The Jumping-Off Place

by Marian Hurd McNeely

  “Better than that.” He opened his hands to show the first fruit of the garden — ten small red radishes.

  Becky gave a squeal of delight. “Oh, Dick, won’t they taste heavenly! Where did they come from? I thought the rabbits got every one of our two plantings.”

  “I tried a third, and sprinkled a little red pepper above each hole. They’re pretty small, still, but I was afraid that a rain might wash the pepper away, and the rabbits might get these before we did.” He rinsed them in a cup of water, and set them, still dripping, on the table.

  “Gee, radishes!” said Joan, coming in the door. “I could eat them all at one mouthful. How soon will the rest be ripe?”

  “In a day or two, if the rabbits let them alone.”

  “I can hardly wait. I’m so sick of cans I never want to see one again. It seemed grand, when we first came out here, to see those long rows of tins, but that was before I had to eat a million of them. The pictures on the outside look so different from the taste inside.”

  “You ought to have to cook from them,” said Becky, sitting down at the table. “That’s worse than eating from them. No matter how I season them the tinny taste is always there. Ten radishes: two for you and me, Dick, and three for the kids.”

  “Two and a half for each one of us,” said Joan. “Uncle Jim would have made us divide them even.”

  Becky gravely cut two of the larger radishes into halves. “Where is Phil?”

  “He and Autie went to find ground cherries.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Just after the Wubbers came.”

  “That was two hours ago. I don’t like to have him wandering around the prairie that way. He ought to show up for meals, at least.”

  “He’d be on hand if he knew about the radishes,” said Joan.

  “I’ll save his,” said Becky. “He’ll be back as soon as he gets hungry.”

  Dick went back to the garden, and Becky and Joan to the dish washing, but Phil didn’t appear. Becky weeded the onion bed, and trained the morning glory vines that had begun to climb around the front door, but her eyes went frequently to the prairie trail. At two he hadn’t appeared. At two-thirty she carried the milk and the butter, which had been awaiting him, back to the well, and lowered them into the coolness. At three she went out to Dick, who was hoeing corn in the garden.

  “I’m worried about Phil,” she said.

  “Hasn’t that little rat turned up yet?”

  “No, and I can’t see him from the big hill. I climbed it to look. There’s not a sign of him along the creek.”

  “Maybe he went to the Wubber’s with Autie.”

  “He would have been back by this time.”

  Dick picked up the spading fork and the hoe with an anxious look on his tanned face. He certainly had grown older, much older, in the months since Uncle Jim died. The careful way in which he cleaned his tools, the worried expression with which he received Becky’s announcement, the readiness with which he accepted responsibility was not like the Dick of three months ago. It was a comfort to have him sharing the things that threatened, and the girl felt a nearness that seemed to cut out the two years between their ages.

  “I’d better ride over to the Wubber’s and see,” he said.

  He galloped over the prairie, but was back in a few minutes. “They haven’t been around there,” he reported. “Wubber isn’t home, and Mrs. Wubber doesn’t seem worried. She’s rocking on her stoop. ‘He’ll show up before long,’ she told me, ‘Autie always does show up.’ But I don’t want to wait for that. I think I’ll start out and round ’em up. Phil has never gone away like this before.”

  THE two little boys had followed the trail that led between the Linville house and the Welp shack. They found some ground cherries, growing along some furrows that had evidently been the fireguard of some homesteader, and they turned back the papery husks and ate their fill. In Platteville Phil would have scorned their queer, musky taste, but to the fruit-hungry lips of the boys they seemed delicious. Then they had walked a mile to see “The Lone Tree,” a single, large cottonwood, that had, by some miracle, been seeded and grown along the trail. It was the first real tree that Phil had seen in Tripp County, and after pounding the ground around it to dislodge any chance snake, the boys lay down under it, and reveled in its shade. The soft grasses waved around them, the gophers popped in and out of their holes, and the meadow-larks whirred close above them.

  “Le’s go up to the water-mark,” suggested Autie.

  “What’s the water-mark?”

