The Wind Before the Dawn Part 2
Crops of all sorts were shortened by continued drought; corn would be an utter failure. He had given notes for a new harvester and other machinery while the prospects for crops were good, and the knowledge that implement dealers would collect those notes whether the yield of grain was equal to their demands or not tightened the set lines about his naturally stern mouth and irritated a temper never good at the best. Daily he became more obstinate and unapproachable.
Josiah Farnshaw was not only obstinate, he was surly. Nothing could induce him to show any interest in the flax field after he found that his wife was looking out for its advantages. If she suggested that they go to examine it, he was instantly busy. If she asked when he intended to begin the cutting, he was elaborately indifferent and replied, "When its ripe; there's plenty of time." When at last the field showed a decided tendency to brown, he helped a neighbour instead of beginning on Friday, as his wife urged. Sat.u.r.day he found something wrong with the binder. By Sat.u.r.day night he began to see that the grain was ripening fast. He was warned and was ready to actually start the machine early the next day. His grizzled face concealed the grin it harboured at the idea of running the harvester on Sunday; he knew Mrs. Farnshaw's scruples. The flax had ripened, almost overnight, because of the extreme heat. Torn with anxiety and the certain knowledge that haste was necessary, Mrs. Farnshaw quoted scripture and hesitated. Her husband, who had delayed in all possible ways up to this time, and had refused to listen to her advice, became suddenly anxious to do "that cuttin'." Now that his wife hesitated from principle, he was intensely anxious to move contrary to her scruples.
The knowledge that her husband was enjoying her indecision, and that he was grimly thinking that her religious scruples would not stand the test, made her even less able to decide a question than usual.
The game was getting exciting and he let her argue, urging with pretended indifference that, "That flax's dead ripe now an' if it shatters out on th' ground you kin blame yourself," adding with grim humour, "There's nothin' like th' sound of money t' bring folks t' their senses. It's good as a pinch of pepper under th' nose of a bulldog."
There was everything to point that way, but a woman and a mother must vindicate her claims to religion, and Mrs. Farnshaw refused to give her consent to the Sunday harvesting.
Torn between her desire to save every grain of the precious crop and the fear of a h.e.l.l that burned with fire and brimstone, her husband's scorn did what neither had been able to do. Mrs. Farnshaw forbade the machine being taken to the field, and then cried herself into a headache.
"Do as you please; it's your lookout, but I tell you It'll be a sick lookin' field by to-morrow mornin'," was Mr. Farnshaw's final shot.
When her decision was finally reached, Mr. Farnshaw became alarmed. He knew he had let the flax go too long uncut. He had half believed in the reasons he had given for delay up to this point, but suddenly realizing that the overripe grain would suffer great loss if left another day in the hot sun, he reasoned with real earnestness that it must be cut if it were to be saved. His wife, thoroughly convinced that he was still tormenting her and that he would never let her hear the last of the matter if she gave up, closed her lips down firmly and declined to allow it to be done.
All this the child had heard argued out that morning. It was a cruel position in which to place one of her years. Part of it she had comprehended, part had escaped her, but she was sensitive to the atmosphere of suffering. The details of past elements in the tragedy she could not be expected to understand. The stunted, barren life of her mother was but half guessed. What child could know of the heartsick longing for affection and a but little understood freedom, the daily coercion, the refusal of her husband to speak kindly or to meet her eye with a smile?
The sorely puzzled and bewildered woman thought affection was withheld from her because of something done or undone, and strove blindly to achieve it by acts, not knowing that acts have little, if anything, to do with affection. She strove daily to win love, not knowing that love is a thing outside the power to win or bestow. Had she had understanding she would have spared the child with whom she worked; instead, she talked on with her dreary whine, morbidly seeking a sympathy of which she did not know how to avail herself when it was so plainly hers.
With a lump in her throat of which the mother did not even suspect, Lizzie Farnshaw set the table, cut the bread, brought the water, "put up the chairs," and, when her father came from the stable, slipped out to where he was washing for supper and whispered about the flax, asking him not to mention it while her mother was suffering with the headache.
The news was not news to Josiah Farnshaw, who had examined the field anxiously as he had returned from Hansen's. Sobered by the loss, he was less disagreeable than usual and only pushed his daughter out of his way as he reached around her for the sun-cracked bar of yellow laundry soap with which to wash his hands. Thankful to have the unpleasant but important matter, as she thought, safely attended to, the child returned to help lift the meal to the bare kitchen table.
