The little agent smoked on in silence for some minutes, gazing motionless at the doorway through which Ichabod had passed out. Again the lean bird-dog thrust in an apologetic head, dutifully awaiting recognition. At length the man shook his pipe clean, and leaned back in soliloquy.
“Man, woman, human nature; habit, solitude, the prairie.” He spoke each word slowly, and with a shake of his head. “He’s mad, mad; but I pity him”––a pause––“for I know.”
The dog whined an interruption from the doorway, and the man looked up.
“Come in, boy,” he said, in recognition. 141
Chapter III––The Wonder of Prairie
Ichabod and Camilla selected their claim together. A fair day’s drive it was from the little town; a half-mile from the nearest neighbor, a Norwegian, without two-score English words in his vocabulary. Level it was, as the surface of a lake or the plane of a railroad bed.
Together, too, they chose the spot for their home. Camilla sobbed over the word; but she was soon dry-eyed and smiling again. Afterwards, side by side, they did much journeying to and from the nearest sawmill––each trip through a day and a night––thirty odd miles away. The mill was a small, primitive affair, almost lost in the straggling box-elders and soft maples that bordered the muddy Missouri, producing, amid noisy protestations, the most despisable of all lumber on the face of the globe––twisting, creeping, crawling cottonwood.
Having the material on the spot, Ichabod 142 built the house himself, after a plan never before seen of man; joint product of his and Camilla’s brains. It took a month to complete; and in the meantime, each night they threw their tired bodies on the brown earth, indifferent to the thin canvas, which alone was spread between them and the stars.
Too utterly weary for immediate sleep, they listened to the sounds of animal life––wholly unfamiliar to ears urban trained––as they stood out distinct by contrast with a silence otherwise absolute as the grave.
... The sharp bark of the coyote, near or far away; soft as an echo, the gently cadenced tremolo of the prairie owl. To these, the mere opening numbers of the nightly concerts, the two exotics would listen wonderingly; then, of a sudden, typical, indescribable, lonely as death, there would boom the cry which, as often as it was repeated, recalled to Ichabod’s mind the words of the little man in the land-office, “loneliest sound on earth”––the sound which, once heard, remains forever vivid––the night call of the prairie rooster. Even now, new and fascinating as it all was, at the last wailing cry 143 the two occupants of the tent would reach out in the darkness until their hands met. Not till then would they sleep.