  “Haven’t you seen those piles of stone built on the hills above the creek? The Indians left them. They built ’em to show where there was water.”

  “Do you know where is one?”

  “Up there. Just on the aige of the hill. You can see it if you look dost.”

  Phil “looked dost.” On the butte above them he could make out a little tower of stones, which he never before had noticed. Together the two boys climbed to the top, and stood panting on the edge of the ravine. The water-mark was made of a circle of big stones, piled one on another, until it was a tower several feet high. Buried in the ground near it Phil found an Indian arrow-head. “This proba’ly was their regular stamping ground,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they had many a war dance up here.”

  Autie agreed. He was the easy-going son of his easy-going mother, and his mild acquiescence was refreshing after two months of constant association with Joan.

  “I’ll bet they had lots of fights here.”

  “Sure,” agreed Autie, “The Sioux is the worst fighters of all. The prairie is just thick with their arrow-heads. My father turned up nine when he was plowing our east forty.”

  “Le’s go down the hill where the wind don’t blow so wild,” suggested Phil.

  Again Autie agreed, and the boys climbed down the slope to the little rocky shelf which jutted out a dozen feet below. Here they sat, side by side, sheltered from the wind, looking down at the rolling grass below them. They were higher than the hawks that sailed lazily above the prairie; so high that they seemed almost on a level with the two purple peaks of Dog Ear Buttes, miles away.

  Suddenly something whizzed over their heads. Both boys looked up just in time to see a noose of rope poise itself for a second above each one of them, then tighten around their arms. They felt themselves being lifted in the air, and pulled several feet above the rocky ledge where they had been sitting. They looked again, half expecting a joke, but there was nothing to be seen but the two stout ropes which hung from the top of the bluff. The pulling stopped, and the boys hung suspended in the air. They could feel the rope jerk and give; then finally stop, as though the mysterious lassoer had fastened the other end. They struggled to loosen their arms, but the ropes pulled tighter with each movement. Three feet above the ledge they dangled, perilously near the stony face of the butte. Both shouted desperately. There was not a sound in reply except the whiff, whiff of the wind blowing over their heads, and the call of the larks in the grass below.

  “Do you s’pose it’s Indians?” said Phil.

  Autie did not answer. He only sobbed.

  The sun shone into their eyes, giant grasshoppers jumped into their faces, and hungry flies settled on them. Autie, who hung nearer the hillside, and had one hand free, kicked his legs until he swung back and forth, and tried to pull himself to the face of the bluff. But the grass broke in his grasp, and there was nothing else within reach. It seemed impossible that they should be stranded there. They were so near safety, and yet they were unable to reach it. They shrieked again and again, but nobody answered. The wind whistled overhead, and the sun beat down.

  Before they had hung an hour it seemed like a whole day. When two hours had dragged themselves away it was like a year. As the sun went farther west the butte failed to shadow them; they were exposed to a glare and heat that was almost unbearable. Sometimes the boys called; sometimes they cried; sometimes they struggled. In one of his mad attempts to reach the
hillside and pull himself to safety Autie struck his head upon a jutting rock which cut a gash over one eye. The blood ran down his face and stiffened his overalls, making a feast for every fly in the neighborhood, and there seemed to be hundreds of them. The children did their best to help each other — Phil trying in vain to get a handkerchief out of his pocket for Autie’s wound, and Autie struggling, with his one free arm, to keep the flies off both of them.

  “Becky’ll be looking for us,” comforted Phil. “She’ll get Dick out after us.”

  “My folks won’t even know I’m gone,” moaned Autie.

  “Dick’ll take you home, too.” There was a pause filled only with the buzzing of flies and the call of a far-off mourning dove. “If he can see us, way up here,” Phil added.

  There came a time when it seemed as though the ropes must cut them in two at the waist; when a belt of numbness circled each body, and their feet and hands seemed going to sleep. Then it was that they stopped crying and struggling and hung limply, spent with heat and pain and thirst and loneliness. Their eyes had ceased to search the prairie below. They did not see Dick who rode across the waves of grass below, calling and looking everywhere.

