So much for the half-morbid frame of mind due for the most part to the reflex of a body made sick by an irregular and irrational life. This much, too, Franklin could have established of his own philosophy. Yet this was not all, nor was the total so easily to be explained away.
Steadily, and with an insistence somewhat horrible, there came to Franklin's mind a feeling that this career which he saw before him would not always serve to satisfy him. Losing no touch of the democratic loyalty to his fellow-men, he none the less clearly saw himself in certain ways becoming inexorably separated from his average fellow-man. The executive instinct was still as strong within him, but he felt it more creative, and he longed for finer material than the seamy side of man's petty strifes with man, made possible under those artificial laws which marked man's compromise with Nature. He found no solace and no science in the study of the great or the small crimes of an artificial system which did not touch individual humanity, and which was careless of humanity's joys or sorrowings. Longing for the satisfying, for the noble things, he found himself irresistibly facing toward the past, and irresistibly convinced that in that past, as in the swiftly marching present, there might be some lesson, not ignoble and not uncomforting. Horrified that he could not rest in the way that he had chosen, distracted at these intangible desires, he doubted at times his perfect sanity; for though it seemed there was within him the impulse to teach and to create, he could not say to himself what or how was to be the form, whether mental or material, of the thing created, the thing typified, the thing which he would teach.
Of such travail, of such mould, have come great architects, great engineers, great writers, musicians, painters, indeed great men of affairs, beings who stand by the head and shoulders above other men as leaders. The nature of such men is not always at the first assured, the imprimitive seal not always surely set on, so that of one thus tormented of his inner self it may be mere accident which shall determine whether it is to be great artist or great artisan that is to be born again.
To Franklin, dreaming as he woke or slept, there sometimes waved a hand, there sometimes sounded a Voice, as that which of old summoned the prophet in the watches of the night. Neither in his waking nor his sleeping hours could he call this spirit into materialization, however much he longed to wrestle with it finally. It remained only to haunt him vaguely, to join with the shade of Mary Ellen the Cruel to set misery on a life which he had thought happily assured.
CHAPTER XXXIII
THE GREAT COLD
The land lay trusting and defenceless under a cynical sky, which was unthreatening but mocking. Dotting a stretch of country thirty miles on either side of the railway, and extending as far to the east and west along its line, there were scattered hundreds of homes, though often these were separated one from the other by many miles of open prairie. Fences and fields appeared, and low stacks of hay and straw here and there stood up above the vast gray surface of the old buffalo and cattle range. Some of these houses were board "shacks," while others were of sods, and yet others, these among the earliest established on the plains, the useful dugout, half above and half beneath the ground. Yet each building, squat or tall, small or less small, was none the less a home. Most of them contained families. Men had brought hither their wives and children—little children, sometimes babes, tender, needful of warmth and care. For these stood guardian the gaunt coal chutes of the town, with the demands of a population of twenty-five hundred, to say nothing of the settlers round about, a hundred tons for a thousand families, scattered, dwelling out along breaks and coulees, and on worn hillsides, and at the ends of long, faint, wandering trails, which the first whirl of snow would softly and cruelly wipe away.
Yet there was no snow. There had been none the winter before. The trappers and skin-hunters said that the winter was rarely severe. The railroad men had ranged west all the winter, throats exposed and coats left at the wagons. It was a mild country, a gentle, tender country. In this laughing sky who could see any cynicism? The wind was cold, and the wild fowl flew clamouring south from the sheeted pools, but the great hares did not change their colour, and the grouse stayed brown, and the prairie dogs barked joyously. No harm could come to any one. The women and children were safe. Besides, was there not coal at the town? Quite outside of this, might not one burn coarse grass if necessary, or stalks of corn, or even ears of corn? No tree showed in scores of miles, and often from smoke to tiny smoke it was farther than one could see, even in the clear blue mocking morn; yet the little houses were low and warm, and each had its makeshift for fuel, and in each the husband ate, and the wife sewed, and the babes wept and prattled as they have in generations past; and none looked on the sky to call it treacherous.
One morning the sun rose with a swift bound into a cloudless field. The air was mild, dead, absolutely silent and motionless. The wires along the railway alone sang loudly, as though in warning—a warning unfounded and without apparent cause. Yet the sighing in the short grass was gone. In the still air the smokes of the town rose directly upright; and answering to them faint, thin spires rose here and there far out over the prairies, all straight, unswerving, ominous, terrible. There was a great hush, a calm, a pause upon all things. The sky was blue and cloudless, but at last it could not conceal the mockery it bore upon its face, so that when men looked at it and listened to the singing of the wires they stopped, and without conscious plan hurried on, silent, to the nearest company.
Somewhere, high up in the air, unheralded, invisible, there were passing some thin inarticulate sounds, far above the tops of the tallest smoke spires, as though some Titan blew a far jest across the continent to another near the sea, who answered with a gusty laugh, sardonic, grim, foreknowing. Every horse free on the range came into the coulees that morning, and those which were fenced in ran up and down excitedly. Men ate and smoked, and women darned, and babes played. In a thousand homes there was content with this new land, so wild at one time, but now so quickly tamed, so calm, so gentle, so thoroughly subdued.