Illustrations (continued 4)

It was not yet fully dawn and the thought of rising in a cold room at that time of night was appalling to a city woman, but with heroic resolution Zulime dressed, and followed me down the narrow stairway to the lamp-lit dining-room, where a steaming throng of dishes, containing oatmeal, potatoes, flap-jacks and sausage (supplemented by cookies, doughnuts and two kinds of jam), invited us to start the day with indigestion.

The dim yellow light of the kerosene lamp, the familiar smell of the buckwheat cakes and my father's clarion voice brought back to me very vividly and with a curious pang of mingled pleasure and regret, the corn-husking days when I habitually ate by candlelight in order to reach the field by daybreak. I recalled to my father's memory one sadly-remembered Thanksgiving Day when he forced us all to husk corn from dawn to sunset in order that we might finish the harvest before the snowstorm covered the fallen stalks. "But mother's turkey dinner saved the day," I remarked to Zulime. "Nothing can ever taste so good as that meal. As we came into the house, cold, famished and weary, the smell of the kitchen was celestial."

My mother smiled but father explained in justification, "I could feel a storm in the air and I knew that we had just time to reach the last row if we all worked, and worked hard. As a matter of fact we were all done at four o'clock."

"O, we worked!" I interpolated. "Frank and I had no vote in those days."

During the week which followed most of my relatives, and a good many of the neighbors, called on us, and as a result Zulime spent several highly educational afternoons listening to the candid comments of elderly widows and sharp-eyed old maids. Furthermore, being possessed of a most excellent digestion, she was able to accept the daily invitations to supper, at which rich cakes and home-made jams abounded. She was also called upon to examine "hand-made paintings in oil," which she did with tender care. No one could have detected in her smile anything less than kindly interest in the quaint interior decorations of the homes. Her comment to me was a different matter.

That she was an object of commiseration on the part of the women I soon learned, for Mrs. Dunlap was overheard to say, "She's altogether too good for him" (meaning me), and Mrs. McIlvane, with the candor of a life-long friendship, replied, "That's what I told Belle."

Uncle William, notwithstanding a liking for me, remarked with feeling, "She's a wonder! I don't see how you got her."

To which I replied, "Neither do I."

In setting down these derogatory comments I do not wish to imply that I was positively detested but that I was not a beloved county institution was soon evident to my wife. Delegations of school children did not call upon me, and very few of my fellow citizens pointed out my house to travelers—at that time. In truth little of New England's regard for authorship existed in the valley and my head possessed no literary aureole. The fact that I could—and did—send away bundles of manuscript and get in return perfectly good checks for them, was a miracle of doubtful virtue to my relatives as well as to my neighbors. My money came as if by magic, unasked and unwarranted, like the gold of sunset. "I don't see how you do it," my Uncle Frank said to me one day, and his tone implied that he considered my authorship a questionable kind of legerdemain, as if I were, somehow, getting money under false pretenses.

Rightly or wrongly, I had never pretended to a keen concern in the "social doings" of my village. Coming to the valley out of regard for my father and mother and not from personal choice, the only folk who engaged my attention were the men and women of the elder generation, rugged pioneer folk who brought down to me something of the humor, the poetry, and the stark heroism of the Border in the days when the Civil War was a looming cloud, and the "Pineries" a limitless wilderness on the north. Men like Sam McKinley, William Fletcher, and Wilbur Dudley retained my friendship and my respect, but the affairs of the younger generation did not greatly concern me. In short, I considered the relationship between them and myself fortuitous.

Absorbed in my writing I was seldom in the mood during my visits to entertain curious neighbors, in fact I had met few people outside my relatives. All this was very ungracious, no doubt, but such had been my attitude for seven years. I came there to work and I worked.

Even now, in the midst of my honeymoon, I wrote busily. Each morning immediately after breakfast I returned to my study, where the manuscript of a novel (Her Mountain Lover) was slowly growing into final shape, but in the afternoons Zulime and I occasionally went sleighing with Dolly and the cutter, or we worked about the house.

It was a peaceful time, with only one thought to stir the pool of my content. I began to realize that the longer we stayed, the harder it would be for my mother to let us go. She could hardly permit her New Daughter to leave the room. She wanted her to sit beside her or to be in the range of her vision all day long. So far from resenting her loss of household authority she welcomed it, luxuriating in the freedom from care which the young wife brought.

This growing reliance upon Zulime made me uneasy. "I cannot, even for mother's sake, ask my city-bred wife to spend the winter in this small snow-buried hamlet," I wrote to my brother, "and, besides, I have planned a wedding trip to Washington and New York."

In announcing to my mother the date of our departure, I said, "We won't be gone long. We'll be back early in the spring."

"See that you do," she replied, but her eyes were deep and dark with instant sadness. She had hoped with childish trust that we would stay all winter with her.

It was beautiful in Neshonoc at this time. Deep, dazzling snows blanketed the hills, and covered the fields, and frequently at sunset or later, after the old people were asleep, Zulime and I went for a swift walk far out into the silent country, rejoicing in the crisp clear air, and in the sparkle of moonbeams on the crusted drifts. At such times the satin sheen of sled-tracks in the road, the squeal of dry flakes under my heel (united with the sound of distant sleigh bells) brought back to me sadly-sweet memories of boyish games, spelling school, and the voices of girls whose laughter had long since died away into silence.

The blurred outlines of the hills, the barking of sentinel dogs at farm-yard gates, and the light from snow-laden cottage windows filled my heart with a dull illogical ache, an emotion which was at once a pleasure and a pain.

O, witchery of the winter night, (With broad moon shouldering to the west), Before my feet the rustling deeps Of untracked snows, in shimmering heaps, Lie cold and desolate and white. I hear glad girlish voices ring Clear as some softly-stricken string— (The moon is sailing toward the west), The sleigh-bells clash in homeward flight, With frost each horse's breast is white— (The moon is falling toward the west)— "Good night, Lettie!" "Good night, Ben!" (The moon is sinking at the west)— "Good night, my sweetheart,"—Once again The parting kiss, while comrades wait Impatient at the roadside gate, And the red moon sinks beyond the west!

Such moments as these were meeting places of the old and the new, the boy and the man. The wistful, haunting dreams of the past, contended with the warm and glowing fulfillment of the present. For the past a song, for the present the woman at my side!

Whether Zulime had similar memories of her girlhood or not I do not know. She was not given to emotional expression, but she several times declared herself entirely content with our orderly easeful life and professed herself willing to remain in the homestead until spring. "I like it here," she repeated, but I was certain that she liked the city and her own kind, better, and that a longer stay would prove a deprivation and a danger. After all, she was an alien in the Valley,—a gracious and kindly alien, but an alien nevertheless. Her natural habitat was among the studios of Chicago or New York, and my sense of justice would not permit me to take advantage of her loyalty and her womanly self-sacrifice.

"Pack your trunk," I said to her one December day, with an air of high authority. "We are going East in continuation of our wedding trip."

Two days after making this decision we were in Washington, at a grand hotel, surrounded by suave waiters who had abundant leisure to serve us, for the reason that Congress was not in session, and the city was empty of its lobbyists and its law-makers.

The weather was like October and for several days we walked about the streets without thinking of outside wraps. We went at once to the Capitol from whose beautiful terraces we could look across the city, back and upward along our trail, above the snows of Illinois soaring on and up into the far cañons of the San Juan Divide, retracing in memory the first half of our wedding journey with a sense of satisfaction, a joy which now took on double value by reason of its contrast to the marble terrace on which we stood. From the luxury of our city surroundings the flaming splendors of the Needle Range appeared almost mystical.

We ate our Christmas dinner in royal isolation, attended by negroes whose dusky countenances shone with holiday desire to make us happy. With no visitors and no duties we gave ourselves to the business of seeing the Capitol and enjoying the gorgeous sunlight. Zulime, who looked at everything in the spirit of a youthful tourist, was enchanted and I played guide with such enthusiasm as a man of forty could bring to bear. It was a new and pleasant schooling for me, a time which I look back upon with wistful satisfaction, after more than twenty years.

Philadelphia, our next stop, had an especial significance to me (something quite apart from its historical significance). Outwardly professing a keen interest in the Liberty Bell, Independence Hall, and other objects which enthralled my young wife, I was secretly planning to offer Lorimer of The Post, the serial rights of my novel The Eagle's Heart, and I had an engagement to talk with Edward Bok about a novelette.

Bok, a friend of several years' standing, received us most cordially, and Mrs. Bok, who came in next day to meet us, not only instantly and heartily approved of my wife, but quite openly said so, a fact which added another quality to the triumphal character of our progress. I was certain that all of my other Eastern friends would find her admirable.

