Father was in unwonted depression. His crop had again failed to mature. With nearly a thousand acres of wheat, he had harvested barely enough for the next year's seed. He was not entirely at the end of his faith, however; on the contrary, he was filled with desire of the farther west. "The irrigated country is the next field for development. I'm going to sell out here and try irrigation in Montana. I want to get where I can regulate the water for my crops."
"You'll do nothing of the kind," I retorted. "You'll go no further west. I have a better plan than that."
The wind roared on, all that night and all the next day, and during this time we did little but feed the stove and argue our widely separated plans. I told them of Franklin's success on the stage with Herne, and I described my own busy, though unremunerative life as a writer, and as I talked the world from which I came shone with increasing splendor.
Little by little the story of the country's decay came out. The village of Ordway had been moved away, nothing remained but the grain elevator. Many of our old neighbors had gone "to the irrigation country" and more were planning to go as soon as they could sell their farms. Columbia was also in desolate decline. Its hotel stood empty, its windows broken, its doors sagging.
Nothing could have been more depressing, more hopeless, and my throat burned with bitter rage every time my mother shuffled across the floor, and when she shyly sat beside me and took my hand in hers as if to hold me fast, my voice almost failed me. I began to plead "Father, let's get a home together, somewhere. Suppose we compromise on old Neshonoc where you were married and where I was born. Let's buy a house and lot there and put the deed in mother's name so that it can never be alienated, and make it the Garland Homestead. Come! Mother's brothers are there, your sister is there, all your old pioneer comrades are there. It's in a rich and sheltered valley and is filled with associations of your youth.—Haven't you had enough of pioneering? Why not go back and be sheltered by the hills and trees for the rest of your lives? If you'll join us in this plan, Frank and I will spend our summers with you and perhaps we can all eat our Thanksgiving dinners together in the good old New England custom and be happy."
Mother yielded at once to the earnestness of my appeal. "I'm ready to go back," she said. "There's only one thing to keep me here, and that is Jessie's grave," (Poor little girl! It did seem a bleak place in which to leave her lying alone) but the old soldier was still too proud, too much the pioneer, to bring himself at once to a surrender of his hopes. He shook his head and said, "I can't do it, Hamlin. I've got to fight it out right here or farther west."
To this I darkly responded, "If you go farther west you go alone. Mother's pioneering is done. She is coming with me, back to comfort, back to a real home beside her brothers."
As I grew calmer, we talked of the past, of the early days in Iowa, of the dimmer, yet still more beautiful valleys of Wisconsin, till mother sighed, and said, "I'd like to see the folks and the old coulee once more, but I never shall."
"Yes, you shall," I asserted.
We spoke of David whose feet were still marching to the guidons of the sunset, of Burton far away on an Island in Puget Sound, and together we decided that placid old William, sitting among his bees in Gill's Coulee, was after all the wiser man. Of what avail this constant quest of gold, beneath the far horizon's rim?