And I want to be able to pay off five hundred dollars of that mortgage this year."So,after that,they sat in the kitchen;and the fire was laid in the front room,against the coming of company.But no one came,and it remained unlighted.
Then the season began to show signs of opening,--bleak signs,hardly recognizable to Annie;and after that Jim was not much in the house.The weeks wore on,and spring came at last,dancing over the hills.
The ground-birds began building,and at four each morning awoke Annie with their sylvan opera.The creek that ran just at the north of the house worked itself into a fury and blustered along with much noise toward the great Platte which,miles away,wallowed in its vast sandy bed.The hills flushed from brown to yellow,and from mottled green to intensest emerald,and in the superb air all the winds of heaven seemed to meet and frolic with laughter and song.
Sometimes the mornings were so beautiful that,the men being afield and Annie all alone,she gave herself up to an ecstasy and kneeled by the little wooden bench outside the door,to say,"Father,I thank Thee,"and then went about her work with all the poem of nature rhyming itself over and over in her heart.
It was on such a day as this that Mrs.
Dundy kept her promise and came over to see if the young housekeeper needed any of the advice she had promised her.She had walked,because none of the horses could be spared.It had got so warm now that the fire in the kitchen heated the whole house sufficiently,and Annie had the rooms clean to exquisiteness.Mrs.Dundy looked about with envious eyes.
"How lovely!"she said.
"Do you think so?"cried Annie,in surprise."I like it,of course,because it is home,but I don't see how you could call anything here lovely.""Oh,you don't understand,"her visitor went on."It's lovely because it looks so happy.Some of us have --well,kind o'lost our grip."
"It's easy to do that if you don't feel well,"Annie remarked sympathetically."Ihaven't felt as well as usual myself,lately.
And I do get lonesome and wonder what good it does to fix up every day when there is no one to see.But that is all nonsense,and I put it out of my head."She smoothed out the clean lawn apron with delicate touch.Mrs.Dundy followed the movement with her eyes.
"Oh,my dear,"she cried,"you don't know nothin'about it yet!But you will know!You will!"and those restless,hot eyes of hers seemed to grow more restless and more hot as they looked with infinite pity at the young woman before her.
Annie thought of these words often as the summer came on,and the heat grew.Jim was seldom to be seen now.He was up at four each morning,and the last chore was not completed till nine at night.Then he threw himself in bed and lay there log-like till dawn.He was too weary to talk much,and Annie,with her heart aching for his fatigue,forbore to speak to him.She cooked the most strengthening things she could,and tried always to look fresh and pleasant when he came in.But she often thought her pains were in vain,for he hardly rested his sunburned eyes on her.His skin got so brown that his face was strangely changed,especially as he no longer had time to shave,and had let a rough beard straggle over his cheeks and chin.On Sundays Annie would have liked to go to church,but the horses were too tired to be taken out,and she did not feel well enough to walk far;besides,Jim got no particular good out of walking over the hills unless he had a plough in his hand.
Harvest came at length,and the crop was good.There were any way from three to twenty men at the house then,and Annie cooked for all of them.Jim had tried to get some one to help her,but he had not succeeded.Annie strove to be brave,re-membering that farm-women all over the country were working in similar fashion.
But in spite of all she could do,the days got to seem like nightmares,and sleep be-tween was but a brief pause in which she was always dreaming of water,and thinking that she was stooping to put fevered lips to a running brook.Some of these men were very disgusting to Annie.Their manners were as bad as they could well be,and a coarse word came naturally to their lips.
"To be master of the soil,that is one thing,"said she to herself in sickness of spirit;"but to be the slave of it is another.
These men seem to have got their souls all covered with muck."She noticed that they had no idea of amusement.They had never played anything.They did not even care for base-ball.Their idea of happiness appeared to be to do nothing;and there was a good part of the year in which they were happy,--for these were not for the most part men owning farms;they were men who hired out to help the farmer.A good many of them had been farmers at one time and another,but they had failed.They all talked politics a great deal,--politics and rail-roads.Annie had not much patience with it all.She had great confidence in the course of things.She believed that in this country all men have a fair chance.So when it came about that the corn and the wheat,which had been raised with such incessant toil,brought them no money,but only a loss,Annie stood aghast.
"I said the rates were ruinous,"Jim said to her one night,after it was all over,and he had found out that the year's slavish work had brought him a loss of three hundred dollars;"it's been a conspiracy from the first.The price of corn is all right.But by the time we set it down in Chicago we are out eighteen cents a bushel.
It means ruin.What are we going to do?
Here we had the best crop we've had for years --but what's the use of talking!
They have us in their grip."
"I don't see how it is,"Annie protested.
"I should think it would be for the inter-est of the roads to help the people to be as prosperous as possible.""Oh,we can't get out!And we're bound to stay and raise grain.And they're bound to cart it.And that's all there is to it.They force us to stand every loss,even to the shortage that is made in transportation.