  It was Autie’s tow head, a white spot against the green, that caught Dick’s attention. He strained his eyes to see. What was it that made the two specks of color on the hillside? He turned Job off the slough grass and toward the butte. It took ages for the horse to wind his way up the stony incline. Dick’s heart went into his mouth as he climbed till the ropes came into view. Had those two boys hanged themselves in play? Was this what the prairies had done to the Linvilles? He gave a great cry. The boys heard it and opened their eyes. Back to Dick, borne on the breeze, came a faint halloo.

  “Alive, alive!” sang Dick’s heart. He urged Job on as far as the horse could go up the hill. Then he dismounted, and climbed the last and steepest part of the slope. He stood on the ledge, caught each boy in an arm, and eased the strain of the cruel ropes. It was only a moment before both bonds were cut, the children were laid side by side on the ledge, and Dick was rubbing their lame bodies to restore the circulation.

  “I knew you’d find me,” said Phil’s parched lips.

  While the two children lay resting on the grass Dick left them and climbed to the summit of the hill to reconnoitre. There was not a sign of anyone near; not a footprint that the boy could find. But the ropes still hung from the edge of the cliff, weighted down by great stones from the water-mark. He stooped down, and pulled one of the lassoes toward him. It was made of a new piece of twisted hemp, and at the end was a halter snap.

  “That,” exclaimed Dick, “is the rope that fastened Red Haw.”

  The shadows had begun to lengthen when Job with his triple burden came down the trail. Autumn, who was the first to recover from his experience, was able to sit up behind Dick, but Phil still leaned limply against his brother. Becky and Joan met them a quarter mile from home. They had been hunting along the creek bed till they were discouraged and frightened. It was like heaven to see Job ambling down the dusty road, carrying the three boys. Becky only delayed them for a fragmentary story; then hurried the rescue party on to the house. The two girls followed, plowing through the prairie grass, holding hands tightly, and squeezing each other now and then in relief and joy. As they hurried through the door they caught sight of the morning glory vines which an hour before had reached their green tendrils half way up the sides of the door. Now they lay, a tangle of string and withered leaves, on the ground, their roots torn from the ground.

  “The Welp boys have been here,” said Joan.

  Becky’s relief at having Phil back again was swept up by a great wave of fear. There was no getting away from an enemy like that. Spite and hatred seemed to envelop them on all sides. Where would it strike next?

  It was twenty minutes later that Dick lifted Autie on the horse to take him home. Becky had washed and dressed his wound, and put on a clean suit of overalls that belonged to Phil. The boy seemed cheerful, and, except for his cut, not much the worse for his bad afternoon.

  “I suppose your mother will be worried to death about you,” said Dick, as they loped over the prairie trail.

  “Ma ain’t the worrying kind,” was the reply.

  And Autie evidently knew his mother. As they drove up, at six-thirty, Mrs. Wubber sat just where she had been sitting three hours before. She was still rocking. She looked as though she had rocked since morning. Dick told the story of the outrage, starting with indignation, and ending with almost fury, but Mrs. Wubber did not seem greatly disturbed. She rocked and listened and rocked. “I always knew those Welp boys were mean cusses,” was her only comment. When Dick unfastened Autie’s bandage and exposed the jagged cut, he expected an outburst of anxiety and wrath, but nothing of the kind was forthcoming.

  “All my kids is got scars now,” she remarked with what seemed like satisfaction.

  “This has been a day of worry for you,” said Dick, as he mounted Job to go back home.

  “That cut won’t last long on Autie,” she said. “He’s a quick healer. But Twinkle, now, she got a worse deal. I guess there’s no way but I got to wash her head tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER VII

  A MESSAGE FROM UNCLE JIM

  THE golden days of June became the molten days of July. The sky was cloudless and the sun was a blinding glare. The winds that stirred the air were hotter than the air itself and seemed to be blown across a fiery furnace. The meadow-larks were silent, and the gardens on the breaking withered.

