Dust
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Mr. And Mrs. Haldeman Julius >> Dust
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Dust by Mr. And Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
CONTENTS
I. THE DUST IS STIRRED
II. OUT OF THE DUST
III. DUST IN HER HEART
IV. A ROSE-BUD IN THE DUST
V. DUST BEGETS DUST
VI. DUST IN HIS EYES
VII. MARTIN BATTLES WITH DUST
VIII. THE DUST SMOTHERS
IX. MARTIN'S SON SHAKES OFF THE DUST
X. INTO THE DUST-BIN
XI. THE DUST SETTLES
I
THE DUST IS STIRRED
DUST was piled in thick, velvety folds on the weeds and grass of
the open Kansas prairie; it lay, a thin veil on the scrawny black
horses and the sharp-boned cow picketed near a covered wagon; it
showered to the ground in little clouds as Mrs. Wade, a tall,
spare woman, moved about a camp-fire, preparing supper in a
sizzling skillet, huge iron kettle and blackened coffee-pot.
Her husband, pale and gaunt, the shadow of death in his weary
face and the droop of his body, sat leaning against one of the
wagon wheels trying to quiet a wailing, emaciated year-old baby
while little tow-headed Nellie, a vigorous child of seven,
frolicked undaunted by the August heat.
"Does beat all how she kin do it," thought Wade, listlessly.
"Ma," she shouted suddenly, in her shrill, strident treble, "I
see Martin comin'."
The mother made no answer until the strapping, fourteen-year-old
boy, tall and powerful for his age, had deposited his bucket of
water at her side. As he drew the back of a tanned muscular hand
across his dripping forehead she asked shortly:
"What kept you so long?"
"The creek's near dry. I had to follow it half a mile to find
anything fit to drink. This ain't no time of year to start
farmin'," he added, glum and sullen.
"I s'pose you know more'n your father and mother," suggested
Wade.
"I know who'll have to do all the work," the boy retorted,
bitterness and rebellion in his tone.
"Oh, quit your arguin'," commanded the mother. "We got enough to
do to move nearer that water tonight, without wastin' time
talkin'. Supper's ready."
Martin and Nellie sat down beside the red-and-white-checkered
cloth spread on the ground, and Wade, after passing the still
fretting baby to his wife, took his place with them.
"Seems like he gets thinner every day," he commented, anxiously.
With a swift gesture of fierce tenderness, Mrs. Wade gathered
little Benny to her. "Oh, God!" she gasped. "I know I'm goin' to
lose him. That cow's milk don't set right on his stomach."
"It won't set any better after old Brindle fills up on this
dust," observed Martin, belligerency in his brassy voice.
"That'll do," came sharply from his father. "I don't think this
is paradise no more'n you do, but we wouldn't be the first who've
come with nothing but a team and made a living. You mark what I
tell you, Martin, land ain't always goin' to be had so cheap and
I won't be living this time another year. Before I die, I'm goin'
to see your mother and you children settled. Some day, when
you've got a fine farm here, you'll see the sense of what I'm
doin' now and thank me for it."
The boy's cold, blue eyes became the color of ice, as he
retorted: "If I ever make a farm out o' this dust, I'll sure 'ave
earned it."
"I guess your mother'll be doin' her share of that, all right.
And don't you forget it."
As he intoned in even accents, Wade's eyes, so deep in their
somber sockets, dwelt with a strange, wistful compassion on his
faded wife. The rays of the setting sun brought out the drabness
of her. Already, at thirty-five, grey streaked the scanty, dull
hair, wrinkles lined the worn olive-brown face, and the tendons
of the thin neck stood out. Chaotically, he compared her to the
happy young girl--round of cheek and laughing of eye--he had
married back in Ohio, fifteen years before. It comforted him a
little to remember he hadn't done so badly by her until the war
had torn him from his rented farm and she had been forced to do a
man's work in field and barn. Exposure and a lung wound from a
rebel bullet had sent Wade home an invalid, and during the five
years which had followed, he had realized only too well how
little help he had been to her.
It is not likely he would have had the iron persistency of
purpose to drag her through this new stern trial if he had not
known that in her heart, as in his, there gnawed ever an
all-devouring hunger to work land of their own, a fervent
aspiration to establish a solid basis of self-sustentation upon
which their children might build. From the day a letter had come
from Peter Mall, an ex-comrade in Wade's old regiment, saying the
quarter-section next his own could be bought by paying annually a
dollar and twenty-five cents an acre for seven years, their hopes
had risen into determination that had become unshakable. Before
the eyes of Jacob and Sarah Wade there had hovered, like a
promise, the picture of the snug farm that could be evolved from
this virgin soil. Strengthened by this vision and stimulated by
the fact of Wade's increasing weakness, they had sold their few
possessions, except the simplest necessities for camping, had
made a canvas cover for their wagon, stocked up with smoked meat,
corn meal and coffee, tied old Brindle behind, fastened a coop of
chickens against the wagon-box and, without faltering, had made
the long pilgrimage. Their indomitable courage and faith,
Martin's physical strength and the pulling power of their two
ring-boned horses --this was their capital.
