_ BOOK IV. THE DAY OF THE PLOUGH
CHAPTER XXXIII. THE GREAT COLD
The land lay trusting and defenceless under a cynical sky, which was unthreatening but mocking. Dotting a stretch of country thirty miles on either side of the railway, and extending as far to the east and west along its line, there were scattered hundreds of homes, though often these were separated one from the other by many miles of open prairie. Fences and fields appeared, and low stacks of hay and straw here and there stood up above the vast gray surface of the old buffalo and cattle range. Some of these houses were board "shacks," while others were of sods, and yet others, these among the earliest established on the plains, the useful dugout, half above and half beneath the ground. Yet each building, squat or tall, small or less small, was none the less a home. Most of them contained families. Men had brought hither their wives and children--little children, sometimes babes, tender, needful of warmth and care. For these stood guardian the gaunt coal chutes of the town, with the demands of a population of twenty-five hundred, to say nothing of the settlers round about, a hundred tons for a thousand families, scattered, dwelling out along breaks and
coulees, and on worn hillsides, and at the ends of long, faint, wandering trails, which the first whirl of snow would softly and cruelly wipe away.
Yet there was no snow. There had been none the winter before. The trappers and skin-hunters said that the winter was rarely severe. The railroad men had ranged west all the winter, throats exposed and coats left at the wagons. It was a mild country, a gentle, tender country. In this laughing sky who could see any cynicism? The wind was cold, and the wild fowl flew clamouring south from the sheeted pools, but the great hares did not change their colour, and the grouse stayed brown, and the prairie dogs barked joyously. No harm could come to any one. The women and children were safe. Besides, was there not coal at the town? Quite outside of this, might not one burn coarse grass if necessary, or stalks of corn, or even ears of corn? No tree showed in scores of miles, and often from smoke to tiny smoke it was farther than one could see, even in the clear blue mocking morn; yet the little houses were low and warm, and each had its makeshift for fuel, and in each the husband ate, and the wife sewed, and the babes wept and prattled as they have in generations past; and none looked on the sky to call it treacherous.
One morning the sun rose with a swift bound into a cloudless field. The air was mild, dead, absolutely silent and motionless. The wires along the railway alone sang loudly, as though in warning--a warning unfounded and without apparent cause. Yet the sighing in the short grass was gone. In the still air the smokes of the town rose directly upright; and answering to them faint, thin spires rose here and there far out over the prairies, all straight, unswerving, ominous, terrible. There was a great hush, a calm, a pause upon all things. The sky was blue and cloudless, but at last it could not conceal the mockery it bore upon its face, so that when men looked at it and listened to the singing of the wires they stopped, and without conscious plan hurried on, silent, to the nearest company.
Somewhere, high up in the air, unheralded, invisible, there were passing some thin inarticulate sounds, far above the tops of the tallest smoke spires, as though some Titan blew a far jest across the continent to another near the sea, who answered with a gusty laugh, sardonic, grim, foreknowing. Every horse free on the range came into the
coulees that morning, and those which were fenced in ran up and down excitedly. Men ate and smoked, and women darned, and babes played. In a thousand homes there was content with this new land, so wild at one time, but now so quickly tamed, so calm, so gentle, so thoroughly subdued.
The sun came on, valiantly stripped bare, knowing what was to be. Still louder rose the requiem of the wire. The sky smiled on. There was no token to strike with alarm these human beings, their faculties dulled by a thousand years of differentiation. "Peace and goodwill," said men; for now it was coming on to Christmastide. But the wire was seeking to betray the secret of the sky, which was resolved to carry war, to sweep these beings from the old range that once was tenantless!