We reached New York on New Year's Eve, and the streets were roaring with the customary riot of youth, but in our rooms at the Westminster we were as remote from the tumult as if we had been at the bottom of a Colorado mine. We would have heard nothing of the horns and hootings of the throngs had not Zulime expressed a wish to go forth and mix with them. With a feeling of disgust of the hoodlums who filled Broadway, I took her as far north as Forty-second Street, but she soon tired of the rude men and their senseless clamor, and gladly returned to our hotel willing to forget it all.

In my diary I find these words, "I am beginning the New Year with two thousand dollars in the bank, and a pending sale which will bring in as much more. I feel pretty confident of a living during the year 1900."

Evidently the disposal of my serial to Lorimer, the results of my deal with Brett, and the growing interest of other publishers in my work had engendered a confidence in the future which I had never before attained—and yet I must admit that most of my prosperity was expected rather than secured, a promise, rather than a fulfillment, and the fact that I permitted Zulime to settle upon a three-room suite in an obscure Hotel on Fifteenth Street, is proof of my secret doubts. Eighteen dollars per week seemed a good deal of money to pay for an apartment.

As I think back to this transaction I am bitten by a kind of remorseful shame. It was such a shabby little lodging for my artist bride, and yet, at the moment, it seemed all that we could safely afford, and she cheerfully made the best of it. Never by word or sign did she hint that its tiny hall and its dingy and unfashionable furnishings were unworthy of us both, on the contrary she went ahead with shining face.

One extravagance I did commit, one that I linger upon with satisfaction—I forced her to choose a handsome coat instead of a plain one. It was a long graceful garment of a rich brown color, an "Individual model" the saleslady called it. It was very becoming to my wife—at any rate I found it so—but the price was sixty-five dollars—"marked down from eighty-five" the saleslady said. Neither of us had ever worn a coat costing more than twenty-five dollars and to pay almost three times as much even for a beautiful "creation" like this was out of the question—and my considerate young wife decided against it with a sigh.

I was in reckless mood. "We will take it," I said to the saleswoman.

"Oh no! We can't afford it!" protested Zulime in high agitation. "It is impossible!" She looked scared and weak.

"You may do up the old coat," I went on in exalted tone. "My wife will wear the new one."

In a tremor of girlish joy and gratitude Zulime walked out upon the street wearing the new garment, and the expression of her face filled me with desire to go on amazing her. She had owned so few pretty things in her life that I took a keen pleasure in scaring her with sudden presents. I bought a crescent-shaped brooch set with small diamonds which cost one hundred dollars—Oh, I was coming on!

[She is wearing these jewels yet and she says she loves them—but as I think back to that brown cloak I am not so sure that her approval was without misgiving. It may be that she secretly hated that coat for it was an unusual color, and while its lines were graceful in my eyes it may have been "all out of style."—What became of it, finally, I am unable to say. No matter, it expressed for me a noble sentiment and it shall have a place on this page with the Oriental brooch and the amethyst necklace.]

Humble as our quarters were we rejoiced in distinguished visitors. William Dean Howells called upon us almost immediately and so did Richard Watson Gilder, Edmund Clarence Stedman, John Burroughs, and many other of my valued, old-time friends. Furthermore, with a courage at which I now marvel at, Zulime announced that we would be "at home" every afternoon, and thereafter our tiny sitting-room was often crowded with her friends—for she had begun to find out many of her artist acquaintances. In fact, we were forever discovering people she had known in Paris. It seemed to me that she had met the entire American Colony during her four years in France.

My social and domestic interests quite cut me off from my club, and we joked about this. "I am now one of the newly-weds," I admitted, "and my absence from the club is expected. Members invariably desert the club during the first year or two of their married life, but they all come back!—Sooner or later, they drop in for lunch or while wifey is away, and at last are indistinguishable from the bachelors."

Mrs. James A. Herne, who had meant so much to me in my Boston days, was one of our very first callers, and no one among all my friends established herself more quickly in my wife's regard. Katharine's flame-like enthusiasm, her never-failing Irish humor, and her quick intelligence, made her a joyous inspiration, and whilst she and Zulime compared experiences like a couple of college girls, I sat and smiled with a kind of proprietary pride in both of them.

Fortunately my wife approved of my associates. "You have a delightful circle," she said one night as we were on our way home from a dinner with a group of distinguished literary folk.

Her remark comforted me. Having no money with which to hire cabs or purchase opera tickets, I could at least share with her the good friendships I had won, confidently, believing that she would gain approval,—which she did. Not all of my associates were as poor as I (some of them, indeed, lived in houses of their own), but they were mostly concerned with the arts in some form, and with such people Zulime was entirely at ease.

With a lecture to deliver in Boston I asked her to go with me. "I cannot forego the pleasure of showing you about 'the Hub,'" I urged. "I want Hurd and other of my faithful friends of former days to know you. We'll take rooms at the Parker House which used to fill me with silent awe. I want to play the part, for a day or two, of the successful author."

As she had never seen Boston, she joyfully consented, and the most important parts of my grandiose design were carried out. We took rooms at the hotel in which I first met Riley, and from there we sent out cards to several of my acquaintances. Hurd, who was still Literary Editor of the Transcript, came at once to call, and so did Flower of the Arena, but for the most part Zulime and I did the calling for she was eager to see the homes and the studios of my artist friends.

By great good fortune, James A. Herne was playing "Sag Harbor" at one of the theaters, and as I had told Zulime a great deal about "Shore Acres" and other of Herne's plays, I hastened to secure seats for a performance. Herne was growing old, and in failing health but he showed no decline of power that night. His walk, his voice, his gestures filled me with poignant memories of our first meeting in Ashmont, and our many platform experiences, while the quaint Long Island play brought back to me recollections of his summer home on Peconic Bay. How much he had meant to me in those days of Ibsen drama and Anti-poverty propaganda!

To go about Boston with my young wife was like reliving one by one my student days. Many of my haunts were unchanged, and friends like Dr. Cross and Dr. Tompkins, with whom I had lived so long in Jamaica Plain, were only a little grayer, a little thinner. They looked at me with wondering eyes. To them I was an amazing success. Flower, still as boyish in face and figure as when I left the city in '92, professed to have predicted my expanding circle of readers, and I permitted him to imagine it wider than it was.

Some of my former neighbors had grown in grace, others had stagnated or receded, a fact which saddened me a little. A few had been caught in a swirl of backwater, and seemed to be going round and round without making the slightest advance. Their talk was all of small things, or the unimportant events of the past.

Alas! Boston no longer inspired me. It seemed small and alien and Cambridge surprised me by revealing itself as a sprawling and rather drab assemblage of wooden dwellings, shops and factories. Even the University campus was less admirable, architecturally, than I had supposed it to be, and the residences of its famous professors were hardly the stately homes of luxury I had remembered them. Upon looking up the house on Berkley Street in which Howells had lived while editing The Atlantic Monthly, I found it smaller and less beautiful than my own house in Wisconsin. Dr. Holmes' mansion on "the water side of Beacon Street" and the palaces of Copley Square left me calm, their glamor had utterly vanished with my youth (I fear Lee's Hotel in Auburndale would have been reduced in grandeur), and when we took the train for New York, I confessed to a feeling of sadness, of definite loss.

Naturally, inevitably the Boston of my early twenties had vanished. My youthful worship of the city, my faith in the literary supremacy of New England had died out. Manifestly increasing in power as a commercial center, roaring with new interests, new powers, new people, the Hub had lost its scholastic distinction, its historic charm. Each year would see it more easily negligible in American art. It hurt me to acknowledge this, it was like losing a noble ancestor, but there was no escape from the conclusion.

"Little that is new is coming out of Boston," I sadly remarked to Zulime. "Her illustrious poets of the Civil War period are not being replaced by others of National appeal. Her writers, her artists, like those of Chicago, Cleveland, and San Francisco, are coming to New York. New England is being drained of talent in order that Manhattan shall be supreme."

While we were away on this trip my friends Grace and Ernest Thompson-Seton had sent out cards for a party "in honor of Mr. and Mrs. Hamlin Garland," but when, a few nights later, a throng of writers, artists and musicians filled the Seton studio, I was confirmed in a growing suspicion that I was only the lesser half of a fortunate combination. A long list of invitations to dinner or to luncheon testified to the fact that while they tolerated me, they liked my wife, and in this judgment I concurred.

One day while calling on a charming friend and fellow-fictionist, Juliet Wilbur Tompkins, we met for the first time Frank Norris, another California novelist, who captivated us both, not merely because of his handsome face and figure, but by reason of his keen and joyous spirit.

He had been employed for some time in the office of Doubleday and Page, and though I had often passed him at his desk, I had never before spoken with him. We struck up an immediate friendship and thereafter often dined together. He told me of his plan to embody modern California in a series of novels, and at my request read some of his manuscript to me.

Zulime, although she greatly admired Norris, still maintained that Edward MacDowell was the handsomest man of her circle, and in this I supported her, for he was then in the noble prime of his glorious manhood, gay of spirit, swift of wit and delightfully humorous of speech. As a dinner companion he was unexcelled and my wife quite lost her heart to him. Between Frank Norris and Edward MacDowell I appeared but a rusty-coat. I sang small. Fortunately for me they were both not only loyal friends but devoted husbands.

