Part 6

Jim looked out of the window a long time, at the gentle undulations of the brown Iowa prairie. His eyes seemed to pierce beneath the sod, to the swelling buds of the yet invisible grass. He noticed how disdainfully the rains of the new year beat down the grasses of the year that was gone. It opened to his mind a vision of the season's possibilities. For a moment, even amid the smoke of the car, he seemed to scent clover, and hear the stiff swishing of the corn and the dull burring of the bees.

“I wish sometimes,” he said, leaning forward to look at his bride, “that I had been born something else than a farmer. But I can no more help farming, Annie, than a bird can help singing, or a bee making honey. I didn't take to farming. I was simply born with a hoe in my hand.”

“I don't know a blessed thing about it,” Annie confessed. “But I made up my mind that a farm with you was better than a town without you. That's all there is to it, as far as I am concerned.”

Jim Lancy slid his arm softly about her waist, unseen by the other passengers. Annie looked up apprehensively, to see if any one was noticing. But they were eating their lunches. It was a common coach on which they were riding. There was a Pullman attached to the train, and Annie had secretly thought that, as it was their wedding journey, it might be more becoming to take it. But Jim had made no suggestion about it. What he said later explained the reason.

“I would have liked to have brought you a fine present,” he said. “It seemed shabby to come with nothing but that little ring. But I put everything I had on our home, you know. And yet, I'm sure you'll think it poor enough after what you've been used to. You'll forgive me for only bringing the ring, my dear?”

“But you brought me something better,” Annie whispered. She was a foolish little girl. “You brought me love, you know.” Then they rode in silence for a long time. Both of them were new to the phraseology of love. Their simple compliments to each other were almost ludicrous. But any one who might have chanced to overhear them would have been charmed, for they betrayed an innocence as beautiful as an unclouded dawn.

Annie tried hard not to be depressed by the treeless stretches of the Nebraska plains.

“This is different from Illinois,” she ventured once, gently; “it is even different from Iowa.”

“Yes, yes,” cried Jim, enthusiastically, “it is different! It is the finest country in the world! You never feel shut in. You can always see off. I feel at home after I get in Nebraska. I'd choke back where you live, with all those little gullies and the trees everywhere. It's a mystery to me how farmers have patience to work there.”

Annie opened her eyes. There was evidently more than one way of looking at a question. The farm-houses seemed very low and mean to her, as she looked at them from the window. There were no fences, excepting now and then the inhospitable barbed wire. The door-yards were bleak to her eyes, without the ornamental shrubbery which every farmer in her part of the country was used to tending. The cattle stood unshedded in their corrals. The reapers and binders stood rusting in the dull drizzle.

“How shiftless!” cried Annie, indignantly. “What do these men mean by letting their machinery lie out that way? I should think one winter of lying out would hurt it more than three summers of using.”

“It does. But sheds are not easily had. Lumber is dear.”

“But I should think it would be economy even then.”

“Yes,” he said, “perhaps. But we all do that way out here. It takes some money for a man to be economical with. Some of us haven't even that much.”

There was a six-mile ride from the station. The horses were waiting, hitched up to a serviceable light wagon, and driven by the “help.” He was a thin young man, with red hair, and he blushed vicariously for Jim and Annie, who were really too entertained with each other, and at the idea of the new life opening up before them, to think anything about blushing. At the station, a number of men insisted on shaking hands with Jim, and being introduced to his wife. They were all bearded, as if shaving were an unnecessary labor, and their trousers were tucked in dusty top-boots, none of which had ever seen blacking. Annie had a sense of these men seeming unwashed, or as if they had slept in their clothes. But they had kind voices, and their eyes were very friendly. So she shook hands with them all with heartiness, and asked them to drive out and bring their womenkind.

“I am going to make up my mind not to be lonesome,” she declared; “but, all the same, I shall want to see some women.”

Annie had got safe on the high seat of the wagon, and was balancing her little feet on the inclined foot-rest, when a woman came running across the street, calling aloud,--

“Mr. Lancy! Mr. Lancy! You're not going to drive away without introducing me to your wife!”

She was a thin little woman, with movements as nervous and as graceless as those of a grasshopper. Her dun-colored garments seemed to have all the hue bleached out of them with wind and weather. Her face was brown and wrinkled, and her bright eyes flashed restlessly, deep in their sockets. Two front teeth were conspicuously missing; and her faded hair was blown in wisps about her face. Jim performed the introduction, and Annie held out her hand. It was a pretty hand, delicately gloved in dove color. The woman took it in her own, and after she had shaken it, held it for a silent moment, looking at it. Then she almost threw it from her. The eyes which she lifted to scan the bright young face above her had something like agony in them. Annie blushed under this fierce scrutiny, and the woman, suddenly conscious of her demeanor, forced a smile to her lips.

“I'll come out an' see yeh,” she said, in cordial tones. “May be, as a new housekeeper, you'll like a little advice. You've a nice place, an' I wish yeh luck.”

“Thank you. I'm sure I'll need advice,” cried Annie, as they drove off. Then she said to Jim, “Who is that old woman?”

“Old woman? Why, she ain't a day over thirty, Mis' Dundy ain't.”

Annie looked at her husband blankly. But he was already talking of something else, and she asked no more about the woman, though all the way along the road the face seemed to follow her. It might have been this that caused the tightening about her heart. For some way her vivacity had gone; and the rest of the ride she asked no questions, but sat looking straight before her at the northward stretching road, with eyes that felt rather than saw the brown, bare undulations, rising every now and then clean to the sky; at the side, little famished-looking houses, unacquainted with paint, disorderly yards, and endless reaches of furrowed ground, where in summer the corn had waved.

The horses needed no indication of the line to make them turn up a smooth bit of road that curved away neatly 'mid the ragged grasses. At the end of it, in a clump of puny scrub oaks, stood a square little house, in uncorniced simplicity, with blank, uncurtained windows staring out at Annie, and for a moment her eyes, blurred with the cold, seemed to see in one of them the despairing face of the woman with the wisps of faded hair blowing about her face.

“Well, what do you think of it?” Jim cried, heartily, swinging her down from her high seat, and kissing her as he did so. “This is your home, my girl, and you are as welcome to it as you would be to a palace, if I could give it to you.”

Annie put up her hands to hide the trembling of her lips; and she let Jim see there were tears in her eyes as an apology for not replying. The young man with the red hair took away the horses, and Jim, with his arm around his wife's waist, ran toward the house and threw open the door for her to enter. The intense heat of two great stoves struck in their faces; and Annie saw the big burner, erected in all its black hideousness in the middle of the front room, like a sort of household hoodoo, to be constantly propitiated, like the gods of Greece; and in the kitchen, the new range, with a distracted tea-kettle leaping on it, as if it would like to loose its fetters and race away over the prairie after its cousin, the locomotive.

It was a house of four rooms, and a glance revealed the fact that it had been provided with the necessaries.

“I think we can be very comfortable here,” said Jim, rather doubtfully.