To the north there appeared a long, black cloud, hanging low as the trail of some far-off locomotive, new upon the land. Even the old hunters might have called it but the loom of the line of the distant sand hills upon the stream. But all at once the cloud sprang up, unfurling tattered battle flags, and hurrying to meet the sun upon the zenith battle ground. Then the old hunters and trappers saw what was betokened. A man came running, laughing, showing his breath white on the air. The agent at the depot called sharply to the cub to shut the door. Then he arose and looked out, and hurried to his sender to wire east along the road for coal, train loads of coal, all the coal that could be hurried on! This man knew the freight of the country, in and out, and he had once trapped for a living along these same hills and plains. He knew what was the meaning of the cloud, and the tall pointed spires of smoke, and the hurrying naked sun.
The cloud swept up and onward, and all persons closed their doors, and said that Christmas would be cold. In a quarter of an hour they saw their chronology late by a day. In half an hour they noted a gray mist drive across the sky. There was a faint wavering and spreading and deflection at the top of the tallest spire of smoke. Somewhere, high above, there passed a swarm of vast humming bees.
Out in the country, miles away from town, a baby played in the clear air, resting its plump knees in the shallow layer of chips where once a pile of wood had been. It turned its face up toward the sky, and something soft and white and cool dropped down upon its cheek.
In mid-sky met the sun and the cloud, and the sun was vanquished, and all the world went gray. Then, with a shriek and a whirl of a raw and icy air which dropped, dropped down, colder and colder and still more cold, all the world went white. This snow came not down from the sky, but slantwise across the land, parallel with the earth, coming from the open side of the coldest nether hell hidden in the mysterious North. Over it sang the air spirits. Above, somewhere, there was perhaps a sky grieving at its perfidy. Across the world the Titans laughed and howled. All the elements were over-ridden by a voice which said, "I shall have back my own!" For presently the old Plains were back again, and over them rushed the wild winds in their favourite ancient game.
Once the winds pelted the slant snow through the interstices of the grasses upon the furry back of the cowering coyote. Now they found a new sport in driving the icy powder through the cracks of the loose board shanty, upon the stripped back of the mother huddling her sobbing children against the empty, impotent stove, perhaps wrapping her young in the worn and whitened robe of the buffalo taken years ago. For it was only the buffalo, though now departed, which held the frontier for America in this unprepared season, the Christmas of the Great Cold. The robes saved many of the children, and now and then a mother also.
The men who had no fuel did as their natures bid, some dying at the ice-bound stove, and others in the open on their way for fuel; for this great storm, known sometimes as the Double Norther, had this deadly aspect, that at the end of the first day it cleared, the sky offering treacherous flag of truce, afterward to slay those who came forth and were entrapped. In that vast, seething sea of slantwise icy nodules not the oldest plainsman could hold notion of the compass. Many men died far away from home, some with their horses, and others far apart from where the horses stood, the latter also in many cases frozen stiff. Mishap passed by but few of the remoter homes found unprepared with fuel, and Christmas day, deceitfully fair, dawned on many homes that were to be fatherless, motherless, or robbed of a first-born. Thus it was that from this, the hardiest and most self-reliant population ever known on earth, there rose the heartbroken cry for comfort and for help, the frontier for the first time begging aid to hold the skirmish line. Indeed, back from this skirmish line there came many broken groups, men who had no families, or families that had no longer any men. It was because of this new game the winds had found upon the plains, and because of the deceitful double storm.
Men came into Ellisville white with the ice driven into their buffalo coats and hair and beards, their mouths mumbling, their feet stumbling and heavy. They begged for coal, and the agent gave to each, while he could, what one might carry in a cloth, men standing over the supply with rifles to see that fairness was enforced. After obtaining such pitiful store, men started back home again, often besought or ordered not to leave the town, but eager to die so much the closer to their families.
After the storm had broken, little relief parties started out, provided with section maps and lists of names from the Land Office. These sometimes were but counting parties. The wolves had new feed that winter, and for years remembered it, coming closer about the settlements, sometimes following the children as they went to school. The babe that touched with laughter the cool, soft thing that fell upon its cheek lay finally white and silent beneath a coverlid of white, and upon the floor lay others also shrouded; and up to the flapping door led tracks which the rescuing parties saw.