I remembered saying to Zulime as we came away: "America need not despair of her art so long as she has two such personalities as Edward MacDowell and Frank Norris."

Edwin Booth's daughter, Mrs. Grossman, who was living at this time in a handsome apartment on Eighteenth Street, was one of those who liked my wife, and an invitation to take tea with her produced in me a singular and sudden reversal to boyish timidity, for to me she had almost the quality of royalty. I thought of her as she had looked to me, fifteen years before, when on the occasion of Edwin Booth's last performance of Macbeth in Boston, she sat in the stage-box with her handsome young husband, and applauded her illustrious father.

"An enormous audience was present," I explained to Zulime, "and most of us were deeply interested in the radiant figure of that happy girl. To me she was a princess, and I observed that as the curtain rose after each act and the great tragedian came forth to bow, his eyes sought his daughter's glowing face. Each time the curtain fell his final glance was upon her. Her small hands seemed the only ones whose sound had value in his ears."

How remote, how royal, how unattainable she had appeared to me that night! Now here she was a kindly, charming hostess, the mother of a family who regarded me as "a distinguished author." To make that radiant girl in the stage box and my lovely hostess coalesce was difficult, but as I studied her profile and noted the line of her expressive lips I was able to relate her to the princely player whose genius I had worshiped from the gallery.

It will be evident to the reader that life in New York pleased me better than life in West Salem or even in Chicago, and I would gladly have stayed on till spring, but Zulime decided to go back to Chicago, and this we did about the first of February.

The last of the many notable entertainments in which my wife shared was an open meeting of the National Institute of Arts and Letters (which I had helped to found), where she met many of the leading writers and artists of the city. Howells, who presided over the program, was especially fine, restrained, tactful yet quietly authoritative, and when I told him that our wedding journey was nearly over he expressed a regret which was highly flattering to us both. At one o'clock on the day following this historic meeting we entered a car headed for the west, acknowledging with a sigh, yet with a comfortable sense of having accomplished our purpose, that it would be profitable to go into retirement and ruminate for a month or two. The glories of New York had been almost too exciting for Zulime, "I am ready to go home," she said.

Home! There was my problem. The only city residence I possessed was my bachelor apartment on Elm Street, and at the moment I had no intention of asking my wife to share its narrow space except as a temporary lodging, and to take her back into that snow-covered little Wisconsin village, back to a shabby farm house filled with ailing elderly folk would amount to crime. From the high splendor of our stay in New York we now fell to earth with a thump. My duties as a son, my cares as the head of a household returned upon me, and my essential homelessness took away all that assurance of literary success which my Eastern friends had helped me attain. Of the elation in which I had moved while in New York I retained but a shred. Once more the hard-working fictionist and the responsible head of a family, I began to worry about the future. My honeymoon was over.

The basic realities of my poverty again cropped out in a letter from my mother who wrote that my aunt was very ill and that she needed me. To Zulime I said, "You stay here with your sister and your friends while I go up to the Homestead and see what I can do for our old people."

This she refused to do. "No," she loyally said, "I am going with you," and although I knew that she was choosing a dreary alternative I was too weak, too selfishly weak, to prevent her self-sacrifice. We left that night at the usual hour and arrived in time to eat another farmer's breakfast with father and mother next morning. Aunt Susan was unable to meet us.

Her sweet spirit was about to leave its frail body, that was evident to me as I looked down at her, but she knew me and whispered, "I'm glad to have you at home." She showed no fear of death, in fact she appeared unconscious of her grave condition. She was a beautiful character and to see her lying there beneath her old-fashioned quilt, so small and helpless, so patient, lonely and sad, made speech difficult for me. She had meant much in my life. The serene dignity with which she and her mother had carried the best New England traditions into the rough front rank of the Border, was still written in the lines of her face. I had never seen her angry or bitter, and I had never heard her utter an unkind word.

Zulime took charge of the work about the house with a cheerfulness which amazed me. My mother with pathetic confidence leaned upon her daughter's strong young shoulders and the music of my stern old father's voice as he said, "Well, daughter, I'm glad you're here," was a revelation to me. He already loved her as if she were his very own, and she responded to his affection in a way which put me still more deeply in her debt. It would have been disheartening, but not at all surprising, had she found the village and my home intolerable, but she did not—she appeared content, sustained we will say, by her sense of duty.

Her situation was difficult. Imprisoned in the snowy silences of the little valley, dependent on her neighbors for entertainment, and confronted with the care of two invalids and a fretful husband, she was put to a rigid test.

Beside our base-burning stove she sat night after night playing cinch or dominoes to amuse my father, while creaking footsteps went by on the frosty board-walks and in a distant room my aunt lay waiting for the soft step of the Grim Intruder. It must have seemed a gray outlook for my bride but she never by word or look displayed uneasiness.

Without putting our conviction into words, we all realized that my aunt's departure was but a matter of a few days. "There is nothing to do," the doctor said. "She will go like a person falling asleep. All you can do is wait—" And so the days passed.

We went to bed each night at ten and quite as regularly rose at half-past six. Dinner came exactly at noon, supper precisely at six. Although my upstairs study was a kind of retreat, we spent less time in it than we had planned to do, for mother was so appealingly wistful to have us near her that neither of us had the heart to deny her. She could not endure to have us both absent. Careful not to interrupt my writing, she considered Zulime's case in different light. "You can read, or sew or knit down here just as well as up there," she said. "It is a comfort for me just to have you sit where I can look at you."

She loved to hear me read aloud, and this I often did in the evening while she sat beside Zulime and watched her fingers fly about her sewing. These were blissful hours for her, and in these after years I take a measure of comfort in remembering the part I had in making them possible.

Slowly but steadily Susan Garland's vital forces died out, and at last there came a morning when her breath faltered on her lips. She had gone away, as she had lived, with quiet dignity. Notwithstanding her almost constant suffering she had always been a calmly cheerful soul and her passing, while it left us serious did not sadden us. Her life came to its end without struggle and her face was peaceful.

She was the last of my father's immediate family, and to him was transmitted in due course of law, the estate with which her husband had left her, a dower, which though small had enabled her to live independently of her relatives and in simple comfort. It was a matter of but a few thousand dollars, but its possession now made the most fundamental change in my father's way of life. The effect of this certain income upon his character was almost magical. He took on a sense of security, a feeling of independence, a freedom from worry such as he had been trying for over sixty years, without success, to attain.

It released him from the tyranny of the skies. All his life he had been menaced by the "weather." Clouds, snows, winds, had been his unrelenting antagonists. Hardly an hour of his past had been free from a fear of disaster. The glare of the sun, the direction of the wind, the assembling of clouds at sunset,—all the minute signs of change, of storm, of destruction had been his incessant minute study. For over fifty years he had been enslaved to the seasons. His sister's blessing liberated him. He agonized no more about the fall of frost, the slash of hail, the threat of tempest. Neither chinch bugs nor drought nor army worms could break his rest. He slept in comfort and rose in confidence. He retained a general interest in crops, of course, but he no longer ate his bread in fear, and just in proportion as he realized his release from these corroding, long-endured cares, did he take on mellowness and humor. He became another man altogether. He ceased to worry and hurry. His tone, his manner became those of a citizen of substance, of genial leisure. He began to speak of travel!

Definitely abandoning all intention of farming, he put his Dakota land on sale and bought several small cottages in West Salem. As a landlord in a modest way, he rejoiced in the fact that his income was almost entirely free from the results of harvest. It irked him (when he thought of it) to admit that all his pioneering had been a failure, that all his early rising, and his ceaseless labor had availed so little, but the respect in which he was now held as householder, and as President of the village, compensated him in such degree that he was able to ignore his ill success as a wheat raiser.

"This legacy proves once again the magic of money," I remarked to Zulime. "Father can now grow old with dignity and confidence. His living is assured."

It remains to say that this inheritance also lifted indirectly a part of my own burden. It took from me something of the financial responsibility concerning the household whose upkeep I had shared for ten years or more. Mother was still my care, but not in the same sense as before, for my father with vast pride volunteered to pay all the household expenses. He even insisted upon paying for an extra maid and gardener. Now that he no longer needed the cash returns from the garden, he began to express a pleasure in it. He was content with making it an esthetic or at most a household enterprise.

CHAPTER TWELVE

We Tour the Oklahoma Prairie

One of the disadvantages of being a fictionist lies in the fact that the history of one's imaginary people halts just in proportion as one's mind is burdened with the sorrowful realities of one's own life. A troubled bank clerk can (I believe) cast up a column of figures, an actor can declaim while his heart is breaking, but a novelist can't—or at any rate I can't—write stories while some friend or relative is in pain and calling for relief. Composition is dependent in my case upon a delicately adjusted mood, and a very small pebble is sufficient to turn the currents of my mind into a dry channel.