The illy lighted room, with its one small window, was dim and dismal in the dusk of evening. In spite of the added heat it would produce, the child decided that a light was necessary.
After the kerosene lamp was lighted, she turned to see if her mother needed her help again. The crooked blaze ran up unexpectedly and blacked the cracked chimney on one side with a soot so thick that one half of the room was soon in semi-darkness. Mrs. Farnshaw took it fretfully in hand.
"Why can't you trim it when you see it runnin' up that way?" she demanded querulously, poking at the lopsided and deeply charred wick with a sliver obtained from the side of the wood-box.
Her ministrations were not very successful, however, for when the chimney was replaced it ran up on the other side, and in the end her daughter had to prosecute a search for the scissors and cut the wick properly. As they worked over the ill-smelling light, Albert, the youngest of the three children of the household, burst into the kitchen crying excitedly:
"Ma, did you know that th' flax was all whipped out of th' pods on to the ground?"
Mrs. Farnshaw, who had received the lamp from her daughter's hand, let it fall on the edge of an upturned plate in her excitement, and then, seeing what she had done, fumbled blindly in a terrified effort to right it before it should go over. The cracked chimney fell from its moorings, and, striking a teacup, spattered broken gla.s.s over the table like hailstones.
The entire family scrambled to save the lamp itself from a similar fate and were plunged into darkness by the girl blowing out its flame to save an explosion.
The excitement of the moment served, temporarily, to lessen the blow of Albert's announcement, but by the time "a dip" had been constructed the full weight of the disaster had fallen upon the defeated and despairing woman, and to protect her from the taunts of the head of the house, Lizzie induced her to go to bed, where she sobbed throughout the night.
The next day was hot and windy. The gra.s.shoppers, unable to fly in a strong wind, clung to the weeds, to the dry gra.s.s, the stripped branches of the half-grown trees, to the cattle and hogs upon which they happened to alight, and even to people themselves, unless brushed off.
Lizzie took the cattle out to the usual grazing ground, but there was no Luther to help, and the gra.s.shoppers made the lives of the restless animals so unendurable that in real alarm, lest they run away again, she took them home, preferring her father's wrath to the experience of getting them back if they should get beyond her control. Fortune favoured her.
Unable to endure the demonstrations of grief at home, her father had taken himself to a distant neighbour's to discuss the "plague of locusts."
The wind blew a gale throughout the day, sweeping remorselessly over the un.o.bstructed hillsides. Unable to fly, the helpless insects hugged the earth while the gale tore over the Kansas prairies with a fearful velocity. With feminine instinct, every female gra.s.shopper burrowed into the dry earth, making a hole which would receive almost her entire body back of her wings and legs. The spring sod, half rotted and loosened from the gra.s.s roots, furnished the best lodgment. In each hole, as deep down as her body could reach, her pouch of eggs was deposited.
No attempt was made to cover the hole, and by night the sod presented a honeycombed appearance never before seen by the oldest settlers. Having performed nature's functions, and provided for the propagation of their kind, the lately fecund gra.s.shoppers were hungry when the act was over.
Not a spear of anything green was left. The travel-worn horde had devoured everything in sight the day before. Evening closed in upon a restless and excited swarm of starving insects, but they were unable to fly at night or while the wind was blowing.
It was necessary to find food; hunger's pangs may not be suffered long by creatures whose active life is numbered in weeks. The high wind had cooled the air and made the locusts stupid and sleepy, but when the next morning the wind had fallen, and the sun had warmed their bodies, as fast as they were able all were on the wing, headed for the north. The air was calm, and by ten o'clock they were away in swarms, leaving ruin and desolation to show that they had sojourned in the land.
The situation was truly desperate. Cattle, horses, and hogs were without food of any sort. Many families were new to the country and had depended upon sod-corn for the winter's supply of provender for both man and beast.
Mr. Farnshaw, being one of the older residents, had grown a crop of wheat, so that his bread was a.s.sured; but the herd of cattle which had been his delight was now a terrorizing burden. Cattle and horses could not live on wheat, and there was no hay because of the dry weather. What was to be done?
That night the neighbours held a consultation at the Farnshaw house, where grizzled and despairing men discussed the advisability of "goin' East,"
and ways and means of getting there. The verdict was strongly in favour of going.