Sam Poston, the driver of the regular mail stage to the south, knew more of the condition of the settlers in that part of the country than any other man in Ellisville, and he gave an estimate which was alarming. There was no regular supply of fuel, he stated, and it was certain that the storm had found scores of families utterly unprepared. Of what that signifies, those who have lived only in the routine of old communities can have no idea whatever. For the most of us, when we experience cold, the remedy is to turn a valve, to press a knob, to ask forthwith for fuel. But if fuel be twenty miles away, in a sea of shifting ice and bitter cold, if it be somewhere where no man may reach it alive--what then? First, we burn the fence, if we can find it. Then we burn all loose things. We burn the chairs, the table, the bed, the doors-- Then we rebel; and then we dream.
Sam Poston came into the office where Franklin sat on Christmas eve, listening to the clinking rattle of the hard snow on the pane. Sam was white from head to foot. His face was anxious, his habitual uncertainty and diffidence were gone.
"Cap," said he, with no prelude, "the whole country below'll be froze out. This blizzard's awful."
"I know it," said Franklin. "We must get out with help soon as we can. How far down do you think the danger line begins?"
"Well, up to three or four miles out it's thicker settled, an' most o' the folks could git into town. As fur out as thirty mile to the south, they might git a little timber yet, over on the Smoky. The worst strip is fifteen to twenty-five mile below. Folks in there is sort o' betwixt an' between, an' if they're short o' fuel to-day they'll have to burn anything they can, that's all, fer a feller wouldn't last out in this storm very long if he got lost. It's the worst I ever see in the West."
Franklin felt a tightening at his heart. "About fifteen to twenty-five miles?" he said. Sam nodded. Both were silent.
"Look here, Cap," said the driver presently, "you've allus told me not to say nothin' 'bout the folks down to the Halfway House, an' I hain't said a thing. I 'low you got jarred down there some. I know how that is. All the same, I reckon maybe you sorter have a leanin' that way still. You may be worried some--"
"I am!" cried Franklin. "Tell me, how were they prepared--would they have enough to last them through?"
"None too much," said Sam. "The old man was tellin' me not long back that he'd have to come in 'fore long to lay him in his coal for the winter. O' course, they had the corrals, an' some boards, an' stuff like that layin' 'round. They had the steps to the dugout, an' some little wood about the win'mill, though they couldn't hardly git at the tank--"
Franklin groaned as he listened to this calm inventory of resources in a case so desperate. He sank into a chair, his face between his hands. Then he sprang up. "We must go!" he cried.
"I know it," said Sam simply.
"Get ready," exclaimed Franklin, reaching for his coat.
"What do you mean, Cap--now?"
"Yes, to-night--at once."
"You d----d fool!" said Sam.
"You coward!" cried Franklin. "What! Are you afraid to go out when people are freezing--when--"
Sam rose to his feet, his slow features working. "That ain't right, Cap," said he. "I know I'm scared to do some things, but I--I don't believe I'm no coward. I ain't afraid to go down there, but I won't go to-night, ner let you go, fer it's the same as death to start now. We couldn't maybe make it in the daytime, but I'm willin' to try it then. Don't you call no coward to me. It ain't right."
Franklin again cast himself into his chair, his hand and arm smiting on the table. "I beg your pardon, Sam," said he presently. "I know you're not a coward. We'll start together in the morning. But it's killing me to wait. Good God! they may be freezing now, while we're here, warm and safe!"
"That's so," said Sam sententiously. "We can't help it. We all got to go some day." His words drove Franklin again to his feet, and he walked up and down, his face gone pinched and old.
"I 'low we won't sleep much to-night, Cap," said Sam quietly. "Come on; let's go git some coffee, an' see if anybody here in town is needin' help. We'll pull out soon as we kin see in the mornin'."