My aunt's death was a sad shock to my mother and until she regained something of her cheerful temper, I was unable to take up and continue the action of my novel. I kept up the habit of going to my study, but for a week or more I could not write anything but letters.

By the tenth of March we were all longing with deepest hunger for the coming of spring. According to the old almanac's saying we had a right to expect on the twenty-first a relenting of the rigors of the north, but it did not come. "March the twenty-first is spring and little birds begin to sing" was not true of the Valley this year. For two weeks longer, the icy winds continued to sweep with Arctic severity across the crests of the hills, and clouds of snow almost daily sifted down through the bare branches of the elms. At times the landscape, mockingly beautiful, was white and bleak as January. Drafts filled the lanes and sleigh-bells jingled mockingly.

At last came grateful change. The wind shifted to the South. At mid-day the eaves began to drip, and the hens, lifting their voices in jocund song, scratched and burrowed, careening in the dusty earth which appeared on the sunward side of the barn. Green grass enlivened the banks of the garden, and on the southern slopes of the hills warmly colored patches appeared, and then came bird-song and budding branches!—so dramatic are the changes in our northern country.

No sooner was spring really at hand than Zulime and I, eager to share in the art life which was so congenial to us both, returned to my former lodging in Chicago; and a little later we went so far as to give a party—our first party since our marriage. Fuller, who came early and stayed late, appeared especially amused at our make-shifts. "This isn't Chicago," he exclaimed as he looked around our rooms. "This is a lodging in London!"

It was at this party that I heard the first word of the criticism under which I had expected to suffer. One of our guests, an old and privileged friend, remarked with a sigh, "Well, now that Zuhl has married a writer, I suppose her own artistic career is at an end."

"Not at all!" I retorted, somewhat nettled. "I am an individualist in this as in other things. I do not believe in the subordination of a wife to her husband. Zulime has all the rights I claim for myself—no more, no less. If she fails to go on with her painting or sculpture the fault will not be mine. Our partnership is an equal one."

I meant this. Although dimly aware that mutual concessions must be made, it was my fixed intention to allow my wife the fullest freedom of action. Proud of her skill as an artist, I went so far as to insist on her going back into her brother's studio to resume her modeling. "You are not my house-keeper—you are a member of a firm. I prefer to have you an artist."

Smiling, evasive, she replied, "I haven't at the present moment the slightest 'call' to be an artist. Perhaps I shall—after a while; but at present I'd rather keep house."

"But consider me!" I insisted. "Here am I, a public advocate of the rights of women, already denounced as your 'tyrant husband,' 'a selfish egotistic brute!'—I'll be accused—I am already accused—of cutting short your career as a sculptor. Consider the injustice you are doing me!"

She refused to take my protest or her friends' comment seriously; and so we drifted along in pleasant round of parties till the suns of May, brooding over the land lured us back to the Homestead, in which Zulime could house-keep all day long if she wished to do so, and she did!

Full of plans for refurnishing and redecorating, she was busy as a bumble-bee. As the mistress of a big garden and a real kitchen she invited all her Chicago friends to come and share her good fortune. She was filled with the spirit of ownership and exulted over the four-acre patch as if it were a noble estate in Surrey.

It chanced that Lorado on his way to St. Paul was able to stop off, and Zulime not only cooked a special dinner for him, but proudly showed him all about the garden, talking gaily of the number of jars of berries and glasses of jelly she was planning to put up.

"Well, Zuhl," he said resignedly, "I suppose it's all for the best, but I don't quite see the connection between your years of training in sculpture and the business of canning fruit."

It was a perfect spring day, and the Homestead was at its best. The entire demesne was without a weed, and the blooming berry patches, the sprouting asparagus beds and the budding grape vines all come in for the eminent sculptor's enforced inspection, until at last with a yawn of unconcealed boredom he turned away. "You seem to like your slavery," he remarked to Zulime, a note of comical accusation in his voice.

On the station platform when about to say good-bye to me, he became quite serious. "This marriage appears to be working out," he admitted, musingly. "I confess I was a little in doubt about it at first, but Zuhl seems to be satisfied with her choice and so—well, I've decided to let matters drift. Whether she ever comes back to sculpture or not is unimportant, so long as she is happy."

Knowing that Zulime had always been his intellectual comrade, and realizing how deeply he felt the separation which her growing interest in my affairs had brought about, I gave him my hand in silent renewal of a friendship into which something new and deeply significant had come. "I hope she will never regret it," was all I could say.

Zulime was not deceived as to my income. My property, up to this time, consisted of a small, a very small library, a dozen Navajo rugs, several paintings, a share in four acres of land and my book rights (which were of negligible value so far as furnishing a living was concerned), and my wife perceived very clearly that our margin above necessity was narrow, but this did not disturb her faith in the future, or if it did, she gave no sign of it—her face was nearly always smiling. Nevertheless I had no intention of keeping her in West Salem all summer. I could not afford to wear out her interest in it.

One day, shortly after Lorado's visit, I received a letter from Major Stouch, the Indian Agent with whom I had campaigned at Lamedeer in '97. He wrote: "I have just been detailed to take charge of the Cheyenne Agency at Darlington, Oklahoma. Mrs. Stouch and I are about to start on a survey of my new reservation and I should like to have you and your wife come down and accompany us on our circuit. We shall hold a number of councils with the Indians, and there will be dances and pow-wows. It will all be material for your pen."

This invitation appealed to me with especial force for I had long desired to study the Southern Cheyennes, and a tour with Stouch promised a rich harvest of fictional themes, for me. Furthermore it offered a most romantic experience for Zulime—just the kind of enlightenment I had promised her.

With no time to lose, we packed our trunks and took train for Kansas City enroute for Indian Territory, the scene of many of the most exciting romances of my youth, the stronghold of bank robbers, and the hiding place of military renegades.

On our way to Oklahoma, we visited Professor Taft in Hanover and I find this note recorded: "All day the wind blew, the persistent, mournful crying wind of the plain. The saddest, the most appealing sound in my world. It came with a familiar soft rush, a crowding presence, uttering a sighing roar—a vague sound out of which voices of lonely children and forgotten women broke. To the solitary farmer's wife such a wind brings tears or madness. I am tense with desire to escape. This bare little town on the ridge is appalling to me. Think of living here with the litany of this wind forever in one's ears."

By contrast West Salem, with its green, embracing hills, seemed a garden, a place of sweet content, a summer resort, and yet in this Kansas town Zulime had spent part of her girlhood. In this sun-smit cottage she had left her mother to find a place in the outside world just as I had left my mother in Dakota. From this town she had gone almost directly to Paris! It would be difficult to imagine a more amazing translation—and yet, now that she was back in the midst of it, she gave no sign of the disheartenment she must have felt. She met all her old friends and neighbors with unaffected interest and gayety.

Twenty-four hours later we were in the midst of a wide, sunny prairie, across which, in white-topped prairie schooners, settlers were moving just as they had passed our door in Iowa thirty years before. Plowmen were breaking the sod as my father had done in '71, and their women washing and cooking in the open air, offered familiar phases of the immemorial American drama,—only the stations on the railway broke the spell of the past with a modern word.

Swarms of bearded, slouchy, broad-hatted men filled the train and crowded the platforms of the villages. Cow-boys, Indians in white men's clothing, negroes (black and brown), and tall, blonde Tennessee mountaineers made up this amazing population—a population in which libraries were of small value, a tobacco-chewing, ceaselessly spitting unkempt horde, whose stage of culture was almost precisely that which Dickens and other travelers from the old world had found in the Central West in the forties.

How these scenes affected my young wife I will not undertake to say; but I remember that she kept pretty close to my elbow whenever we mingled with the crowd, and the deeper we got into this raw world the more uneasy she became. "Where shall we spend the night?" she asked.

Had I been alone I would not have worried about a hotel, but with a young wife who knew nothing of roughing it, I became worried. To the conductor I put an anxious question, "Is there a decent hotel in Reno?"

His answer was a bit contemptuous, "Sure," he exclaimed. "What do you think you're doing—exploring?"

This was precisely what I feared we were doing. I said no more about it, although I hadn't much confidence in his notions of a first class hotel. There was nothing for it but to rest upon his assurance and go hopefully forward to the end of the line.

It must have been about ten of a dark warm night as we came to a final halt beside a low station marked "Reno," and at the suggestion of the brakeman I called for "the Palace Hotel Bus," although none of the waiting carriages or drivers seemed even remotely related to a palace. My wife, filled with a high sense of our adventure, took her seat in the muddy and smelly carriage, with touching trust in me.

The Palace Hotel, with its doorway brightly lighted with electricity, proved a pleasant surprise. It looked clean and bright and new, and the proprietor, a cheerful and self-respecting citizen, was equally reassuring. We went to our rooms with restored confidence in Oklahoma.

