summer when I bought an eighty across the road so as to have more plow-land, I paid three dollars and a half an acre, and sorrowed over it afterward: for in 1857 I could have got all I wanted of the best land--if I had had the money, which I had not--at a dollar and a quarter. At the going price then, in 1855, this section of land, if it had been good land, would have been worth only twelve or thirteen hundred dollars. At that rate, what was this swamp worth? Nothing!

I can still feel sorry for that poor boy, myself, green as gra.s.s, and without a friend in the world to whom he could go for advice, halted in his one-sided battle with the world, out there on the bare prairie, looking out on what he thought was the scene of his ruin, and thinking that every man's hand had been against him, and would always be. Where were now all my dreams of fat cattle, sleek horses, waddling hogs, and the fine house in which I had had so many visions of spending my life, with a more or less clearly-seen wife--especially during those days after Rowena Fewkes had told me how well she could cook, and proved it by getting me my breakfast; and the later days of my stay in the Grove of Destiny with Virginia Royall. Any open prairie farm, with no house, nothing with which to make a house, and no home but a wagon, and no companions but my cows would have been rather forbidding at first glance; but this--I was certain I was ruined; I suppose I must have looked a little bad, for Henderson L. laid his hand on my shoulder.

"Don't cave in, my boy," said he. "You're young--and there's oceans of good land to be had. Keep a stiff upper lip!"

"I'll kill him!" I shouted. "I'll kill John Rucker!"

"Don't, till you catch him," said Burns. "And what good would it do anyhow?"

"Is there any plow-land on it?" I asked, after getting control of myself.

"Some," said Henderson L. cheerfully. "Don't you remember that we drove up over a spur of the hill back there? Well, all the dry land north of our track is yours. Finest building-spot in the world, Jake. We'll make a farm of this yet. Come back and I'll show you."

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So we went back and looked over all the dry ground I possessed, and agreed that there were about forty acres of it, and as Burns insisted, sixty in a dry season; and he stuck to it that a lot of that slew was as good pasture especially in a dry time as any one could ask for. This would be fine for a man as fond of cows as I was, though, of course, cows could range at will all over the country. It was fine hay land, he said, too, except in the wettest places; but it was true also, that any one could make hay anywhere.

I paid Henderson L., bade good-by to Magnus Thorkelson, drove my outfit up on the "building-spot," and camped right where my biggest silo now stands. I sat there all the afternoon, not even unhitching my teams, listening as the afternoon drew on toward night, to the bitterns crying "plum pudd'n'" from the marsh, to the queer calls of the water-rail, and to the long-drawn "whe-e-ep--whe-e-e-ew!" of the curlews, as they alighted on the prairie and stretched their wings up over their backs.

I could never be much of a man, I thought, on a forty-acre farm, nor build much of a house. I had come all the way from York State for this!

The bubble had grown brighter and brighter as I had made my strange way across the new lands, putting on more and more of the colors of the rainbow, and now, all had ended in this spot of water on the floor of the earth. I compared myself with the Fewkeses, as I remembered how I had told Virginia just how the rooms of the house should be arranged, and allowed her to change the arrangement whenever she desired, and even to put great white columns in front as she said they did in Kentucky. We had agreed as to just what trees should be set out, and what flowers should be planted in the blue-gra.s.s lawn.

All this was gone glimmering now--and yet as I sit here, there are the trees, and there are the flowers, very much as planned, in the soft blue-gra.s.s lawn; about the only thing lacking being the white columns.

I was lying on the ground, looking out across the marsh, and as my misfortunes all rolled back over my mind I turned on my face and cried like a baby. Finally, I felt a large light hand laid softly on my head.

I looked up and saw Magnus Thorkelson bending over me.

"Forty acres," said he, "bane pretty big farm in Norvay. My fadder on twenty acres, raise ten s.h.i.+ldren. Not so gude land like dis. Vun of dem s.h.i.+ldern bane college professor, and vun a big man in leggislatur. Forty acre bane gude farm, for gude farmer."

I turned over, wiped my sleeve across my eyes, and sat up.

"I guess I dropped asleep," I said.

"Ya.s.s," he said. "You bane sleep long time. I came back to ask if I stay vith you. I halp you. You halp me. Ve halp each udder. Ve be neighbors alvays. I get farm next you. I halp you build house, an' you halp me.

Maybe ve lif togedder till you git vooman, or I git vooman--if American vooman marry Norwegian man. I stay?"

I took his hand and pressed it. After a few days' studying over it, I made up my mind that in the kindness of his heart he had come back just to comfort me. And all that he had said we would do, we did. Before long we had a warm dugout barn built in the eastern slope of the hillside, partly sheltered from the northwestern winds, and Magnus and I slept in one end of it on the sweet hay we cut in the marsh while the cows ranged on the prairie. Together we broke prairie, first on his land, then on mine. Together we hauled lumber from the river for my first little house.

If we first settlers in Iowa had possessed the sense the Lord gives to most, we could have built better and warmer, and prettier houses than the ones we put up, of the prairie sod which we ripped up in long black ribbons of earth; but we all were from lands of forests, and it took a generation to teach our prairie pioneers that a sod house is a good house. I never saw any until the last of Iowa was settling up, out in the northwestern part of the state, in Lyon, Sioux and Clay Counties.

All that summer, every wagon and draught animal in Monterey County was engaged in hauling lumber--some of it such poor stuff as ba.s.swood sawed in little sawmills along the rivers; and it was not until in the 'eighties that the popular song, _The Little Old Sod Shanty on the Claim_ proved two things--that the American pioneer had learned to build with something besides timber, and that the Homestead Law had come into effect. What Magnus and I were doing, all the settlers on the Monterey County farms were doing--raising sod corn and potatoes and buckwheat and turnips, preparing shelter for the winter, and wondering what they would do for fuel. Magnus helped me and I helped him.