After settling the expenses of their college course and paying for their outfit, the two young people found themselves in possession of some two thousand dollars between them; more than enough, they fancied, backed as it was—or should I say led?—by two stout hearts and by four strong young arms, to wrest a livelihood—nay, a fortune, perhaps—from the prairies of the West.
An old, old story, this. A pair of home-builders going out into a new land to conquer or die; to establish another outpost of civilization on the distant frontier, or to fail. A man and a woman who had taken their all in their hands to consecrate it by their toil to the service of humanity, and to stake their happiness on the success of their endeavor. True builders of the nation, they! Pickets they were, going ahead of the advance guard of the army of civilization's marchers, which, untold ages ago, started in some secluded nook in the far Orient, and, impelled by an irresistible desire for conquest, in successive waves of emigration, has at last compassed the globe, rolled around the world. Leaders, these two, of that mighty deluge of men and women for whom the sun of hope is ever rising,—but rising in the West.
Never was such a wedding journey. It was springtime in the most bountiful and fertile year that had come to the great State for a generation. The way of the lovers, as they plodded ever southward and westward, led them now past vast fields of yellowing wheat already beginning to ripen for the thresher. Sometimes they drove for miles through towering walls of broad-bladed, cool, green corn; sometimes the trail led them over the untilled, treeless prairies covered with tall, nodding sunflowers in all their gorgeous golden bloom,—blossoms which gave the State a name; and not infrequently their way would take them alongside a limpid river, in that happy season bank full from the frequent rains, where the winding road would be overhung by great trees.
They stopped at night at the different little towns through which their way passed, and once in a while they enjoyed the hearty welcome of a lone farm-house. Sometimes they hired a negro boy to drive the wagon from one stopping-place to another, while they mounted the two led horses and galloped over the prairie. Samuel rode well, but to see Sue Belle on that spirited young steed of hers was to see the perfection of dashing horsemanship. An instinctive judge of horse-flesh, she had bought that three-year-old herself. He was a chestnut sorrel with a white blaze on his face, and white forefeet, as handsome and spirited as his mistress. In honor of her native State, she called him Kentucky.
As they progressed farther and farther southwestward the land became more open, the farm-houses were greater distances apart, cultivated fields less frequent, the towns were fewer in number and diminishing in size, the rivers grew smaller and smaller, and trees almost vanished from the landscape. Finally, away out in Cimarron County, where the railroad stopped and civilization ended, they reached their journey's end. Such a wedding-trip they had enjoyed, such a honeymoon they had spent!
They bought a bit of flower-decked prairie, a quarter section crossed in one corner by a little creek flowing southward until it joined a larger steam flowing into the Arkansas River. The chosen land mostly lay on the south side of a slight elevation from which they could survey the grass-mantled plains melting into the unbroken horizon miles and miles away. The country about was entirely uncultivated and had been mainly given over to cattle-raising; it was a dozen miles to the nearest house and fifteen to the town of Apache, the county-seat.
How still was that vast expanse of gently undulating land of which they were the centre! An ocean caught in a quiet moment, and every smoothly rolling wave petrified, motionless. How vast was the firmament above them! To lie in the grass at night and stare up into its blue unclouded distance filled with stars—shone they ever so gloriously anywhere else on the globe?—was to reduce one's self to a vanishing point in the infinite universe of God. Lonely? Yes, to ordinary people, perhaps, but not to these two home-builders. They were young, they were together, they were lovers, and they had to do prosaic, God-given labor.
So they pitched their stakes upon the verdant hill, and, toiling early and late, built there for themselves and those to come a home. With iron share they tore the virgin sod; with generous hands they sowed the seed; with all the hope of youth and love bourgeoning and blossoming in their breasts, they began the earth-old process of wresting a living from the tillage of the soil. "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread." So ran the primal truth. Ah, yes, but this time counted not a curse but a privilege, and enjoyed not without but within an Eden.
II.—THE SECOND FLIGHT
Spring-time again upon the farm, and they were bidding it good-by. Five years have dragged away, years filled with little but misfortune—years of freezing winters, burning summers, drought, or storm. Five lean years of failure, unprecedented but true. A long, deadly, paralyzing struggle with that terrible minatory face of nature which, thank God! is usually turned away from humanity, else we could not bear the sight. The sun had beaten upon the farm and burnt it up, the parasites had swarmed over the field and eaten it down, the winter cold had frozen the life out of it, the fierce storms had swept over it and torn it away,—winter and summer had been alike against them.