The next morning, before we had finished our breakfast, a messenger from the Agency came in to say that a carryall was at the door, and soon we were on our way toward the Fort.

The roads were muddy, but the plain was vividly, brilliantly green, and the sky radiantly blue. The wind, filled with delicious spring odors, came out of the west; larks were whistling and wild ducks were in flight. To my wife it was as strange as it was beautiful. It was the prairie at its best—like the Jim River in 1881.

Fort Reno (a cluster of frame barracks), occupied a low hill which overlooked the valley of the Canadian, on whose green meadows piebald cattle were scattered like bits of topaz. Flowers starred the southern slopes, and beside the stream near the willows (in which mocking birds were singing), stood clusters of the conical tents of the Cheyennes, lodges of canvas made in the ancient form. Our way led to the Agency through one of these villages, and as we passed we saw women at their work, and children in their play, all happy and quite indifferent to the white man and his comment.

The Stouchs met us at the door of the big frame cottage which was the agent's house, and while Mrs. Stouch took charge of Zulime the Major led me at once to his office, in order that I might lose no time in getting acquainted with his wards. In ten minutes I found myself deep in another world, a world of captive, aboriginal warriors, sorrowfully concerned with the problem of "walking the white man's trail."

All that day and each day thereafter, files of white-topped wagons forded the river, keeping their westward march quite in the traditional American fashion, to disappear like weary beetles over the long, low ridge past the fort which stood like a guidon to the promised land. Here were all the elements of Western settlement, the Indians, the soldiers, the glorious sweeping wind and the flowering sod, and in addition to all these the resolute white men seeking their fortunes beneath the sunset sky, just as of old, remorselessly carrying their women and children into hardship and solitude. Without effort I was able to imagine myself back in the day of Sam Houston and Satanka.

Our trip around the reservation with the Agent began a few days later with an exultant drive across the prairie to the South Fork of the Canadian River. It was glorious summer here. Mocking birds were singing in each swale, and exquisite flowers starred the sod beneath our wheels. Through a land untouched by the white man's plow, we rode on a trail which carried me back to my childhood, to the Iowa Prairie over which I had ridden with my parents thirty years before. This land, this sky, this mournful, sighing wind laid hold of something very sweet, almost sacred in my brain. By great good fortune I had succeeded in overtaking the vanishing prairie.

The arrival of the Agent at each sub-agency was the signal for an assembly of all the red men round-about and Zulime had the pleasure of seeing several old fashioned Councils carried on quite in the traditional fashion, the chiefs in full native costume, their head dresses presenting suggestions of the war-like past. The attitudes of the men in the circle were at all times serious and dignified, and the gestures of the orators instinct with natural grace.

One of the Cheyenne camps in which we lingered was especially charming. Set amid the nodding flowers and waving grasses of a small meadow in the elbow of a river, its lodges were filled with happy children, and under sun-shades constructed of green branches, chattering women were at work. Paths led from tent to tent, and in the deep shade of ancient walnut trees, on the banks of the stream, old men were smoking in reminiscent dream of other days.

As night fell and sunset clouds flamed overhead, primroses yearned upward from the sward, and the teepees, lighted from within, glowed like jewels, pearl-white cones with hearts of flame. Shouts of boys, laughter of girls, and the murmur of mothers' voices suggested the care-free life of the Algonquin in days before the invading conqueror enforced new conditions and created new desires.

For two weeks we drove amid scenes like these, scenes which were of inspirational value to me and of constant delight to Zulime. My notebook filled itself with hints for poems and outlines for stories. In all my tales of the Cheyennes, I kept in mind Major Powell's significant remark, "The scalp dance no more represents the red man's daily life than the bayonet-charge represents the white man's civilization." Having no patience with the writers who regarded the Indian as a wild beast, I based my interpretation on the experiences of men like Stouch and Seger who, by twenty years' experience, had proved the red man's fine qualities. As leading actors in the great tragedy of Western settlement I resolved to present the Ogallallah and the Ute as I saw them.

At one of these informal councils between the Agent and some of the Cheyenne headmen, I caught a phrase which gave me the title of a story and at the same time pointed the moral of a volume of short stories. White Shield, one of John Seger's friends, in telling of his experiences, sadly remarked, "I find it hard to make a home among the white men."

Instantly my mind grasped the reverse side of the problem. I took for the title of my story these words: White Eagle, the Red Pioneer, and presented the point of view of a nomad who turns his back on the wilderness which he loves, and sets himself the task of leading his band in settlement among the plowmen. In a collection of tales, some of which have not been published even in magazines, I have grouped studies of red individuals with intent to show that a village of Cheyennes has many kinds of people just like any other village. "Hippy, the Dare Devil," "White Weasel, the Dandy," "Rising Wolf, the Ghost Dancer," are some of the titles in this volume. Whether it will get itself printed in my lifetime or not is a problem, for publishers are loath to issue a book of short stories, any kind of short stories. "Stories about Indians are no longer in demand," they say. Nevertheless, some day I hope these stories may get into print as a volume complementary to Main Traveled Roads, and They of the High Trails.

Among the most unforgettable of all our Oklahoma experiences was a dinner which we had with the Jesuit Missionary priest at "Chickashay" on the last day of our stay. It had been raining in torrents for several hours, and as the Mission was four miles out I would have despaired of getting there at all had it not been for the Agency Clerk who was a man of resource and used to Oklahoma "showers." Commandeering for us the Agency "hack," a kind of canvas-covered delivery wagon, he succeeded in reaching the priest's house without shipwreck, although the road was a river.

The priest, a short, jolly Alsatian, met us with shining face quite unlike any other missionary I had ever seen. He was at once a delight and an astonishment to Zulime. His laugh was a bugle note and his hospitality a glow of good will. The dinner was abundant and well served, the wine excellent, and our host's talk of absorbing interest.

We were waited upon by a Sister of severe mien, who, between courses, stood against the wall with folded arms eyeing us with disapproving countenance. It was plain that she was serving under compulsion, but Father Ambrose paying no attention to her frowns, urged us to take a second helping, telling us meanwhile of his first exploration of Oklahoma, a story which filled us with laughter at his "greenness." Chuckling with delight of the fool he was, he could not conceal the heroic part he had played, for the hardships in those days were very real to a young man just out of a monastery. "I was so green the cows would have eaten me," he said.

The whole incident was like a chapter in a story of some other land than ours. The Sisters, the little brown children, the book-walled sitting room, the sturdy little priest recounting his struggles with a strange people and a strange climate,—all these presented a charming picture of the noble side of missionary life. Nothing broke the charm of that dinner except an occasional peal of thunder which made us wonder whether we would be able to navigate the hack back to the hotel or not.

What a waste the plain presented as we started on our return at ten o'clock! The lightning, almost incessant, showed from time to time what appeared to be a vast lake, shorelessly extending on every side of us, a shallow sea through which the horses slopped, waded and all but swam while Carroll, the Clerk, as pilot, did his best to reassure my wife. "I know the high spots," he said, whereat I fervently (though secretly) replied, "I hope you do," and when we swung to anchor in front of our little hotel, I shook his hand in congratulations over his skill—and good luck!

On our return to Chicago I found Lorado in his studio, modeling a more or less conventional female form, and my resentment took words. "If you will come with me, down among the Cheyennes, I will show you men who can be nude without being naked. In White Eagle's camp you can study warriors who have the dignity of Roman Senators and the grace of Athenian athletes."

To illustrate one of my points, I caught up a piece of gray canvas and showed him how the chiefs of various tribes managed their blankets. Something in these motions or in the long gray lines of the robe which I used fired his imagination. For the first time in our acquaintanceship, I succeeded in interesting him in the Indian. He was especially excited by the gesture of covering the mouth to express awe, and a few days later he showed me several small figures which he had sketched, suggestions which afterwards became the splendid monuments of Silmee and Blackhawk. He never lost the effect of the noble gestures which I had reproduced for him. The nude red man was a hackneyed subject, but Brown Bear with his robe, afforded precisely the stimulus of which he stood in need.

This trip to Indian Territory turned out to be a very important event in my life. First of all it enabled me to complete the writing of The Captain of the Gray Horse Troop, and started me on a long series of short stories depicting the life of the red man. It gave me an enormous amount of valuable material and confirmed me in my conviction that the Indian needed an interpreter, but beyond all these literary gains, I went back to Wisconsin filled with a fierce desire to own some of that beautiful prairie over which we had ridden.

This revived hunger for land generated in me a plan for establishing a wide ranch down there, an estate to which we could retire in February and March. "We can meet the spring half-way," I explained to my father. "I want a place where I can keep saddle horses and cattle. You must go with me and see it sometime. It is as lovely as Mitchell County was in 1870."

To this end I wrote to my brother in Mexico. "Leave the rubber business and come to Oklahoma. I am going to buy a ranch there and need you as superintendent."

