IT was always a puzzle to the little girl how the stork that brought her ever reached the lonely Dakota farm-house on a December afternoon without her being frozen; and it was another mystery, just as deep, how the strange bird, which her mother said was no larger than a blue crane, was able, on leaving, to carry her father away with him to some family, a long, long distance off, that needed a grown-up man as badly as her three big brothers needed a little sister.
She often tried to remember the stork, his broad nest of pussy-willows on the chin of the new moon, and the long trip down through the wind and snow to the open window of the farm-house. But though she never forgot her christening, and could even remember things that happened before that, her wonderful journey, she found, had slipped entirely from her mind. But her mother and the three big brothers, ever reminded by the stone-piled mound on the carnelian bluff, never forgot that day:
An icy blizzard, carrying in its teeth the blinding sleet that neither man nor animal could breast, was driving fiercely across the wide plains; and the red, frame dwelling and its near-lying buildings of sod, which only the previous morning had stood out bravely against the dreary, white waste, were wrapped and almost hidden in great banks that had been caught up from the river heights and hurled with piercing roars against them.
The storm had begun the day before, blowing first in fitful gusts that whistled under the eaves, sent the hay from the stacks flying through the yard, and lifted the ends of the roof shingles threateningly. It had gradually strengthened to a gale toward midday, and the steady downfall of flakes had been turned into a biting scourge that whipped up the soft cloak from the face of the open, treeless prairie and sent it lashing through the frigid air. Long before night had begun to settle down, no eye could penetrate the scudding snow a foot beyond the window ledges, except when a sudden stilling of the tempest disclosed the writhing cottonwood break to the north, and the double row of ash saplings leading south to the blotted, printless highway.
With darkness, the fury of the blizzard had redoubled, and the house had rocked fearfully as each fresh blast struck it, so that the nails in the sheathing had snapped from time to time, and rung in the tense atmosphere like pistol shots. Momentary lulls—ominous breathing-spells—had interrupted the blizzard; but they had served only to intensify it when it broke again. As it rose from threatening silence to rending shrieks, the bellowing of the frightened cattle, tied in their narrow stalls, had mingled with it, and added to its terrors.
But, when another wild, sunless day had come in, the drift-piled home had ceased to shiver and creak or admit any sounds from without. Hour by hour it had settled deeper and deeper into the snow that weighted its roof and shuttered its windows, until, shrouded and almost effaced, it lay, at last, secure from the tempest that swept over it and deaf to the calls from the buried stables.
Down-stairs in the big, dim sitting-room, the neighbor woman was keeping the lonely vigil of the stork. Early the previous day, before the storm began, and when the plains still stretched away on all sides, a foam-covered sea, the huge swells of which had been gripped and frozen into quiet, the anxious husband had mounted and started westward across the prairie. The horse had not carried him far, however, for the drifts would not bear its weight; so, when the three big brothers, hearing his halloo, had taken him a pair of rude skees made of barrel staves, he had helped them free the floundering animal, and had then gone on afoot.
His destination was the army post at the reservation, and he had made swift progress toward it. The ice-bound Vermilion did not check him, and the sealed sloughs shortened his path. Onward he had sped, tirelessly. In half an hour his scarlet nubia had blended into the black of his fur-lined coat; in an hour he was only a speck, now in sight upon the top of a swell, now lost in its trough. And then he had disappeared altogether over the long, unbroken line of the horizon.
That day had passed, and the night; and, when a second day was half gone, he had not yet returned. The farm-house, as hopeful as a sailor's home, felt little worry, believing that he was too good a plainsman to brave such a blizzard foolishly, and pictured him fretting his time away at the post, or in some hospitable shanty nearer by.
But the neighbor woman was full of fear for his safety. And, as she waited alone, she walked to and fro, watching first the canopied bed in the corner, and then the shaking sash that, if Providence were merciful, might at any moment frame an eager face. Every little while she paused at the stove, where, the hay twists having long since given out, she fed the fire from a heaping basket of yellow, husked corn.