He had been passing through a running fire of questions from the child for two years, but these questions now took hold of deeper things, and they could no longer be put aside by saying, "Wait a few years and then I'll tell you." She would learn them elsewhere, if not from him. He braced himself for the trial, which increased in severity.
The child's horizon was limited, but within its circle her searching eyes let nothing escape. She came to Dutcher with appalling questions.
She not only asked him, "Who made God?" but she wanted to know how she came to be born, and a thousand other questions of the same searching nature. He saw that the day of petty fictions had gone by. The child knew that little lambs, and calves, and kittens did not grow down in the woods. She knew that babies were not brought by the doctor, and that they did not come from heaven.
"Good Lord!" groaned her father one day, after an unusually persistent attack from her, caused by the appearance of a little colt out in the barn, "I wish your mother was here, or some woman. You do make it hard for me, Rosie."
"How do I make it hard for you, pappa?" was her quick new question. "O, Lord, what a young un," he said, in deeper despair. "Come, ain't it about time for you to be leggin' it toward school? Give me a rest, Rosie. But I'll answer all your questions—don't ask about them things of the children—come right to me always—only don't pile 'em all on me to once."
"All right, pappa, I won't."
"That's a good old soul!" he said, patting her on the back. After she had gone he sat down on the feed-box and wiped his face. "I wonder how women do explain things like that to girls," he thought. "I'll ask the preacher's wife to explain it—no, I won't. I'll do it myself, and I'll get her books to read about it—good books."
It was evidence of the girl's innate strength and purity of soul that the long succession of hired hands had not poisoned her mind. They soon discovered, however, the complete confidence between the father and child, and knew that their words and actions would be taken straight to John as soon as night came and Rose climbed into his lap. This made them careful before her, and the shame of their words and stories came to the child's ears only in fragments.
Dutcher concluded that he should have a woman in the house, and so sent back to Pennsylvania for his sister, lately widowed. Rose looked forward to seeing her aunt with the wildest delight. She went with her father down the valley to Bluff Siding to meet her. Bluff Siding was the only town the child knew, and it was a wonderful thing to go to town.
As they stood on the platform, waiting, her eyes swept along the great curve of the rails to the east, and suddenly, like a pain in the heart, came her first realization of distance, of the infinity of the world.
"Where does it go to, pappa?"
"O, a long way off. To Madison, Chicago, and Pennsylvany."
"How far is it? Could we go there with old Barney and Nell?"
"O, no. If we drove there it would take us days and days, and the wheat would grow up and get yellow, an' the snow come, almost, before we'd get there."
"O, dear!" she sighed. "I don't like to have it so big. Do people live all along the whole way?"
"Yes, the whole way, and lots of big cities."
"Big as Madison?" Madison was her unseen measure of greatness.
"O, yes. A hundred times bigger."
She sighed again and looked away to the east with a strange, unchildish, set stare in her eyes. She was trying to realize it.
"It makes me ache, pappa," she sighed, putting her little brown hand to her throat.
When the engine came in with its thunder and whizz, she shrank back against the station wall, white and breathless, not so much with fear as with awe. She had never stood so close to this monster before. It attracted all her attention so that for the moment she forgot about the coming of her aunt.
When she looked into the large dull face of Mrs. Diehl she was deeply disappointed. She liked her but she not love her!
She had looked forward to her coming almost as if to the return of her mother. She had imagined her looking strange and beautiful because she came out of the mystical, far-off land her father often spoke of. Instead of these things Mrs. Diehl was a strong-featured, mild-voiced woman, rather large and ungraceful, who looked upon the motherless child and clicked her tongue—tch!
"You poor chick!"
But the thing which had happened was this: Rose had conceived of distance and great cities.
The next day she said: "Pappa John, I want to go way up on the bluffs. I want to go up to Table Rock where I can see way, way off."
"It's a long climb up there, Rosie. You'll get tired."
But Rosie insisted and together they climbed the hill. Up beyond the pasture—beyond the black-berry patch—beyond the clinging birches in their white jackets—up where the rocks cropped out of the ground and where curious little wave-worn pebbles lay scattered on the scant grass.
Once a glittering rattle-snake lying in the sun awoke, and slipped under a stone like a stream of golden oil, and the child shrank against her father's thigh in horror.
They climbed slowly up the steep grassy slope and stood at last on the flat rock which topped the bluff. Rose stood there, dizzy, out of breath, with her hair blown across her cheek and looked away, at the curving valley and its river gleaming here and there through the willows and elders. It was like looking over an unexplored world to the child. Her eyes expanded and her heart filled with the same ache which came into it when she looked down along the curving railway track. She turned suddenly and fell sobbing against her father.
"Why, Rosie, what's the matter? Poor little girl—she's all tired out, climbin' up here." He sat down and took her on his lap and talked to her of the valley below and where the river went—but she would not look up again.
"I want to go home," she said with hidden face.
On the way down, John rolled a big stone down the hill and as it went bounding, crashing into the forest below, a deer drifted out like a gray shadow and swept along the hillside and over the ridge.
Rose saw it as if in a dream. She did not laugh nor shout. John was troubled by her silence and gravity, but laid it to weariness and took her pick-a-back on the last half mile through the brush.
That scene came to her mind again and again in the days which followed, but she did not see it again till the following spring. It appealed to her with less power then. Its beauty over-shadowed its oppressive largeness. As she grew older it came to be her favorite playing ground on holidays. She brought down those quaint little bits of limestone and made them her playthings in her house, which was next door to her barn—and secondary to her barn.
CHAPTER II
CHILD-LIFE, PAGAN FREE
Rose lived the life of the farm girls in the seven great Middle-West States. In summer she patted away to school, clad only in a gingham dress, white untrimmed cotton pantalets, and a straw hat that was made feminine by a band of gay ribbon. Her body was as untrammeled as a boy's. She went bare-foot and bare-headed at will, and she was part of all the sports.
She helped the boys snare gophers, on the way to school,