  Three weeks of the blazing sunshine. The green carpet that had unrolled before them two months ago disappeared, and a dry mat of slippery hay covered the earth. The corn was no longer shiny and green; the blades were pale yellow and crinkled with heat. Nobody said, any more, that it was good corn weather. At first they had complained that it was too dry; then they had said that they must get rain; now they had stopped talking about it. The few homesteaders that drove by on the trail were so discouraged and blue that they frequently didn’t rein up their horses at all as they passed by.

  Becky and Dick made a brave fight to save the garden. They shielded the sickly plants from the sun with cloths and tin cans; they hoed the earth around and around the roots; they carried pail after pail of water to the clearing. But the tendrils of the cucumbers burned away, the melon vines were seared, and the tomatoes hung their limp heads. One by one the leaves on the two transplanted trees turned yellow, withered, blew away. Even Castor and Pollux looked ready to die, though each day Becky loosened the dirt around their roots, and each night she carried water from the creek to pour around them.

  “I just can’t bear to lose them,” she said. “They’re the only green thing I can see from the window.”

  “Wish we’d had a picture taken of the claim before everything dried up,” said Joan. “Our place looks almost as bad as the Welpses, now. If we had a contest there wouldn’t be anything to show for all that work we did.”

  “I’d just as soon the Welps would get the land, if this is the kind of summers they have in Tripp County. I don’t think this is much of a place to live,” growled Phil.

  The children no longer sought their old haunts. It was too hot to play near the little homestead; the prairie dog town blazed under the fierce sun; the creek was drying up. The last time they had played there water stood only in the deeper pools, and in one of the shallower basins Phil had counted twelve small striped snakes wriggling over one another in a vain attempt to get beneath the water. It was too hot to play; too hot to work. The children hung about in the shadow cast by the barn, listlessly trying and discarding schemes for comfort, and quarreling with each other. Becky’s nerves, already frayed by the heat, were more and more worn by the discord. The tiny kitchen was almost unbearable in the middle part of the day, and out of it came nothing that was appetizing. Bacon and ham and dried beef, canned vegetables, last year’s potatoes that were almost too limber to pare, butter that melted while it was being carried on the t
able, fried eggs, beans, dried fruit and milk was their fare, day after day. The children’s appetites began to wane.

  There was no prospect of change in their menu. For weeks they had been living in hope of that garden, watching each green head poke its way through the earth, rejoicing in each inch of growth. “Perhaps in a week the beans will be ready; by August we may be able to dig our first early potatoes.” But there was no chance of that now; no future of fruit or vegetables to look forward to. Unless they had rain now, at once, the garden was doomed. And there was no rain in sight. There was never a cloud in the sky, the sun held its shining course day after day, and the dry wind blew and blew and blew. Becky closed her ears with her hands, sometimes, to shut out the sound.

  On one of the hottest of these July days Dick was out in the garden. There was no further need of stirring the soil; what was turned up was as dry as the surface. He walked about through the yellowing rows, and with sinking heart looked at the ruin of his summer’s work. The potatoes had been the last to yield to the drought. They had flowered abundantly, and Dick and Becky had rejoiced over the prospect of a full crop. With milk and potatoes one could live, even if other things failed. Today he took the spading fork and turned up the dry earth around one of the plants. No potatoes. He dug around another: not a tuber there, either. He dug up a third and fourth. At the roots of the fifth he found one tiny potato, the size of an acorn.

  Two horseback riders crossed the creek, and came picking their way along the dusty trail. As they rounded the potato patch they gave a derisive “hi there!” and Dick looked up to see the grinning faces of the two Welp boys.

  “Fine potato crop you got,” remarked Pete.

  Dick made no reply, but went on digging.

  “Don’t worry over ’em; those are our spuds, not yours. Paw filed a contest on you yesterday.” And they rode on laughing.

  The dry dust from the potato field blew into Dick’s face as he looked down the trail at their retreating backs. He hoped Becky had not heard their remark. She would have to know about the contest, of course, but this was no time to tell her—while this blight lay upon the earth. She had enough to worry about now.