Well, I’m beat! I don’t know what to do with myself. Out there to the clearing I was just crazy wild to get back to town; and now I’m here I’m nigh dead with plumb lonesomeness. My, my, my! Indians licked out of their skins, about, and cleared out the whole endurin’ State. Old Black Hawk marched off to the East to be shown what kind of a nation he’d bucked up against, the simpleton! And Osceolo takin’ himself and his pranks, with his tribe, clear beyond the Mississippi; an’ me an’ ma lived through watchin’ them little tackers of Kit’s—oh, hum! I’d ought to take some rest; but somehow I ’low I can’t seem to.”
Mercy looked up from the unbleached sheet she was hemming and smiled grimly.
“Give it up, pa. Give it up. I’ve been a-studyin’ this question, top and bottom crust and through the inside stuffin’, and I sum it this way: It’s in the soil!”
“What’s in the soil? The shakes? or the homesickness when a feller’s right to home? or what in the land do you mean?”
“The restlessness. The something that gets inside your mind and keeps you movin’. I’ve noticed it in everybody ever come here. Must be doin’; can’t keep still; up an’ at it, till a body’s clean wore an’ beat out. Me, for one. Here I’ve no more need to hem sheets than I have to make myself a pink satin gown, which I never had nor hope to have even——”
“The idee! I should hope not, indeed. You in a pink satin gown, ma; ’twould be scandalous!”
“Didn’t I say I wasn’t thinkin’ of gettin’ one, even so be I could, in this hole in the mud? I was talkin’ about Chicago. It ain’t a town to brag of, seein’ there ain’t two hundred left in it after the ravagin’ of the cholera; an’ yet I don’t know ary creature, man, woman, or child, ain’t goin’ to plannin’ right away for something to be done. I’ve heard more talk of improvements and hospitals and schools an’ colleges and land knows what more truck an’ dicker—Pshaw! It takes my breath away.”
“It does mine, ma.”
“Well,—that’s Chicago! You can always tell by a child when it’s a baby what it’s goin’ to be when it’s a man. Chicago’s a baby now, an’ a mighty puny one, too; but it’s kickin’ like a good feller, an’ it’s gettin’ strong; an’, first you know, folks will be pourin’ in here faster ’n the Indians or cholera carried ’em off, ary one.”
“Them ain’t your own idees; they’re Gaspar’s and Kit’s. He’s gone right to work, an’ so has she; layin’ out buildin’ sites an’ sendin’ East for any poor man that’s had hard luck and wants to begin all over again. Say—do you know—I—believe—that our Gaspar writes for the newspapers. Our Gaspar, ma! Newspapers! Out East!”