The Moccasin Ranch: A Story of Dakota

by Hamlin Garland

  II

  MAY

  Day by day the plain thickened with life. Each noon a crowd ofland-seekers swarmed about the Moggason Ranch asking for food andshelter, and Blanche, responding to Rivers' entreaties, went down tocook, returning each night to her bed. Rivers professed to be verygrateful for her aid.

  All ages and sexes came to take claims. Old men, alone and feeble,school teachers from the East, young girls from the towns of the oldercounties, boys not yet of age--everywhere incoming claimants weresetting stakes upon the green and beautiful sod.

  Each day the grass grew more velvety green. Each day the sky waxedwarmer. The snow disappeared from the ravines. The ice broke up on theMoggason. The ponds disappeared. Plover flew over with wailing cry.Buffalo birds, prairie pigeons, larks, blackbirds, sparrows, joinedtheir voices to those of the cranes and geese and ducks, and the prairiepiped and twittered and clacked and chuckled with life. The gophersemerged from their winter-quarters, the foxes barked on the hills, theskunk hobbled along the ravines, and the badger raised mounds of freshsoil as if to aid the boomer by showing how deep the black loam was.

  Everybody was in holiday mood. Men whistled and sang and shouted andtoiled--toiled terribly--and yet it did not seem like toil! They sankwells and ploughed gardens and built barns and planted seeds, and yetthe whole settlement continued to present the care-free manners of agreat pleasure party. It seemed as if no one needed to work, and,therefore, those first months were months of gay and swift progress.

  It was the most beautiful spring Blanche and Willard Burke had spentsince their marriage nine years before. Blanche forgot to be petulant ormoody. She was in superb health, and carried herself like a girl ofeighteen. She appeared to have lost all her regrets.

  She laughed heartily when Rivers came over one afternoon and boldlydeclared:

  "Burke, I've c'me to borrow your wife. We've got a lot o' tenderfootsover there to-night, and I'm a little shy of Bailey's biscuits. I'mgoing to carry your cook away."

  "All right; only bring her back."

  Blanche was a little embarrassed when Rivers replied: "I don't like toagree to do that. Mebbe you'd better come over to make sure I do."

  "All right. I'll come over in time for supper." Burke's simple, goodface glowed with enjoyment of the fun. He smilingly went back to beatinghis plough-share with hammer and wedge as Rivers drove away withBlanche. The clink of his steel rang through the golden light thatflooded the prairie, keeping time to his whistled song.

  In the months of April and May the world sent a skirmish-line into thisecholess land to take possession of a belt of territory six hundredmiles long and one hundred miles broad. The settlers came like locusts;they sang like larks. From Alsace and Lorraine, from the North Sea, fromRussia, from the Alps, they came, and their faces shone as if they hadhappened upon the spring-time of the world. Tyranny was behind them, themajesty of God's wilderness before them, a mystic joy within them.

  Under their hands the straddle-bug multiplied. He is short-lived, thisprairie insect. He usually dies in thirty days--by courtesy alone helives. He expresses the settlers' hope and sense of justice. In thesespring days of good cheer he lived at times to sixty days--but only onstony ground or fire-scarred, peaty lowlands.

  He withered--this strange, three-legged, voiceless insect--but in hisstead arose a beetle. This beetle sheltered human beings, and was calleda shack.

  They were all alike, these shacks. They had roofs of one slant. Theywere built of rough lumber, and roofed with tarred paper, which made allfood taste of tar.

  They were dens but little higher than a man's head, and yet theysheltered the most joyous people that ever set foot to earth. In onecabin lived a girl and a canary-bird, all alone. In the next a man whocooked his own food when he did not share his rations with the girl, allin frank and honorable companionship. On the next claim were twoschool-teachers, busy as magpies, using the saw and hammer with deftaccuracy. In the next was a bank-clerk out for his health--and theseclean and self-contained people lived in free intercourse withoutslander and without fear. Only the Alsatians settled in groups, alienand unapproachable. All others met at odd times and places, breathingin the promiseful air of the clean sod, resolute to put the world ofhopeless failure behind them.

  Spring merged magnificently into summer. The grass upthrust. Thewaterfowl passed on to the northern lake-region. The morning symphony ofthe prairie-chickens died out, but the whistle of the larks, the chatterof the sparrows, and the wailing cry of the nesting plover came to takeits place.

  The gophers whistled and trilled, the foxes barked from the hills, andan occasional startled antelope or curious wolf passed through the lineof settlement as if to see what lay behind this strange phalanx ofploughmen guarding their yellow shanties.

  Week after week passed away, and the government surveyors did notappear. The Boomtown _Spike_ told in each issue how the men of thechain and compass were pushing westward; but still they did not come,and the settlers' hopes of getting their claims filed before winter grewfainter. The mass of them had planned to take claims in the spring, liveon them the required six months, "prove up," and return East for thewinter.

  In spite of these disappointments, all continued to be merry. No onetook any part of it very seriously. The young men went out and ploughedwhen they pleased, and came in and sat on the door-step and talked withthe women when they were weary. The shanties were hot and crowded, butno one minded that; by-and-by they were to build bigger.

  And, then, all was so new and beautiful, and the sky was so clear. Oh,that marvellous, lofty sky with just clouds enough to make the blue moreintense! Oh, the wonder of the wind from the wild, mysterious green seato the west! With the change and sheen of the prairie, incessant andmagical life was made marvellous and the winter put far away.

  Merry parties drove here and there visiting. Formalities counted forlittle, and yet with all this freedom of intercourse, this closecompanionship, no one pointed the finger of gossip toward any woman. Thegirls in their one-room huts received calls from their bachelorneighbors with the confidence that comes from purity of purpose, bothfelt and understood. Life was strangely idyllic during these springdays. Envy and hate and suspicion seemed exorcised from the world.