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Standing Rock and Lake McDonald

It was full summer when we got back to Wisconsin, and The Old Homestead was at its best. The garden was red with ripening fruit, the trees thick with shining leaves, and the thrushes and catbirds were singing in quiet joy. In the fields the growing corn was showing its ordered spears, and the wheat was beginning to wave in the gentle wind. No land could be more hospitable, more abounding or more peaceful than our valley.

With her New Daughter again beside her life seemed very complete and satisfying to my mother, and I was quite at ease until one night, as she and I were sitting alone in the dusk, she confided to me, for the first time, her conviction that she had but a short time to live. Her tone, as well as her words, shocked me, for she had not hitherto been subject to dark moods. She gave no reason for her belief, but that she was suffering from some serious inner malady was evident,—I feared it might concern the action of her heart—and I was greatly disturbed by it.

Of course I made light of her premonition, but thereafter I watched her with minute care, and called on the doctor at the slightest sign of change. We sang to her, we read to her, and Zulime spent long hours reading to her or sitting beside her. She was entirely happy except when, at intervals, her mysterious malady,—something she could not describe,—filled her eyes with terror.

She loved to sit in the kitchen and watch her new daughter presiding over its activities, and submitted, with pathetic pride, to any change which Zulime proposed. "I am perfectly contented," she said to me, "except——"

"Except what, mother?"

"The grandchild. I want to see my grandchild."

One of our regular excursions for several years had been a drive (usually on Sunday) over the ridge to Lewis Valley, where Frank McClintock still lived. Among my earliest memories is a terror of this road, for it led up a long, wooded hill, which seemed to me, as a child, a dangerous mountain pass. Many, many times since then I had made the climb, sometimes in the spring, sometimes in midsummer, but now my plans included my wife. Mother was eager to go. "I can stand the ride if you will drive and be careful going down hill," she said to me—and so, although I was a little in doubt about the effect upon her heart, I hired a team, and early of a clear June morning we started for Mindoro.

It was like riding back into the hopeful, happy past, for both the old people. Father was full of wistful reminiscences of "the early days," but mother, who sat beside Zulime, made no comment, although her face shone with inward joy of the scene, the talk—until we came to the steep descent which scared her. Clinging to her seat with pitiful intensity she saw nothing but dangerous abysses until we reached the level road on the opposite side of the ridge.

It was glorious June, and in this I now rejoice, for it proved to be the last time that we made the crossing of the long hill together. I was glad to have her visit her brother's home once more. Change was coming to him as well as to her. His prodigious muscles and his boyish gayety were fading away together. Though still delightfully jolly and hospitable, his temper was distinctly less buoyant. He still played the fiddle; but like his brother, David, he found less and less joy in it, for his stiffened fingers refused to do his bidding. The strings which once sang clear and sweet, failed of their proper pitch, and these discords irritated and saddened him.

Aunt Lorette, his handsome, rosy-cheeked wife, was beginning to complain smilingly, of being lame and "no account," but she provided a beautiful chicken dinner, gayly "visiting" while she did it, with mother sitting by to watch her at the job as she had done so many times before.

Lorette, like all the rest of us, felt under the necessity of putting her best foot forward in order that "Zuleema" should not be disappointed in any way, and to Zulime she was like a character in a novel; indeed, they all tried to live up to her notion of them. For her, father told his best stories of bears and Indians, for her, Uncle Frank fiddled his liveliest tunes, and for her Aunt Lorette recounted some of the comedies which the valley had from time to time developed, and which (as she explained) "had gone into one of Hamlin's books. Of course he fixed 'em up a little," she added, "you couldn't expect him to be satisfied with a yarn just as I told it, but all the same he got the idea of at least two of his stories from me."

Valiant Aunt Lorette! Her face was always sunny, no matter how deep the shadow in her heart; and her capacity for work was prodigious. She was an almost perfect example of the happy, hard-working farmer's wife, for her superb physical endowment and her serene temperament had survived the strain of thirty years of unremitting toil. Her life had been, thus far, a cheerful pilgrimage. She did not mind the loneliness of the valley. The high hill which lay between her door and the village could not wall her spirit in. She rejoiced in the stream of pure water which flowed from the hillside spring to the tank at her kitchen door, and she took pride in the chickens and cows and pigs which provided her table with abundant food.

"Oh, yes, I like to go to town—once in a while," she replied, in answer to Zulime's question. "But I'd hate to live there. I don't see how people get along on a tucked up fifty-foot lot where they have to buy every blessed thing they eat."

How good that dinner was! Hot biscuit, chicken, shortcake, coffee and the most delicious butter and cream. At the moment it did seem a most satisfactory way to live. We forgot that the dishes had to be washed three times each day, and that the mud and rain and wind and snow often shut the homestead in for weeks at a stretch. Seeing the valley at its loveliest, under the glamor of a summer afternoon, we found it perfect.

After dinner we men-folks (leaving the women, in the "good old way," to clear away the dinner dishes) went out on the grass under the trees, and as I talked of my mountaineering Uncle Frank said, with a wistful note in his voice, "I've always wanted to go out into that country with you. Chasing a deer through a Wisconsin swamp don't satisfy me—I'd like to get into the grizzly bear country—but now I'm too old."

Thereupon father stated his desires. "There are just two trips I want to make—I'd like to go by a steamboat from Duluth to Detroit, and I want to see Yellowstone Park."

"Well, why don't you do it?" demanded my Uncle. "You can afford it now."

Father's face became thoughtful. "I believe I will. Lottridge and Shane are planning that boat trip. I could go with them."

"Sail ahead," said I, "and if you get back in time I'll take you through Yellowstone Park. Zulime and I are going to Montana in July."

Neither of them had the slightest desire to see London or Paris or Rome, but they both longed for a fuller knowledge of the West. They were still pioneers, still explorers over whose imagination the trackless waste exercised a deathless dominion. To my uncle I said, "If I could afford it, I would take you with me on one of my trailing expeditions and show you some real wilderness."

"I wish you would," he answered quickly. "I'd tend horses, cook, or anything else in order to go along."

Of course this wistful longing was only a mood on his part, for he was naturally of a cheerful disposition, but music and the wilderness always stirred him to his deeps. Ten minutes later he was joking with Zulime, giving a fine exhibition of the contented husbandman.

As the time came to leave, my mother glanced about her with an emotion which she brokenly expressed when she said, "I don't suppose I shall ever get over here again. You must come and see me, after this."

"Oh, you'll be comin' over oftener than ever, now that you've got a daughter to lean on," retorted Lorette with easy grace.

On our way home, at the crest of the hill, I drew rein in order that we might all look away over the familiar valley, stretching mistily toward the sun, and I, too, had the feeling—which I was careful not to express even by a look or tone—that mother and I would never again ride this road or look out upon this lovely scene together, and something in her eyes and the melancholy sweetness of her lips told me that she was bidding the landscape a long farewell.

We rode the remaining portion of our way in somber mood, although we all agreed that it was a colorful finish of a perfect day—a day to be recalled in after years with a tender heart-ache.

[It is all changed now. Aunt Lorette has gone to her reward. Uncle Frank, old and lonely, is living on the village side of the ridge and strangers are in the old house!]

That night, Zulime and I talked over the agreement I had made with father, and we planned a way to carry it out. Almost as excited about the Yellowstone as he, she was quite ready to camp through as I suggested. "We will hire a team at Livingston, and with our own outfit, will be independent of stages and hotels—but first I must show you some Indians. We will visit Standing Rock and see the Sioux in their 'Big Sunday.' Father can meet us at Bismark after we come out."

With the confidence of a child she accepted my arrangement and on the first day of July we were in the stage ambling across the hot, dry prairie which lay between Bismark and Fort Yates. Empty, arid and illimitable the rolling treeless landscape oppressed us both, and yet there was a stern majesty in its sweep, and the racing purple shadows of the dazzling clouds lent it color and movement. To me it was all familiar, but when, after an all-day ride, we came down into the valley of the Muddy Missouri, the sheen of its oily red current was quite as grateful to me as to my weary wife.

Our only means of reaching the Agency was a small rowboat which seemed a frail ferry even to me. How it appeared to Zulime, I dared not ask—but she unhesitatingly stepped in and took her seat beside me. I think she accepted it as a part of the strange and hardy world in which her husband was at home.

We were both silent on that crossing, for our slender craft struggled anxiously with the boiling, silent, turbid current, and when we landed, the tense look on Zulime's face gave place to a smile.—Half an hour later we were sitting at supper in a fly-specked boarding house, surrounded by squaw-men and half-breed Sioux, who were enjoying the luxury of a white man's table as a part of their Fourth of July celebration. My artist wife was being educated swiftly!

