4

Iowa did not look much like a prairie country from where I stood. The Iowa shore towered above the town of Dubuque, clothed with woods to the top, and looking more like York State than anything I had seen since I had taken the schooner at Buffalo to come up the Lakes. I lay that night, unable to sleep. For one thing, I needed to be wakeful, lest some of the motley crowd of movers might take a fancy to my cattle. I was learning by experience how to take care of myself and mine; besides, I wanted to be awake early so as to take passage by ferry-boat "before soon" as the Hoosiers say, in the morning.

That April morning was still only a gray dawn when I drove down to the ferry, without stopping for my breakfast. A few others of those who looked forward to a rush for the boat had got there ahead of me, and we waited in line. I saw that I should have to go on the second trip rather than the first, but movers can not be impatient, and the driving of cattle cures a person of being in a hurry; so I was in no great taking because of this little delay. As I sat there in my wagon, a black-bearded, scholarly-looking man stepped up and spoke to me.

"Going across?" he asked.

"As soon as the boat will take me," I said.

"Heavy loaded?" he asked. "Have you room for a passenger?"

"I guess I can accommodate you," I answered. "Climb in."

"It isn't for myself I'm asking," he said. "There's a lady here that wants to ride in a covered wagon, and sit back where she can't see the water. It makes her dizzy--and scares her awfully; can you take her?"

"If she can ride back there on the bed," said I.

He peeped in, and said that this was the very place for her. She could lie down and cover up her head and never know she was crossing the river at all. In a minute, and while it was still twilight, just as the ferry-boat came to the landing, he returned with the lady. She was dressed in some brown fabric, and wore a thick veil over her face; but as she climbed in I saw that she had yellow hair and bright eyes and lips; and that she was trembling so that her hands shook as she took hold of the wagon-bow, and her voice quivered as she thanked me, in low tones. The man with the black beard pressed her hand as he left her. He offered me a dollar for her passage; but I called his attention to the fact that it would cost only two shillings more for me to cross with her than if I went alone, and refused to take more.

"There are a good many rough fellows," said he, "at these ferries, that make it unpleasant for a lady, sometimes--"

"Not when she's with me," I said.

He looked at me sharply, as if surprised that I was not so green as I looked--though I was pretty verdant. Anyhow, he said, if I should be asked if any one was with me, it would save her from being scared if I would say that I was alone--she was the most timid woman in the world.

"I'll have to tell the ferryman," I said.

"Will you?" he asked. "Why?"

"I'd be cheating him if I didn't," I answered.

"All right," he said, as if provoked at me, "but don't tell any one else."

"I ain't very good at lying," I replied.

He said for me to do the best I could for the lady, and hurried off. In the meantime, the lady had crept back on my straw-bed, and pulled the quilts completely over her. She piled pillows on one side of her, and stirred the straw up on the other, so that when she lay down the bed was as smooth as if nobody was in it. It looked as it might if a heedless boy had crawled out of it after a night's sleep, and carelessly thrown the coverlet back over it. I could hardly believe I had a passenger. When I was asked for the ferriage, I paid for two, and the ferryman asked where the other was.

"Back in the bed," I said.

He looked back, and said, "Well, I owe you something for your honesty. I never'd have seen him. Sick?"

"Not very," said I. "Don't like the water."

"Some are that way," he returned, and went on collecting fares.

As we drove up from the landing, through the rutted streets of the old mining and Indian-trading town, the black-bearded man came to me as we stopped, held back by a jam of covered wagons--a wonderful sight, even to me--and as if talking to me, said to the woman, "You'd better ride on through town;" and then to me, "Are you going on through?"

"I've got to buy some supplies," said I; "but I've nothing to stop me but that."

"Tell me what you want," he said hurriedly, and looking about as if expecting some danger, "and I'll buy it for you and bring it on. Which way are you going?"

"West into Iowa," I answered.

"Go on," said he, "and I'll make it right with you. Camp somewhere west of town. I'll come along to-night or to-morrow. I'll make it right with you."

"I don't see through this," I said, with my usual indecision as to doing something I did not understand. "I thought I'd look around Dubuque a little."

"For God's sake," said the woman from the bed, "take me on--take me on!"

Her tones were so pleading, she seemed in such an agony of terror, that I suddenly made up my mind in her favor. Surely there would be no harm in carrying her on as she wished.

"All right," I said to her, but looking at him, "I'll take you on! You can count on me." And then to him, "I'll drive on until I find a good camping-place late this afternoon. You'll have to find us the best way you can."

