In the scantily-furnished apartment into which we are shown, two or three women and as many children are crowding around a stove, for the night is bitter cold, and even the large wood-fire scarcely heated a space so thinly walled. Behind a heavy pine table, on which stands a flickering tallow-candle, and leaning against a half-curtained window on which the sleet and winter's blast beat drearily, sits a woman of some forty years of age, clad in a dress of dark, coarse stuff, resting her head on her hand, and seeming unmindful of all about her.
She was the widow of Thomas W. Barber, one of the victims of the Kansas war. The attenuated hand supporting the aching head, and half shielding the tear-dimmed eyes, the silent drops trickling down the wasted cheeks, told but too well the sad story.
"They have left me," she cried, "a poor, forsaken creature, to mourn all my days! Oh, my husband, my husband, they have taken from me all that I hold dear! one that I loved better than I loved my own life!"
Thomas W. Barber was a careful and painstaking farmer, a kind neighbor, and an inoffensive, amiable man. His "untimely taking off" was indeed a sad loss to the community at large, but how much more to his wife! She had loved him with a love that amounted to idolatry. When he was returning from his daily toil she would go forth to meet him. When absent from home, if his stay was prolonged, she would pass the whole night in tears; and when ill, she would hang over his bed like a mother over her child. With a presentiment of evil, when he left his home for the last time, after exhausting every argument to prevent him from going, she had said to him, "Oh, Thomas! if you should be shot, I shall be left all alone, with no child and nothing in the wide world to fill your place!" This was their last parting.
The intelligence of his death was kept in mercy from her, through the kindness of friends, who hoped to break it to her gently. This thoughtful and sympathetic purpose was marred by the unthinking act of a young man, who had been sent with a carriage to convey her to the hotel where her husband's body lay. As he rode up he shouted, "Thomas Barber is killed!" His widow half-caught the dreadful words, and rushing to the door cried, "Oh, God! What do I hear?" Seeing the mournful and sympathetic faces of the bystanders, she knew the truth and filled the house with her shrieks. When they brought her into the apartment where her husband lay, she threw herself upon his corpse, and kissing the dead man's face, called down imprecations on the heads of those who had bereaved her of all she held dear.
The prairies of the great West resemble the ocean in more respects than in their level vastness, and the travelers who pass over them are like mariners who guide themselves only by the constellations and the great luminaries of heaven. The trail of the emigrant, like the track of the ship, is often uncrossed for days by others who are voyaging over this mighty expanse. Distance becomes delusive, and after journeying for days and failing to reach the foot-hills of the mountains, whose peaks have shone to his eyes in so many morning suns, the tired emigrant is tempted by the abounding richness of the country to pause. He is one hundred miles from the nearest settlement. Beside a stream he builds his cabin. He is like a voyager whose ship has been burned, leaving him in a strange land which he must conquer or die.
Such was the situation of that household on the prairie of Illinois, concerning whom is told a story full of mournful pathos. We should note, in passing on to our story, one of the dangers to which prairie-dwellers are exposed. They live two or three months every year in a magazine of combustibles. One of the peculiarities of the climate in those regions is the dryness of its summers and autumns. A drought often commences in August which, with the exception of a few showers towards the close of that month, continues, with little interruption, throughout the full season. The immense mass of vegetation with which the fertile soil loads itself during the summer is suddenly withered, and the whole earth is covered with combustible materials. A single spark of fire falling anywhere upon these plains at such a time, instantly kindles a blaze that spreads on every side, and continues its destructive course as long as it finds fuel, these fires sweeping on with a rapidity which renders it hazardous even to fly before them.
The flames often extend across a wide prairie and advance in a long line; no sight can be more sublime than to behold at night a stream of fire several miles in breadth advancing across these plains, leaving behind it a black cloud of smoke, and throwing before it a vivid glare which lights up the whole landscape with the brilliancy of noonday. A roaring and crackling sound is heard like the rushing of the hurricane; the flame, which, in general, rises to the height of about twenty feet, is seen sinking and darting upward in spires precisely as the waves dash against each other, and as the spray flies up into the air; the whole appearance is often that of a boiling and flaming sea violently agitated. Woe to the farmer whose ripe corn-field extends into the prairie, and who has carelessly suffered the tall grass to grow in contact with his fences; the whole labor of a year is swept away in a few hours.
More than sixty years since, and before the beautiful wild gardens of Illinois had been tilled by the hand of the white man, an emigrant with his family came thither from the East in search of a spot whereon to make his home. One bright spring day his white-topped wagon entered a prairie richer in its verdure and more brilliant in its flowers, than any that had yet met his eyes. At night-fall it halted beside a clump of trees not far from a creek. On this site a log-cabin soon rose and sent its smoke curling through the overhanging boughs.
The only neighbors of the pioneers were the rambling Indians. Their habitation was the center of a vast circle not dwelt in, and rarely even crossed by white settlers; oxen, cows, and a dog were their only domestic animals. For many months after their cabin was built they depended on wild game and fruits for subsistence; the rifle of the father, and traps set by the boys, brought them an abundant supply of meat. The wife and mother wrought patiently for those she loved. Her busy hands kept a well-ordered house by day, and at night she plied the needle to repair the wardrobe of her little household band. It was already growing scanty, and materials to replace it could only be procured at a distance, and means to procure it were limited. Patching and darning until their garments were beyond repair, she then supplied their place with skins stripped from the deer which the father had shot. Far into the night, by the flickering light of a single candle, this gentle housewife plied "her busy care," while her husband, worn out with his day's work, and her children, tired by their rambles, were slumbering in the single chamber of the cabin.