The Wind Before the Dawn

by Dell H. Munger

Finding that the horses did not thrive on the straw alone, and knowing that wheat would very quickly kill them, Mr. Farnshaw put away a sufficient amount of oats for seed and then carefully portioned out the rest to be fed to four of his best broodmares, hoping to be able to put in the spring crops with them as well as to save the coming colts of two. The rest, he decided, must take their chances on getting through the winter alive.

The family food consisted largely of bread and the slabs of thin meat, with a sort of coffee made from browned rye. As a “company dish” there was a scanty supply of sweet corn, dried before the drought had cut the crop short. There were no eggs, because the chickens had sickened from eating grasshoppers in the fall and nearly all had died. The few hens which remained clung to the limbs of the half-grown cottonwood trees throughout the long winter nights, and found barely food enough during the day to keep life in their fuzzy bodies, which could not even furnish the oil necessary to lay their feathers smooth, much less foster the growth of eggs.

Josiah Farnshaw secretly questioned the propriety of having remained in that desolate territory when, as spring approached, the shrunken cows died one after another in giving birth to the calves which had matured in their slowly perishing bodies, but he made no sign or admission of the fact.

It was a season of gloom such as our frontier states had never known, and to add to the general depression there was a growing conviction that the hatching of the grasshoppers’ eggs when warm weather came would complete the famine.

To support his action in refusing to go East, Josiah Farnshaw asserted stubbornly that the frost of their hard winter would certainly kill the larvae of the locusts. So persistent was his attitude that at short intervals throughout the entire winter rumours that “th’ hopper eggs is dead ’s doornails” stirred the community and set its members to making tests in a vain endeavour to establish their truth. Pieces of earth, honeycombed with the tiny nests, would be placed near the fire and kept at as regular a degree of warmth as possible, the condition of the eggs would be noted carefully, and in a short time the hopes of the anxious pioneers would be dashed to the ground by wriggling little insects climbing cheerfully out of their winter quarters and hopping about in a vain search for something green to live upon. Often, in sheer desperation, the harassed settler would sweep the hatching brood into the fire, remarking as he did so, “Burnin’s too good for such pests,” and always fear gripped the heart. If the crops in spring were eaten, other homes must be sought, and all knew that the weakened horses were unfit for travel. In fact, no team in that entire country was fit to travel far or fast, except the two which Mr. Farnshaw groomed and fed so carefully for the sake of the spring work and the much desired colts.

The depression and worries of the Farnshaw home increased the spirit of contention and distrust of its guardians. The husband daily grew surlier and more unpleasant and the wife more lachrymose and subject to “spells.” The children learned to avoid the presence of either parent as much as possible, and to look outside the home for the joy childhood demands. The chores were heavy and difficult, but could at least be performed in the open light of God’s great out-of-doors, where the imagination could people the world with pleasant features and pleasant prospects.

The cattle were driven daily to the ponds, half a mile away, for water, and if the ice was thick and the axe-handle benumbing to the mittened hands as they chopped the holes for the tottering animals to drink from, there was the prospect of a slide on the uncut portions of the ice later; and as the plucky youngsters followed the cattle home they dreamed of skates to be obtained in the dim future, and tried to run fast enough to keep warm. The blessing of childhood is that it cannot be cheated of its visions, and the blood of adolescence was coursing riotously through the veins of the daughter of the Farnshaw house. If her hands were cold when she returned to the barnyard, after watering the cattle, she beat them about her shoulders or held them against the shrunken flank of some dumb animal, or blew her breath through the fingers of her knitted mittens; but her thoughts were of other things.

It is an old saying that “God helps them who help themselves,” and in the case of Lizzie Farnshaw the axiom became a living truth. While the rest of her family suffered and magnified their sufferings, she, by a vivid imagination, placed herself in the path of fortune and obtained the thing she demanded. The simple country schoolhouse that year, dreary and cheerless enough to the pert Miss who had come out from Topeka to teach there, and incidentally to collect twenty-five dollars a month from the school board, was to be the scene of the initial change in Lizzie Farnshaw’s life.

Verily, God helps them who help themselves, and Lizzie Farnshaw proved the old saw by laying hold of and absorbing every new idea and mannerism of which the new teacher was arrogantly possessed—absorbed them, but transmuted them, winnowing out the coarse, the sarcastic, the unkind, and making of what was left a substance of finer fibre.

The number of children in the Prairie Home school that year was limited to five, the rest having departed for the indefinable land known as the “East.” Three of these children came from the Farnshaw home and the other two from the new neighbours, the Cranes, on the Hansen place.