He thanked me, and I gave him a list of the things I wanted. Then he went on up the street ahead of us, walking calmly, and looking about him as any stranger might have done. We stood for some time, waiting for the jam of teams to clear, and I gee-upped and whoa-hawed on along the street, until we came to a building on which was a big sign, "Post-Office." There was a queue of people waiting for their mail, extending out at the door, and far down the sidewalk. In this string of emigrants stood our friend, the black-bearded man. Just as we passed, a rather thin, stooped man, walking along on the other side of the street, rushed across, right in front of my lead team, and drawing a pistol, aimed at the black-bearded man, who in turn stepped out of line and drew his own weapon.

"I call upon you all to witness," said the black-bearded man, "that I act in self-defense."

A bystander seized the thin man's pistol hand, and yelled at him not to shoot or he might kill some one--of course he meant some one he did not aim at, but it sounded a little funny, and I laughed. Several joined in the laugh, and there was a good deal of confusion. At last I heard the black-bearded man say, "I'm here alone. He's accused his wife of being too thick with a dozen men. He's insanely jealous, gentlemen. I suppose his wife may have left him, but I'm here alone. I just crossed the river alone, and I'm going west. If he's got a warrant, he's welcome to have it served if he finds his wife with me. Come on, gentlemen--but take the fool's pistol away from him."

As I drove on I saw that the woman had thrown off the quilt, and was peeping out at the opening in the cover at the back, watching the black-bearded and the thin man moving off in a group of fellows, one of whom held the black-bearded man by the arm a good deal as a deputy sheriff might have done.

The roads leading west out of Dubuque were horrible, then, being steep stony trails coming down the hollows and washed like watercourses at every rain. Teams were stalled, sometimes three and four span of animals were used to get one load to the top, and we were a good deal delayed. I was so busy trying to keep from upsetting when I drove around stalled outfits and abandoned wagons, and so occupied in finding places where I might stop and breathe my team, that I paid little attention to my queer-acting passenger; but once when we were standing I noticed that she was covered up again, and seemed to be crying. As we topped the bluffs, and drew out into the open, she sat up and began to rearrange her hair. After a few miles, we reached a point from which I could see the Iowa prairie sweeping away as far as the eye could see. I drew out by the roadside to look at it, as a man appraises one with whom he must live--as a friend or an enemy.

I shall never forget the sight. It was like a great green sea. The old growth had been burned the fall before, and the spring grass scarcely concealed the brown sod on the uplands; but all the swales were coated thick with an emerald growth full-bite high, and in the deeper, wetter hollows grew cowslips, already showing their glossy, golden flowers. The hillsides were thick with the woolly possblummies[5] in their furry spring coats protecting them against the frost and chill, showing purple-violet on the outside of a cup filled with golden stamens, the first fruits of the prairie flowers; on the warmer southern slopes a few of the splendid bird's-foot violets of the prairie were showing the azure color which would soon make some of the hillsides as blue as the sky; and standing higher than the peering grass rose the rough-leafed stalks of green which would soon show us the yellow puccoons and sweet-williams and scarlet lilies and shooting stars, and later the yellow rosin-weeds, Indian dye-flower and goldenrod. The keen northwest wind swept before it a flock of white clouds; and under the clouds went their shadows, walking over the lovely hills like dark ships over an emerald sea.

The wild-fowl were clamoring north for the summer's campaign of nesting. Everywhere the sky was harrowed by the wedged wild geese, their voices as sweet as organ tones; and ducks quacked, whistled and whirred overhead, a true rain of birds beating up against the wind. Over every slew, on all sides, thousands of ducks of many kinds, and several sorts of geese hovered, settled, or burst up in eruptions of birds, their back-feathers shining like bronze as they turned so as to reflect the sunlight to my eyes; while so far up that they looked like specks, away above the wind it seemed, so quietly did they circle and sail, floated huge flocks of cranes--the sand-hill cranes in their slaty-gray, and the whooping cranes, white as snow with black heads and feet, each bird with a ten-foot spread of wing, piping their wild cries which fell down to me as if from another world.

It was sublime! Bird, flower, grass, cloud, wind, and the immense expanse of sunny prairie, swelling up into undulations like a woman's breasts turgid with milk for a hungry race. I forgot myself and my position in the world, my loneliness, my strange passenger, the problems of my life; my heart swelled, and my throat filled. I sat looking at it, with the tears trickling from my eyes, the uplift of my soul more than I could bear. It was not the thought of my mother that brought the tears to my eyes, but my happiness in finding the newest, strangest, most delightful, sternest, most wonderful thing in the world--the Iowa prairie--that made me think of my mother. If I only could have found her alive! If I only could have had her with me! And as I thought of this I realized that the woman of the ferry had climbed over the back of the spring-seat and was sitting beside me.

"I don't wonder," said she, "that you cry. Gosh! It scares me to death!"