It 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, who already had been doing a man's work, now assumed a
man's responsibilities. Mrs. Wade consulted more and more with
him, relied more and more upon his judgment. She was immensely
proud of him, of his steadiness and dependability, but at rare
moments, remembering her own normal childhood, she would think
with compunction: "It ain't right. Young 'uns ought to have some
fun. Seems like it's makin' him too old for his age." She never
spoke of these feelings, however. There were no expressions of
tenderness in the Wade household. She was doing her best by her
children and they knew it. Even Nellie, child that she was,
understood the grimness of the battle before them.
They were able to thresh enough wheat to repay their debt of six
hundred bushels and keep an additional three hundred of seed for
the following year. The remaining seven hundred and fifty they
sold at twenty-five cents a bushel by hauling them to Fort
Scott--thirty miles distant. Each trip meant ten dollars, but to
the Wades, to whom this one hundred and eighty-seven dollars--the
first actual money they had seen in over a year--was a fortune,
these journeys were rides of triumph, fugitive flashes of glory
in the long, gray struggle.
That Fall they paid the first installment of two hundred dollars
on their land and Martin persuaded his mother to give and
Robinson to take a chattel on their two horses, old Brindle, her
calf and the pigs, that other much-needed implements might be
bought. Mrs. Wade toiled early and late, doing part of the chores
and double her share of the Spring plowing that Martin, as well
as Nellie, could attend school in Fallon.
"I don't care about goin'," he had protested squirmingly.
But on this matter his mother was without compromise. "Don't say
that," she had commanded, her voice shaken and her eyes bright
with the intensity of her emotion; "you're goin' to get an
education."
And Martin, surprised and embarrassed by his mother's unusual
exhibition of feeling, had answered, roughly: "Aw, well, all
right then. Don't take on. I didn't say I wouldn't, did I?"
He was twenty-three and Nellie sixteen when, worn out and broken
down before her time, her resistance completely undermined, Mrs.
Wade died suddenly of pneumonia. Within the year Nellie married
Bert Mall, Peter's eldest son, and Martin, at once, bought out
her half interest in the farm, stock and implements, giving a
first mortgage to Robinson in order to pay cash.
"I'm making it thirty dollars an acre," he explained.
"That's fair," conceded the banker, "though the time will come
when it will be cheap at a hundred and a half. There's coal under
all this county, millions of dollars' worth waiting to be mined."
"Maybe," assented Martin, laconically.
As he sat in the dingy, little backroom of the bank, while
Robinson's pen scratched busily drawing up the papers, he was
conscious of an odd thrill. The land--it was all his own! But
with this thrill welled a wave of resentment over what he
considered a preposterous imposition. Who had made the land into
a farm? What had Nellie ever put into it that it should be half
hers? His mother--now, that was different. She and he had toiled
side by side like real partners; her efforts had been real and
unstinted. If he were buying her out, for instance --but Nellie!
Well, that was the way, he noticed, with many women--doing little
and demanding much. He didn't care for them; not he. From the day
Nellie left, Martin managed alone in the shack, "baching it," and
putting his whole heart and soul into the development of his
quarter-section.
II
OUT OF THE DUST
AT thirty-four, Martin was still unmarried, and though he had not
travelled far on that strange road to affluence which for some
seems a macadamized boulevard, but for so many, like himself, a
rough cow-path, he had done better than the average farmer of
Fallon County. To be sure, this was nothing over which to gloat.
A man who received forty cents a bushel for wheat was satisfied;
corn sold at twenty-eight cents, and the hogs it fattened in
proportion. But his hundred and sixty acres were clear from debt,
four thousand dollars were on deposit drawing three per cent in
The First State Bank--the old Bank of Fallon, now incorporated
with Robinson as its president. In the pasture, fourteen sows
with their seventy-five spring pigs rooted beside the sleek herd
of steers fattening for market; the granary bulged with corn; two
hundred bushels of seed wheat were ready for sowing; his
machinery was in excellent condition; his four Percheron mares
brought him, each, a fine mule colt once a year; and the well
never went dry, even in August. Martin was--if one discounted the
harshness of the life, the dirt, the endless duties and the
ever-pressing chores--a Kansas plutocrat.
One fiery July day, David Robinson drew up before Martin's shack.
The little old box-house was still unpainted without and
unpapered within. Two chairs, a home-made table with a Kansas
City Star as a cloth, a sheetless bed, a rough cupboard, a stove
and floors carpeted with accumulations of untidiness completed
the furnishings.
"Chris-to-pher Columbus!" exploded Robinson, "why don't you fix
yourself up a bit, Martin? The Lord knows you're going to be able
to afford it. What you need is a wife--someone to look after
you." And as Martin, observing him calmly, made no response, he
added, "I suppose you know what I want. You've been watching for
this day, eh, Martin? All Fallon County's sitting on its
haunches--waiting."
"Oh, I haven't been worrying. A fellow situated like me, with a
hundred and sixty right in the way of a coal company, can afford
to be independent."
