| Nearer, my God, to thee, Nearer to thee, E’en though it be a cross That raiseth me. Still all my song shall be Nearer, my God, to thee, Nearer to thee. |
CHAPTER V
A Plainsman of the Old School
| I have eaten your bread and salt, I have drunk your water and wine; The deaths ye died I have watched beside, And the lives ye led were mine. —Kipling. |
The little postoffice at Carey’s Crossing in Wolf County was full of men waiting for the mail due at noon. Mail came thrice a week now, and business on the frontier was looking brighter. The postoffice was only one feature of the room it occupied. Drugs, hardware, horse-feed, groceries, and notions each had claims of their own, while beside the United States Mail Department was an inksplashed desk holding a hotel register, likewise inksplashed. Beyond the storeroom was a long, narrow dining room on one side and a few little cell-like rooms on the other with a crack of a hall between them leading back to the kitchen, the whole structure, only one story high, having more vertical boards than horizontal in its making. But the lettering over the front door bore the brave information that this was the Post Office, the General Merchandise Store, and the Jacobs House, all in one.
The rain of the night had shifted to a light snow that whiffed about in little white pellets, adding nothing to the land in the way of moisture, or beauty, or protection from cold. Just a chill fraying out of the rain’s end that matched the bitterness of the wind’s long sweep from out 59 of the vast northwest. A gray sky was clamped down over all, so dull and monotonous, it seemed that no rainbow tint could ever again brighten the world.
“The stage is late again,” observed one of the men.
“Always is when you want her particular.” This from a large man who held the door open long enough to stare up the open street for the sign of the coming stage and to let in a surge of cold air at the same time.