CHAPTER I
IN THE FURROW
The coulée was a long, scarlet gash in the brown level of the Dakota prairie, for the sumach, dyed by the frosts of the early autumn, covered its sides like a cloth whose upper folds were thrown far over the brinks of the winding ravine and, southward, half-way to the new cottonwood shack of the Lancasters. Near it, a dark band against the flaming shrub, stretched the plowed strip, narrow, but widening with each slow circuit of the team as the virgin, grass-grown land was turned by the mould-board to prepare for the corn-planting of the coming spring.
The sun, just risen, shone coldly upon the plain, and a wind, bearing with it a hint of raw weather and whirling snow, swept down the Missouri valley from the north, marshalling in its front hosts of gabbling ducks and honking geese that were taking noisy flight from a region soon to be buried and already bleak. Yet with all the chill in the air, Ben and Betty, the mules, steamed as they toiled to and fro, and lolled out their tongues with the warmth of their work and the effort of keeping straight in the furrow; and Dallas, following in their wake with the reins about her shoulders and the horns of the plow in a steadying grasp, took off her slouch hat at the turnings to bare her damp forehead, drew the sleeve of her close-fitting jersey across her face every few moments, and, at last, to aid her in making better progress, as well as to cool her ankles, brought the bottom of her skirt through the waistband, front and back, and walked in her red flannel petticoat. As she travelled, she looked skyward occasionally with a troubled face, and, resting but seldom, urged the team forward. Clear weather and sunshine would not long continue, and the first field on the claim must be turned up and well harrowed before the opening of winter.
"Come, Ben, come," she called coaxingly to the nigh mule. "If you don't dig in now, how d' you expect to have anything to eat next winter? Betty, Betty, don't let Ben do it all; I'm talking to you, too. Come along, come along."
Ben and Betty, lean, and grey with age, bent willingly to their labour at the sound of her voice. Their harnesses creaked a monotonous complaint with their renewed efforts, the colter came whining behind them. As Dallas gently slapped the lines along their backs, now and then, to emphasise her commands, clouds of dust, which had been gathered as mud in the buffalo-wallow where they went each evening to roll, ascended and were blown away. Faithfully they pulled, not even lifting an eyelid or flapping an ear in protest when Simon, the stray yearling bull that had adopted the claim as its home and tagged Dallas everywhere, bellowed about their straining legs or loitered at their very noses and impeded their way.
Plowing was strange work to the patient mules and to the girl who was guiding them. To her, the level prairie, rank with goldenrod, pink-flowered smartweed, and purple aster, was a land of wondrous growth. For twenty years her home had been an arid mesa far to the south, where her father captained the caretakers of a spur railroad track. The most western station-house in Texas, standing amid thorny mesquite, was her birthplace and that of her sister Marylyn; the grey plateau across which the embankment led was their playground; there they grew to womanhood under the careful guidance of their frail, Northern-born mother.
And then two casualties, coming close upon each other, had suddenly changed their life. Their father was brought home one night so maimed and crushed by the wheels of a flat-car that he could never hope to take up his work again; and while he lay, bandaged and broken, fighting to keep the soul in his crippled body, their mother bravely yielded her life to a lingering illness.
Many months later, when Evan Lancaster's wounds were at last healed, Ben and Betty were unhitched from a dirt-laden scraper on the siding and put before a white-topped prairie-schooner. Then the old section-boss, with his crutches beside him and his daughters seated in the all but empty box behind, said a husky farewell to the men crowding around the wagon, and started the mules along the road that led northward beside the rails.
He gave no backward glance at the wind-battered house where he had brought an ailing bride; instead, eager to leave that plain of flying sand and scanty grasses, he drove the team rapidly forward, bound for a country where there were wells, and not water-cars, where rain fell oftener, and where food, both for man