CHAPTER XXXIII
The End of the Sunset Trail
In February while attending a conference of reformers in St. Louis I received a letter from my mother which greatly disturbed me. "I wish I could see you," she wrote. "I am not very well this winter, I can't go out very often and I get very lonesome for my boys. If only you did not live so far away!"
There was something in this letter which made all that I was doing in the convention of no account, and on the following evening I took the train for Columbia, the little village in which my parents were spending the winter, filled with remorseful forebodings. My pain and self-accusation would not let me rest. Something clutched my heart every time I thought of my crippled mother prisoned in a Dakota shanty and no express train was swift enough to satisfy my desire to reach her. The letter had been forwarded to me and I was afraid that she might be actually ill.
That ride next day from Sioux City to Aberdeen was one of the gloomiest I had ever experienced. Not only was my conscience uneasy, it seemed that I was being hurled into a region of arctic storms. A terrific blizzard possessed the plain, and the engine appeared to fight its way like a brave animal. All day it labored forward while the coaches behind it swayed in the ever-increasing power of the tempest, their wheels emitting squeals of pain as they ground through the drifts, and I sitting in my overcoat with collar turned high above my ears, my hands thrust deep in my pockets, sullenly counted the hours of my discomfort. The windows, furred deep with frost, let in but a pallid half-light, thus adding a mental dusk to the actual menace of the storm.
After each station the brakemen re-entered as if blown in by the blast, and a vapor, white as a shower of flour, filled the door-way, behind them. Occasionally as I cleared a space for a peephole through the rimy panes, I caught momentary glimpses of a level, treeless earth, desolate as the polar ocean swept by ferocious elemental warfare.
No life was to be seen save here and there a suffering steer or colt, humped under the lee of a straw-stack. The streets of the small wooden towns were deserted. No citizen was abroad, only the faint smoke of chimneys testified to the presence of life beneath the roof-trees.
Occasionally a local passenger came in, puffing and whistling with loud explosions of excited comment over the storm which he seemed to treat as an agreeable diversion, but the conductor, who followed, threshing his hands and nursing his ears, swore in emphatic dislike of the country and climate, but even this controversy offered no relief to the through passengers who sat in frozen stoical silence. There was very little humor in a Dakota blizzard for them—or for me.
At six o'clock that night I reached the desolate end of my journey. My father met me at the station and led the way to the low square bleak cottage which he had rented for the winter. Mother, still unable to lift her feet from the floor, opened the door to us, and reaching her, as I did, through that terrifying tempest, made her seem as lonely as a castaway on some gelid Greenland coast.