Vandemark's Folly

by Herbert Quick

So we went back and looked over all the dry ground I possessed, and agreed that there were about forty acres of it, and as Burns insisted, sixty in a dry season; and he stuck to it that a lot of that slew was as good pasture especially in a dry time as any one could ask for. This would be fine for a man as fond of cows as I was, though, of course, cows could range at will all over the country. It was fine hay land, he said, too, except in the wettest places; but it was true also, that any one could make hay anywhere.

I paid Henderson L., bade good-by to Magnus Thorkelson, drove my outfit up on the "building-spot," and camped right where my biggest silo now stands. I sat there all the afternoon, not even unhitching my teams, listening as the afternoon drew on toward night, to the bitterns crying "plum pudd'n'" from the marsh, to the queer calls of the water-rail, and to the long-drawn "whe-e-ep--whe-e-e-ew!" of the curlews, as they alighted on the prairie and stretched their wings up over their backs.

I could never be much of a man, I thought, on a forty-acre farm, nor build much of a house. I had come all the way from York State for this! The bubble had grown brighter and brighter as I had made my strange way across the new lands, putting on more and more of the colors of the rainbow, and now, all had ended in this spot of water on the floor of the earth. I compared myself with the Fewkeses, as I remembered how I had told Virginia just how the rooms of the house should be arranged, and allowed her to change the arrangement whenever she desired, and even to put great white columns in front as she said they did in Kentucky. We had agreed as to just what trees should be set out, and what flowers should be planted in the blue-grass lawn.

All this was gone glimmering now--and yet as I sit here, there are the trees, and there are the flowers, very much as planned, in the soft blue-grass lawn; about the only thing lacking being the white columns.

I was lying on the ground, looking out across the marsh, and as my misfortunes all rolled back over my mind I turned on my face and cried like a baby. Finally, I felt a large light hand laid softly on my head. I looked up and saw Magnus Thorkelson bending over me.

"Forty acres," said he, "bane pretty big farm in Norvay. My fadder on twenty acres, raise ten shildren. Not so gude land like dis. Vun of dem shildern bane college professor, and vun a big man in leggislatur. Forty acre bane gude farm, for gude farmer."

I turned over, wiped my sleeve across my eyes, and sat up.

"I guess I dropped asleep," I said.

"Yass," he said. "You bane sleep long time. I came back to ask if I stay vith you. I halp you. You halp me. Ve halp each udder. Ve be neighbors alvays. I get farm next you. I halp you build house, an' you halp me. Maybe ve lif togedder till you git vooman, or I git vooman--if American vooman marry Norwegian man. I stay?"

I took his hand and pressed it. After a few days' studying over it, I made up my mind that in the kindness of his heart he had come back just to comfort me. And all that he had said we would do, we did. Before long we had a warm dugout barn built in the eastern slope of the hillside, partly sheltered from the northwestern winds, and Magnus and I slept in one end of it on the sweet hay we cut in the marsh while the cows ranged on the prairie. Together we broke prairie, first on his land, then on mine. Together we hauled lumber from the river for my first little house.