The tribe was again encamped in a wide circle just west of the Fort, precisely as when my brother and I had visited it three years before, while the store and the Agency swarmed with native men and women, many in mixed costume of cloth and skin. Zulime's artistic joy in them filled me with complacent satisfaction. I had the air of a showman rejoicing in his exhibition hall. With keen interest we watched the young warriors as they came whirling in on their swift ponies, each in his gayest garments, the tail of his horse decorated with rosettes and ribbons. Possessing the swiftness and the grace of Centaurs, coming and going like sudden whirlwinds, they were superb embodiments of a race which was passing. Some of the older men remembered me, and greeted me as one friendly to their cause—but for the most part the younger folk eyed us with indifference.

That night a singular and savage change in the weather took place. The wind shifted to the southeast and took on the heat of a furnace. By ten o'clock next morning dirt was blowing in clouds and to walk the street was an ordeal. All day Zulime remained in her room virtually a prisoner. Night fell with the blast still roaring, and the dust rising from the river banks like smoke, presented a strange and sinister picture of wrath. It was as though the water, itself, had taken fire from the lightning which plunged in branching streams across the sky. Thunder muttered incessantly all through that singular and solemn night, a night which somehow foreshadowed the doom which was about to overtake the Sioux.

The following day, however, was clear and cool, and we spent most of it in walking about the camp, visiting the teepees of which there were several hundreds set in a huge ellipse, all furnished in primitive fashion—some of them very neatly. Over four thousand Sioux were said to be in this circle, and their coming and going, their camp fires and feasting groups composed a scene well worth the long journey we had endured. Strange as this life seemed to my wife it was quite familiar to me. To me these people were not savages, they were folks—and in their festivity I perceived something of the spirit of a county fair in Wisconsin.

Our guide about the camp, the half-breed son of a St. Louis trader, was a big, fine-featured, intelligent man of about my own age, whose pleasant lips, and deep brown eyes attracted me. He knew everybody, both white and red, and as soon as he understood my wish to write fairly of his people, he gave himself unreservedly to our service. Taking us from lodge to lodge, he introduced us to the men whose characters were of the most value in my study and told them of my wish to report them with sympathy and truth.

One of the games that day was a rough, outdoor drama, in which mimic war parties sallied forth, scouts were captured and captives rescued in stirring pantomime.

As I stood watching the play I observed that one man (no longer young) was serving as "the enemy," alternately captured or slain. His role was not only arduous—it was dangerous—dangerous and thankless, and as I saw him cheerfully volunteering to be "killed" I handed Primeau a dollar and said: "Give this to that old fellow, and tell him he should have many dollars for his hard, rough work."

Primeau gave him the coin, but before he had time to know who gave it, he was called back into the field.

At the Agency store I met a French-Canadian named Carignan who was a most valuable witness, for he had been among the red men for many years, first as a school teacher and later as trader. From him I secured much intimate history of the Sioux. He had known the Sitting Bull well, and gave me a very kindly account of him. "I taught the school in Rock Creek near the Sitting Bull's camp, and he was often at my table," he explained. "I saw no harm in him. I liked him and respected him. He was an Indian but he was a thinker."

Vaguely holding in my brain a tale in which the Sitting Bull should be protagonist, I talked with many who had known him, and a few days later I accepted Primeau's invitation to visit the valley in which the chief had lived, and which was the scene of the Ghost Dance, and the place of the chief's death.

I suggested to Zulime that she would be more comfortable at the Agency but she replied, "I'd rather go with you. I don't like being left here alone."

"You'll find the ride tiresome and the lodging rough, I fear."

"I don't care," she retorted firmly, "I'm going with you."

Primeau was a very intelligent man and a good talker, and as we rode along he gave us in detail the history of the rise of the Ghost Dance, so far as the Sioux were concerned. "There was nothing war-like about it," he insisted. "It was a religious appeal. It was a prayer to the Great Spirit to take pity on the red man and bring back the world of the buffalo. They carried no weapons, in fact they carried nothing which the white man had brought to them. They even took the metal fringes off their shirts. They believed that if they gave up all signs of the whites the Great Spirit would turn his face upon them again."

"Did Sitting Bull take part in this?" I asked.

"He encouraged the meeting at his camp and gave his cattle to feed the people, but he was never able to dream like the rest. He never really believed in it. He wanted to but he couldn't. He was too deep a thinker. He often talked with me about it."

At a point about twenty miles from The Fort, Primeau left us to visit a ranchman with whom he had some business and left us to drive on with a guide to his cattle-ranch where we were to stay all night.

The ranch house turned out to be a rude low shack, and here Zulime had her first touch of genuine cowboy life. The foreman had not been expecting ladies for supper and the food he had prepared was of the usual camp sort. He explained that he and his men had finished their meal, and then, leading the way to the kitchen, showed us the food and said heartily, "Help yourself."

On the back of the stove was a pot half filled with a mixture of boiled rice and prunes. In the oven was some soggy bread, and on the hearth some cold bacon. A can half filled with pale brown coffee added the finishing touch to a layout perfectly familiar to me. I thanked the cook and proceeded to dish out some of the rice whose grayish color aroused Zulime's distrust. She refused to even taste it. "It looks as if it were filled with dirt—or ashes."

"That's its natural complexion," I explained. "This is the unpolished kind of rice. It is much more nutritious than the other kind."

She could not eat any of the bread, and when she tried the coffee she was utterly discouraged. Nevertheless her kindliness of heart led her to conceal her disgust. She emptied her rice into the stove and threw her cup of coffee from the window in order that the cook might think that she had eaten her share of the supper.

The foreman who came in a few minutes later to see that we were getting fed politely inquired, "Is there anything else I can get you, miss?"

She really needed something to eat and yet she was puzzled to know what to ask for. At last, in the belief that she was asking for the simplest possible thing, she smiled sweetly and said, "I should like a glass of milk."

The foreman permitted no expression of surprise or displeasure to cross his face, he merely turned to a tall young man in the doorway and quietly remarked, "Mell, the lady would like some milk."

A glint of amusement was in the eyes of Mell, but he made no reply, just quietly "sifted out," and a few moments later, while the foreman was in the midst of a story, a most appalling tumult broke upon our ears. Calves bawled, bulls bellowed, galloping hooves thundered, men shouted and laughed—in a most amazing uproar.

Rushing to the door in search of the cause of this clamor, I found it to be related to my wife's innocent request.

Tied near the cabin was a leaping, blatting, badly frightened calf while inside the corral, a cow evidently its dam, was charging up and down the fence, her eyes literally blazing with fury, pursued by Mell on a swift pony, a rope swinging in his hand. On the top rails of the enclosure a row of delighted loafers laughed and cheered and shouted good advice to the roper.

"What is he doing?" asked my amazed wife, as Mell brought the cow to earth in a cloud of dust.

"Milking the cow," replied the boss with calmly hospitable inflection. "If you'll be patient jest a few minutes——"

The insane animal, strong as a lioness, in some way freed herself from the rope and charged her enemy—Mell's pony fled. "O, don't let him hurt her," pleaded Zulime. "I don't want any milk. I didn't know you had to do that."

"It's the only way to milk a range cow," I explained.

"Don't worry, Miss," the foreman added reassuringly. "It's all in the day's work for Mell."

Again the cow went to earth and Zulime, horrified at the sight, begged them to restore the calf to its dam. At last this was done, and a grateful peace settled over the scene.

The cowboys were highly delighted and I was amused, but Zulime was too shocked to see any humor in Mell's defeat. "Do they really milk their cows in that way?" she asked me.

"Yes, when they milk them at all," I replied, inwardly filled with laughter. "As a matter of fact they get all their cream out of cans. Milking that cow was a new departure for Mell, I think he was a little disappointed at not being allowed to go through with it."

"I'm glad he didn't. I'll never mention milk again—in this country."

We slept in the bed of our wagon-box that night while the crew rode away to fight a prairie fire. We heard them come quietly in toward dawn, and when we awoke and looked out of our cover we saw them lying all about us on the ground each rolled up in his tarpaulin like a boulder. Altogether it was a stirring glimpse of ranch life for my city-bred wife.

Primeau's home ranch and store which we reached about eleven the next forenoon was an almost equally sorry place for a delicate woman, a sad spot in which to spend even a single night. Flies swarmed in the kitchen like bees, and the air of our bedroom was hot and stagnant, and mosquitoes made sleep impossible. Zulime became ill, and I bitterly regretted my action in bringing her into this God forsaken land. "We shall return at once to the fort," I promised her.

It was an iron soil. The valley was a furnace, the sky a brazen shield. No green thing was in sight, and the curling leaves of the dying corn brought back to me those desolate days in Dakota when my mother tried so hard to maintain a garden. Deeply pitying the captive red hunters, who were expected to become farmers under these desolate conditions, I was able to understand how they had turned to the Great Spirit in a last despairing plea for pity and relief. "Think of this place in winter," I said to Zulime.

One of the men whom Primeau especially wished me to meet was Slohan, the annalist of his tribe, one of the "Silent Eaters," a kind of bodyguard to Sitting Bull. "He lives only a few miles up the valley," Primeau explained, and so to find him we set off in a light wagon next morning drawn by a couple of fleet ponies.