"You understand our procedure, Martin," Robinson continued. "We
are frank and aboveboard. We set the price, and if you can't see
your way clear to take it there are no hard feelings. We simply
call it off--for good."
Wade knew how true this was. When the mining first began, several
rebels toward the East had tried profitlessly to buck this
irrefragable game and had found they had battered their
unyielding heads against an equally unyielding stone wall. These
men had demanded more and Robinson's company, true to its threat,
had urbanely gone around their farms, travelled on and left them
behind, their coal untouched and certain to so remain. Such
inelastic lessons, given time to soak in, were sobering.
"Now," said Robinson, in his amiable matter-of-fact manner, "as I
happen to know the history of this quarter, backwards and
forwards, we can do up this deal in short order. You sign this
contract, which is exactly like all the others we use, and I'll
hand over your check. We get the bottom; you keep the top; I give
you the sixteen thousand, and the thing is done."
"Well, Martin," he added, genially, as Wade signed his name,
"it's a long day since you came in with your father to make that
first loan to buy seed corn. Wouldn't he have opened his eyes if
any one had prophesied this? It's a pity your mother couldn't
have lived to enjoy your good fortune. A fine, plucky woman, your
mother. They don't make many like her."
Long after Robinson's buggy was out of sight, Martin stood in his
doorway and stared at the five handsome figures, spelled out the
even more convincing words and admired the excellent reproduction
of The First State Bank.
"This is a whole lot of money," his thoughts ran. "I'm rich. All
this land still mine--practically as much mine as ever--all this
stock and twenty thousand dollars in money--in cash. It's a fact.
I, Martin Wade, am rich."
He remembered how he had exulted, how jubilant, even intoxicated,
he had felt when he had received the ten dollars for the first
load of wheat he had hauled to Fort Scott. Now, with a check for
sixteen thousand--SIXTEEN THOUSAND DOLLARS!--in his hand, he
stood dumbly, curiously unmoved.
Slowly, the first bitter months on this land, little Benny's
death from lack of nourishment, his father's desperate efforts to
establish his family, the years of his mother's slow crucifixion,
his own long struggle --all floated before him in a fog of
reverie. Years of deprivation, of bending toil and then,
suddenly, this had come--this miracle symbolized by this piece of
paper. Martin moistened his lips. Mentally, he realized all the
dramatic significance of what had happened, but it gave him none
of the elation he had expected.
This bewildered and angered him. Sixteen thousand dollars and
with it no thrill. What was lacking? As he pondered, puzzled and
disappointed, it came to him that he needed something by which to
measure his wealth, someone whose appreciation of it would make
it real to him, give him a genuine sense of its possession. What
if he were to take Robinson's advice: fix up a bit and--marry?
Nellie had often urged the advantages of this, but he had never
had much to do with women; they did not belong in his world and
he had not missed them; he had never before felt a need of
marriage. Upon the few occasions when, driven by his sister's
persistence, he had vaguely considered it, he had shrunk away
quickly from the thought of the unavoidable changes which would
be ushered in by such a step. This shack, itself--no one whom he
would want would, in this day, consent to live in it, and, if he
should marry, his wife must be a superior woman, good looking,
and with the push and energy of his mother. He thought of all she
had meant to his father; and there was Nellie, not to be spoken
of in the same breath, yet making Bert Mall a good wife. What a
cook she was! Memories of her hot, fluffy biscuits, baked
chicken, apple pies and delicious coffee, carried trailing aromas
that set his nostrils twitching. It would be pleasant to have
satisfying meals once more, to be relieved, too, of the bother of
the three hundred chickens, to have some one about in the
evenings. True, there would be expense, oh, such expense--the
courting, the presents, the wedding, the building, the furniture,
and, later, innumerable new kinds of bills. But weren't all the
men around him married? Surely, if they, not nearly as well off
as himself, could afford it, so could he.
Besides, wasn't it all different now that he held this check in
his hand? These sixteen thousand dollars were not the same
dollars which he had extorted from close-fisted Nature. Each of
those had come so lamely, was such a symbol of sweat and aching
muscles, that to spend one was like parting with a portion of
himself, but this new, almost incredible fortune, had come
without a turn of his hand, without an hour's labor. To Martin,
the distinction was sharp and actual.
He figured quickly. Five thousand dollars would do wonders. With
that amount, he would build so substantially that his neighbors
could no longer feel the disapprobation in which, according to
Nellie, he was beginning to be held, because of his sordid,
hermit-like life. That five thousand could buy many cows and
additional acreage--but just now a home and a wife would be
better investments. Yes, he would marry and a house should be his
bait. That was settled. He would drive into Fallon at once to see
the carpenter and deposit the check.
He was already out of the house when a thought struck him.
Suppose he were to meet just the woman he might want? These
soiled, once-blue overalls, these heavy, manure-spotted shoes,
this greasy, shapeless straw hat, with its dozen matches showing
their red heads over the band, the good soils and fertilizers of
Kansas resting placidly in his ears and the lines of his
neck--such a Romeo might not tempt his Juliet; he must spruce up.
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