Mrs. Farnshaw brightened. Perhaps, after all, she would get away from these wind-blown prairies, where no shade offered its protecting presence against a sun which took life and spirits out of the pluckiest of them.
Even more childish than the daughter at her side, Mrs. Farnshaw clapped her hands with joy as she leaned forward expectantly to address her new neighbour.
"If I can only get t' my mother's, I won't care for nothin' after that. My heart goes out t' Mrs. Crane. Think of all that good money goin' t' them Swedes! You just better pocket your loss an' get away while you can."
"You're goin' too, then, Farnshaw?" the new neighbour asked.
All eyes turned upon Mr. Farnshaw, who had not as yet expressed himself on either side. These neighbours had asked to a.s.semble in his house because his kitchen afforded more room than any other house in the vicinity, the kitchen being a large room with no beds in it to take up floor s.p.a.ce.
Mrs. Farnshaw realized as soon as the question was asked that her joy had been premature.
Josiah Farnshaw sat with his chair tilted back on two legs against the wall, snapping the blade of his pocket knife back and forth as he considered what he was going to say in reply. He felt all eyes turned in his direction and quite enjoyed the suspense. Mr. Farnshaw was an artist in calculating the suspense of others. He gave them plenty of time to get their perspective before he replied. At last he shut the blade of the knife down ostentatiously, replaced it in his trousers' pocket, and announced slowly:
"Well, sir, as for me and mine, I think we'll stay right here."
Mrs. Farnshaw gave a despairing, "Oh!" and covered her face with her hands to strangle back her tears. Her one hope had been that poverty would accomplish what the flax had failed to do.
"Why--I thought you said there'd be nothin' t' feed an' you'd have t',"
said a man whose s.h.a.ggy whiskers had not seen a comb that year. "What'll you do? You can't see things starve!"
"I thought you was strong for goin'. What'll you do with all your stock?"
another said, and all bent forward and waited for his answer as if he could find a way out of the tangle for them.
"That's just it." Again he paused, enjoying the suspense that his silence created. Mr. Farnshaw was not popular, but he had more stock than all his simple neighbours put together and was conscious that money, or its equivalent, had weight. "That's just it," he repeated to add emphasis to his opinion. "What is a man to do? You folks that have nothin' but your teams an' wagons can load th' family in an' get away. How'd I feel 'bout th' time that I got t' th' Missouri River if I knowed all them hogs an'
cattle was layin' around here too weak t' get up cause they hadn't been fed?"
He dropped his argument into the midst of them and then sat back and enjoyed its effect. He had intended to go till ten minutes previous. The argument sounded good to him now, however. It put him on a higher basis with himself, in spite of the fact that it had only popped into his head while he was clicking his knife blade. He conceived a new liking for himself. "No, sir," he continued; "I'll stay by it."
"I don't see as your stayin' helps anything if you ain't got nothin' t'
feed," was the reiterated objection.
"Well," Mr. Farnshaw replied, careful not to look in his wife's direction, "I was for goin' at first, but I've listened t' you folks an' I've come t'
th' conclusion that you ain't goin' t' better yourselves any. If you go East, You'll have t' come back here in th' spring, or live on day's work there--an'--an' I'll take my chances right here. It's a long lane that has no turn. Gra.s.shoppers can't stay always."
"What'll you do if all them eggs hatch out an' eat th' crops in th'
spring?" the new neighbour asked, determined to look on all sides of the question before he decided to give up his recently purchased farm, and glad of this opportunity to get the opinions of his fellow sufferers on that particular phase of his unexpected calamity. "What'll you do with all that bunch of cattle, anyhow?" he added.
"I'll share what I've got with th' stuff, an' if part of it dies I'll drag it out on th' hill t' rot; th' rest I'll stay by," was the stubborn reply.
"As for them eggs a-hatchin', they'll be good ones if they can stand a Kansas winter; they'll do a blamed sight better'n any eggs Mrs. Farnshaw gethers in. They'd better go south."
This raised a laugh. The grim humour of anything, that could get away, spending a winter in Kansas, appealed to these grizzly pioneers, who struggled with the question of fuel in a country where there was little natural timber, and coal must be paid for before it was burned. But all their arguments would not turn him from his course.
"Your wife's turrible set on goin', Farnshaw," one of the men said to him as they went to the stable for their horses when the meeting broke up.