As we rode, Primeau told me more of "The Silent Eaters." "They were a small band of young warriors organized for defense and council, and were closely associated with Sitting Bull all his life. Slohan, the man we are to see to-day, is one of those who stood nearest the chief. No man living knows more about him. He can tell you just what you want to know."

An hour later as we were riding along close to the bank of the creek, Primeau stopped his team. "There he is now!" he exclaimed.

Looking where he pointed I discovered on a mound above the stream an old man sitting motionless as a statue, with bowed head, and lax hands. There was something strange, almost tragic in his attitude, and this impression deepened as we approached him.

He was wrinkled with age and clad in ragged white man's clothing, but his profile was fine, fine as that of a Roman Senator, and the lines of his face were infinitely sad. In one fallen hand lay a coiled rope.

He did not look up as we drew near, did not appear to hear Primeau's respectful greeting. Dejected, motionless, he endured the hot sunshine like an Oriental Yoghi or a man deadened by some narcotic drug.

Gently, almost timidly, Primeau addressed him. "Slohan, this white man has come a long way to see you. He wishes to talk with you about the Sitting Bull and of the days of the buffalo."

At last the old man turned and lifted his bloodshot eyes and uttered in a husky whisper, a few words which changed Primeau's whole expression. He drew back. "Come away!" he said to me.

While we were walking toward our team he explained. "Slohan is mourning the death of his little grandson. Long time he has been there wailing. His voice is gone. He can cry no more. His heart is empty. He will not talk with us."

What a revelation of the soul of a red warrior! Hopeless, tragic, inconsolable, he was the type of all paternity throughout the world.

Primeau went on, "I told him of you and I think his mind is turned to other things. I asked him to come to see you this afternoon. Perhaps he will. Perhaps I have lifted his mind from his sorrow."

All the way down the valley I pondered on the picture that grandsire had made there in the midst of that desolate valley.

Primeau told me of his grandson. "He was a handsome little fellow. I can't blame the old man for weeping over his loss."

Slohan was a redoubtable warrior. He had been the leader of Sitting Bull's bodyguard, he was accounted a savage, and yet for forty-eight hours he had been sitting ceaselessly mourning for a child, crying till his voice was only a husky whisper. Nothing that I had ever seen typed the bitterness of barbaric grief more powerfully than this bent and voiceless old man.

Late in the afternoon the mourner came in view, riding on a pony, without a saddle, his face still very sad, but not entirely despairing. His mind, in working backward to the splendid world of the past, the world in which his chief had played such heroic and stirring parts, his heart had been comforted—or at any rate lightened.

Although clothed in the customary rags of the mourner, his hair was neatly brushed and braided, and he met my wife with gentle grace. There was something tragic in his dim glance, something admirable in his low words of greeting.

We gave him food and drink, and then while we all sat on the earth in the scant shade thrown by Primeau's building, he began to talk, slowly, hesitantly of the part his chief had taken in the wars against the white man. He had the dignity and the eloquence of a fine New England judge. A notable sweetness and a lofty poetry were blended in his expression; and as he used the sign language in emphasizing his words (gestures finely expressive and nobly rhythmical) he became, to my perception, the native bard reciting the story of his clan. I was able to follow the broad lines of his discourse and when at the close of the afternoon he rose to go, I said to him, "I shall tell of the Sitting Bull as you have spoken," and we parted in the glow of mutual esteem.

Zulime was feeling much better, and the air being cooler, I asked permission to stay another day, in order that I might meet Looking Stag, another of the warriors who had known the Sitting Bull.

Looking Stag's home was a few miles down the valley, and we found him in his commodious lodge, entertaining a couple of headmen from Cheyenne River. He was seated on a low bed opposite the door, and his guests were placed on either hand of him. He glanced up at us, spoke a curt word to Primeau and went on with his story. His cold greeting, and the evident preoccupation of his manner made me feel like an intruder, which I was, and this feeling was deepened when I perceived that my guide was distinctly ill at ease. After all, he was only a half-breed trader, while these men were red chieftains.

The Looking Stag was not contemptuous of me—he was merely indifferent. Busied with honored guests he regarded the coming of a strange white man to his lodge as something of a nuisance. He went on cutting tobacco, and afterward ground it between his palms whilst his visitors talked on quite oblivious to me.

Our host looked familiar, but as he was painted and wore a bonnet of eagle feathers I could not remember where I had seen him.

At last, in a pause of the talk, Primeau said something to him which caused him to break into a smile and thrust his open hand toward me. "How! How! my friend," he called heartily.

Then I recognized him. He was the man who had so unweariedly taken the part of "The Enemy" in the games at Standing Rock. Primeau had told him that I was the man who had given him the money, and he now accepted me as a friend.

He then told his visitors the story of my gift and message. They also laughed and shook hands with me. Thereafter we were all on terms of high respect and mutual confidence. I put my questions freely and they replied with an air of candor.

As they approached the Custer fight, however, they paused, pondered, checked up one another's statements, and at last produced what I believed to be the truth regarding the share in that battle—and the truth is incredible. They recreated the whole scene for me as Two Moons had done. They corroborated all that I had obtained from the northern Cheyennes.

I forgot the plow and the reaper while sitting there in conference with those men for they were thinkers as well as warriors. Within the walls of that lodge they were not despised outcasts, they were leaders, councillors, men of weight. They had reëntered a world which caused their faces to shine just as my father's face shone when he told of Grant at Vicksburg or recounted the days of his youth on The Old Wisconse. For a little while I inhabited their world, and when I left them I carried with me a deepened sense of their essential manliness.

Alas! Zulime was less enthusiastic. The flies, the heat, the dust, the bad food—so commonplace to me—were horrifying to her, and so for her sake I cut short my historical studies and hurried her back to the Fort, back to the wholesome fare of the officers' mess. With no consuming literary interest to sustain her she found even the Agency a weariness; and as the date for meeting my father was near, we took the stage back to Bismark, she with a sense of relief, I with a feeling of regret that I had not been able to push my investigations deeper. There was a big theme here, but I had small faith in my ability to handle it. It required an epic poet, rather than a realistic novelist.

Father, excited as a boy, came along on the train which reached Bismark the morning following our arrival and we at once took him into the Pullman car and forced him to share some of the comforts of travel. We ate breakfast in the dining car at what seemed to him a wildly extravagant price but I insisted on his being a guest. "Just sit here and look out of the window and think of the Erie Canal Boats in which you came west, or remember your ox-team in fifty-eight."

"All right," he said with a quizzical smile. "If you can stand the expense, I can." A little later he said, "What a change my life has witnessed. I helped to grade the first railway in the State of Maine, and now here I am whirling along through 'the Great American Desert' eating a steak and drinking my coffee in a flying hotel. I wish your mother could be here with us."

This was the only shadow at our feast and we put it aside, taking comfort in the thought that she was happy in a tree-embowered home, surrounded by the abundance of a prolific garden. "Her days of travel are over," I said, and turned to the task of making my father's outing a shining success.

For ten days we camped with him in Yellowstone Park, moving from place to place, in our own wagon and tent, and when we came out and he started on his homeward way, he expressed complete satisfaction. "It has been up to the bills," he conceded, and I could see that he was eager to get back to Johnson's drug store, where he could discuss with Stevens and McEldowney the action of geysers and the habits of grizzly bears, on terms of equal information.

If he was satisfied, I was not. Insisting on showing Zulime the Cascade Range and the Pacific Ocean, I kept on to the West. Together we viewed Tacoma and Seattle, and from the boat on Puget Sound discovered the Olympic Mountains springing superbly from the sea. For us Rainier disclosed his dome above the clouds, and Lake McDonald offered its most gorgeous sunset.

One of the points which I had found of most interest in '97 was the Blackfoot Agency, and as we sat in our tent on the Northern shore of Lake McDonald I gained Zulime's consent to go in there for a few days. "The train lands us there late at night," I said, "and there is no hotel at the station or the Agency, but we can set up our tent in a few moments and be comfortable till morning."

To this she agreed—or perhaps I should say to this she submitted, and at eleven o'clock the following night we found ourselves unloaded on the platform of a lonely little station on the plain. It was a starlit night, fortunately, and dragging our tent and bedding out on the crisp, dry sod, we set to work. In ten minutes we had a house and bed in which we slept comfortably till a freight train thundered by along about dawn. Truly my artist wife was being schooled in the tactics of the trail!

At the Agency we hired a wagon and drove to the St. Mary's Lake. With a Piegan (old Four Horns) for a guide we camped on the lower Lake, and Zulime caught two enormous pike. At Upper St. Mary's, we set our tent just below the dike. A "Chalet" on this spot now welcomes the tourist, but in those days St. Mary's was a lone, and stormful mountain water with not even a forest ranger's cabin to offer shelter. We lived in our own tent and cooked our own food—a glorious experience to me, but to Zulime (as I learned afterward) the trip was not an unmixed delight.