seemed pitifully meager to Wade at that despondent moment, exhausted as he was by the long, hard journey and the sultry heat. Never had he been so taunted by a sense of failure, so torn by the haunting knowledge that he must soon leave his family. To die—that was nothing; but the fears of what his death might mean to this group, gripped his heart and shook his soul.
If only Martin were more tender! There was something so ruthless in the boy, so overbearing and heartless. Not that he was ever deliberately cruel, but there was an insensibility to the feelings of others, a capacity placidly to ignore them, that made Wade tremble for the future. Martin would work, and work hard; he was no shirk, but would he ever feel any responsibility toward his younger brother and sister? Would he be loyal to his mother? Wade wondered if his wife ever felt as he did—almost afraid of this son of theirs. He had a way of making his father seem foolishly inexperienced and ineffectual.
“I reckon,” Wade analysed laboriously, “it’s because I’m gettin’ less able all the time and he’s growing so fast—him limber an’ quick, and me all thumbs. There ain’t nothing like just plain muscle and size to make a fellow feel as if he know’d it all.”
Martin had never seemed more competent than this evening as, supper over, he harnessed the horses and helped his mother set the little caravan in motion. It was Martin who guided them to the creek, Martin who decided just where to locate their camp, Martin who, early the next morning, unloaded the wagon and made a temporary tent from its cover, and Martin who set forth on a saddleless horse in search of Peter Mall. When he returned, the big, kindly man came with him, and in Martin’s arms there squealed and wriggled a shoat.
“A smart boy you’ve got, Jacob,” chuckled Peter, jovially, after the first heart-warming greetings. “See that critter! Blame me if Martin, here, didn’t speak right up and ask me to lend ’er to you!” And he collapsed into gargantuan laughter.
“I promised when she’d growed up and brought pigs, we’d give him back two for one,” Martin hastily explained.
“That’s what he said,” nodded Peter, carefully switching his navy plug to the opposite cheek before settling down to reply, “and sez I, `Why, Martin, what d’ye want o’ that there shoat? You ain’t got nothin’ to keep her on!’ `If I can borrow the pig,’ sez he, `I reckon I can borrow the feed somewheres.’ God knows, he’ll find that ain’t so plentiful, but he’s got the right idea. A new country’s a poor man’s country and fellows like us have to stand together. It’s borrow and lend out here. I know where you can get some seed wheat if you want to try puttin’ it in this fall. There’s a man by the name of Perry—lives just across the Missouri line—who has thrashed fifteen hundred bushel and he’ll lend you three hundred or so. He’s willing to take a chance, but if you get a crop he wants you should give him back an extra three hundred.”
It was a hard bargain, but one that Wade could afford to take up, for if the wheat were to freeze out, or if the grasshoppers should eat it, or the chinch bugs ruin it, or a hail storm beat it down into the mud, or if any of the many hatreds Stepmother Nature holds out toward those trusting souls who would squeeze a living from her hard hands—if any of these misfortunes should transpire, he would be out nothing but labor, and that was the one thing he and Martin could afford to risk.
The seed deal was arranged, and Martin made the trip six times back and forth, for the wagon could hold only fifty bushels. Perry lived twenty miles from the Wades and a whole day was consumed with each load. It was evening when Martin, hungry and tired, reached home with the last one; and, as he stopped beside the tent, he noticed with surprise that there was no sign of cooking. Nellie was huddled against her mother, who sat, idle, with little Benny in her arms. The tragic yearning her whole body expressed, as she held the baby close, arrested the boy’s attention, filled him with clamoring uneasiness. His father came to help him unhitch.
“What’s the matter with Benny?”
Wade looked at Martin queerly. “He’s dead. Died this mornin’ and your ma’s been holding him just like that. I want you should ride over to Peter’s and see if you can fetch his woman.”
“No!” came from Mrs. Wade, brokenly, “I don’t want no one. Just let me alone.”
The shattering anguish in his mother’s voice startled Martin, stirred within him tumultuous, veiled sensations. He was unaccustomed to seeing her show suffering, and it embarrassed him. Restless and uncomfortable, he was glad when his father called him to help decide where to dig the grave, and fell the timber from which to make a rough box. From time to time, through the long night, he could not avoid observing his mother. In the white moonlight, she and Benny looked as if they had been carved from stone. Dawn was breaking over them when Wade, surrendering to a surge of pity, put his arms around her with awkward gentleness. “Ma, we got to bury ’im.”
A low, half-suppressed sob broke from Mrs. Wade’s tight lips as she clasped the tiny figure and pressed her cheek against the little head.
“I can’t give him up,” she moaned, “I can’t! It wasn’t so hard with the others. Their sickness was the hand of God, but Benny just ain’t had enough to eat. Seems like it’ll kill me.”
With deepened discomfort, Martin hurried to the creek to water the horses. It was good, he felt, to have chores to do. This knowledge shot through him with the same thrill of discovery that a man enjoys when he first finds what an escape from the solidity of fact lies in liquor. If one worked hard and fast one could forget. That was what work did. It made one forget—that moan, that note of agony in his mother’s voice, that hurt look in her eyes, that bronze group in the moonlight. By the time he had finished his chores, his mother was getting breakfast as usual. With unspeakable relief, Martin noticed that though pain haunted her face, she was not crying.
“I heard while I was over in Missouri, yesterday,” he ventured, “of a one-room house down in the Indian Territory. The fellow who built it’s give up and gone back East. Maybe we could fix a sledge and haul it up here.”
“I ain’t got the strength to help,” said Wade.
Martin’s eyes involuntarily sought his mother’s. He knew the power in her lean, muscular arms, the strength in her narrow shoulders.
“We’d better fetch it,” she agreed.
The pair made the trip down on horseback and brought back the shack that was to be home for many years. Eighteen miles off a man had some extra hand-cut shingles which he was willing to trade for a horse-collar. While Mrs. Wade took the long drive Martin, under his father’s guidance, chopped down enough trees to build a little lean-to kitchen and make-shift stable. Sixteen miles south another neighbor had some potatoes to exchange for a hatching of chickens. Martin rode over with the hen and her downy brood. The long rides, consuming hours, were trying, for Martin was needed every moment on a farm where everything was still to be done.
Day by day Wade was growing weaker, and it was Mrs. Wade who helped put in the crop, borrowing a plow, harrow, and extra team, and repaying the loan with the use of their own horses and wagon. Luck was with their wheat, which soon waved green. It seemed one of life’s harsh jests that now, when the tired, ill-nourished baby had fretted his last, old Brindle, waxing fat and sleek on the wheat pasture, should give more rich cream than the Wades could use. “He could have lived on the skimmed milk we feed to the pigs,” thought Martin.
In the Spring he went with his father into Fallon, the nearest trading point, to see David Robinson, the owner of the local bank. By giving a chattel mortgage on their growing wheat, they borrowed enough, at twenty per cent, to buy seed corn and a plow. It was Wade’s last effort. Before the corn was in tassel, he had been laid beside Benny.
Martin,
