“I am sure of that,” said her husband with the confidence of a bridegroom.
The house of which the young bride had just taken possession was by no means an ordinary prairie house. Far from it. It had pretensions to comfort which the true prairie house should never possess, and it lacked the few elements of picturesqueness with which the genuine article is sometimes endowed. The plan on which it was built was of the simplest—the same that children adopt in building their doll’s houses—four sides and a sloping roof, all of wood from top to bottom. It was not a log-house, which has a few broken lines to rest the eye of the beholder and present possibilities to the artist, it was a frame house, that is, the straightest, stiffest, squarest, most hopelessly unpicturesque object that it is possible to imagine, and to make matters worse it was painted a glaring white from eave to foundation. There was not a broken line or a broken tint anywhere to refresh the eye, and it stood on the high prairie, as if hurled into a glaring world by a Titan’s hand.
The prairie is fertile, and in the eye of a farmer may possess the beauty of usefulness, but otherwise it is hideous. The long rolling billows of grass present no character, while the trees are confined to the river valleys where they find refuge from prairie fires, and can therefore lead a sufficiently undisturbed existence to reach quite a respectable height. A couple of small locust trees, not three feet high, were all that did duty as shade-giving plants near Olive’s house, which accordingly faced the world and its storms entirely on its own individual merits. Judged by prairie standard the house was “tip-top.” It possessed no less than four rooms, while the regular settler’s cabin was wont to indulge in only a single comprehensive apartment, which was kitchen, parlour and bedroom all in one. The two lower rooms were the kitchen, which was fairly large, and a smaller one off it, reserved for the private use of the young wife. The kitchen looked like a ship’s cabin, only that it had more light than usually penetrates into a ship’s cabin. In fact it was very light, for there were two large windows, one to the north and one to the south, geometrically opposite each other. These two windows, so exactly facing each other, were fairly typical of the house itself, which was the embodiment of mathematical accuracy. The building was placed exactly east and west, as if it had been a carefully oriented church. There was a door on the south side, exactly in the middle, and a window on either side of the door, placed accurately in the centre of the space left between the side of the door and the end of the house. Over these two windows were two others exactly one half their size, giving light to the loft, and exactly in the centre of the roof-ridge was a black stove-pipe.
The average prairie man is a genius in the way of doing without things. He can live in a house of the smallest dimensions, containing the minimum of utensils. In fact, his idea of a house is that it should be a miner’s tent solidified into substantiality. The miner in a newly-prospected gold-field is a person who spends his days in a hole, and has no belongings but the clothes on his back and the shovel in his hand. He lives on his expectations. The regular prairie settler, would arrive in the spring, camp in his waggon, stick grains of corn under the sod, and think himself lucky if he could raise both the corn and a loghut, fourteen by twelve feet, before the cold weather set in. Those who have passed through such a severe school prune down their requirements. Therefore the house to which Ezra Weston brought his little bride was rightly considered to be a model of luxury, or in prairie phraseology to be “powerful full o’ truck.”
The kitchen certainly was full. The stove, black and business-like, stood near the partition wall, and on it rested a couple of huge iron pots with covers. Chairs there were none, as Olive had remarked, but boxes and nail-kegs did as well and were useful in holding things. There was a large wooden table, very strongly made, on one side, and a set of shelves in one corner. The walls and ceiling, which were of wood closely jointed, added to the ship-like appearance of the room, but the presence of two large saws and a horse-collar which hung above them made a considerable deduction from the nautical character of the apartment.
This model dwelling stood in the midst of a large tract of fenced-in land. Part of this was already under cultivation and showed a dark purple surface to the heavens, betokening newly turned up prairie sod full of the natural plant foods stored there for thousands of ages. These were now about to be recklessly used up by the ordinary system of prairie farming, which consisted of taking everything out of the land and of putting nothing back into it. A sort of road, that is to say a beaten track with deep channels on either side, led from the house to the bars, which did duty as gate to the premises. These bars were precisely what the name implies, bars of wood lying on supports made for them between posts, and they were simply let down whenever horses or other animals had to pass in or out, and were climbed over by active children too lazy to let them down or rather, perhaps, too lazy to put them up again.
On one side of the bars stretching out at an angle was an orchard just planted with trees that probably would be worth having twenty years hence, and further away was another field consisting simply of fenced-in prairie grass. The fields, and indeed everything else, were square, and every fence that did not run north and south, ran east and west. The whole place seemed under a despotism of compass and measuring chain. Indeed, the prairie itself was under the same iron rule: and by the authorities had been plotted out into squares of a mile each way called “sections,” of which persons could buy of the Government quarter sections or multiples of a quarter section at a low rate. Fortunately for humanity this conspiracy to turn the world into a surveyor’s map was to some extent defeated by the rivers and streams, which ran as Heaven and the water-sheds decreed, and not as the officials at Washington desired. This fact, and this alone, has in some measure saved the prairie from the awful fate of mathematical damnation.
CHAPTER II.
UNCLE DAVID.
Mrs. Weston was tired and sat down in her rocking-chair to rest. Her day’s work was fairly over. The breakfast had been ready punctually at half past five, and it was well-cooked, as she had boasted it would be—corn-bread smoking hot, fried chicken, potatoes, flap-jacks and molasses—a meal for a king, to say nothing of a working-man and his negro help. Ezra and Napoleon Pompey had partaken heartily, especially the latter, for he had been living on underdone hoe-cake and cold pork. Then they had gone off to the ploughing, while Olive had bustled around and got forward with her house-work. At eleven o’clock she had run up the towel against the shady side of the house, a signal easily seen from the distant field, and signifying that dinner was ready. They had come home, men and horses thoroughly hungry and ready for food and rest. Ezra lay on the kitchen floor and talked to her while she washed up the dishes. And now it was three o’clock, and all the work was done. She thought she would read a little. She had several books with her that she had been looking forward to reading. So she took up one of them and seated herself comfortably in the rocking-chair. The door was open and a warm air came in from the south along with the gleaming sunshine. Diana lay across the door-way, but kept one eye open, so as to see when the black hen came near enough to have a spring at her with any chance of grabbing a mouthful of tail-feathers. Olive’s eyes rested very little on the book, but much on the view outside. It looked pleasant enough in the bright May sunshine. The long brown patch of the garden showed a few methodical green lines that spoke of vegetables beginning to sprout. The meadow of blue grass just beyond was likewise by its hue showing the on-coming of the warm spring weather, and yet again further off, on the other side of the meadow, lay the vast field which her husband was ploughing. Once in every half hour she could see him turn at the head-land, and noted how seldom he seemed to stop and rest. Napoleon Pompey was riding the off leader, and from that distance they seemed little insects gently crawling backwards and forwards across the land. Pleasant it looked too and by no means hard work. Olive determined to go out to the field one day soon and watch the process from a nearer point of view; she might indeed herself hold the plough-handles, it looked easy, she would ask Ezra to let her, she would like to learn to do all sorts of work so as to be very useful, she would—confused images swept slowly over her mind, she leaned back her pretty little head and slept in her chair.
She awoke with a start. A large square figure stood in the door-way, blocking out the sunshine, and Diana, with the insane friendliness of a puppy, was trying to clamber up one of his legs.