They went out into the cold, staggering as the icy sheet drove full against them. Ellisville was blotted out. There was no street, but only a howling lane of white. Not half a dozen lights were visible. The tank at the railway, the big hotel, the station-house, were gone--wiped quite away. The Plains were back again!
"Don't git off the main street," gasped Sam as they turned their faces down wind to catch their breath. "Touch the houses all along. Lord! ain't it cold!"
Ellisville was safe, or all of it that they could stumblingly discover. The town did not sleep. People sat up, greeting joyously any who came to them, eating, drinking, shivering in a cold whose edge could not be turned. It was an age till morning--until that morning of deceit.
At dawn the wind lulled. The clouds swept by and the sun shone for an hour over a vast landscape buried under white. Sam was ready to start, having worked half the night making runners for a sled at which his wild team snorted in the terror of unacquaintedness. The sled box was piled full of robes and coal and food and liquor--all things that seemed needful and which could hurriedly be secured. The breath of the horses was white steam, and ice hung on the faces of the men before they had cleared the town and swung out into the reaches of the open prairies which lay cold and empty all about them. They counted the smokes--Peterson, Johnson, Clark, McGill, Townsend, one after another; and where they saw smoke they rejoiced, and where they saw none they stopped. Often it was but to nail fast the door.
With perfect horsemanship Sam drove his team rapidly on to the south, five miles, ten miles, fifteen, the horses now warming up, but still restless and nervous, even on the way so familiar to them from their frequent journeyings. The steam of their breath enveloped the travellers in a wide, white cloud. The rude runners crushed into and over the packed drifts, or along the sandy grime where the wind had swept the earth bare of snow. In less than an hour they would see the Halfway House. They would know whether or not there was smoke.
But in less than two hours on that morning of deceit the sun was lost again. The winds piped up, the cold continued, and again there came the blinding snow, wrapping all things in its dancing, dizzy mist.
In spite of the falling of the storm, Franklin and his companion pushed on, trusting to the instinct of the plains horses, which should lead them over a trail that they had travelled so often before. Soon the robes and coats were driven full of snow; the horses were anxious, restless, and excited. But always the runners creaked on, and always the two felt sure they were nearing the place they sought. Exposed so long in this bitter air, they were cut through with the chill, in spite of all the clothing they could wear, for the norther of the plains has quality of its own to make its victims helpless. The presence of the storm was awful, colossal, terrifying. Sometimes they were confused, seeing dark, looming bulks in the vague air, though a moment later they noted it to be but the packing of the drift in the atmosphere. Sometimes they were gloomy, not hoping for escape, though still the horses went gallantly on, driven for the most part down a wind which they never would have faced.
"The wind's just on my right cheek," said Sam, putting up a mitten. "But where's it gone?"
"You're frozen, man!" cried Franklin. "Pull up, and let me rub your face."
"No, no, we can't stop," said Sam, catching up some snow and rubbing his white cheek as he drove.
"Keep the wind on your right cheek--we're over the Sand Run now, I think, and on the long ridge, back of the White Woman. It can't be over two mile more.--Git along, boys. Whoa! What's the matter there?"
The horses had stopped, plunging at something which they could not pass. "Good God!" cried Franklin, "whose fence is that? Are we at Buford's?"
"No," said Sam, "this must be at old man Hancock's. He fenced across the old road, and we had to make a jog around his d----d broom-corn field. It's only a couple o' miles now to Buford's."
"Shall I tear down the fence?" asked Franklin.
"No, it's no use; it'd only let us in his field, an' maybe we couldn't hit the trail on the fur side. We got to follow the fence a way. May God everlastingly damn any man that'll fence up the free range!--Whoa, Jack! Whoa, Bill! Git out o' here! Git up!"
They tried to parallel the fence, but the horses edged away from the wind continually, so that it was difficult to keep eye upon the infrequent posts of the meagre, straggling fence that this man had put upon the "public lands."
"Hold on, Sam!" cried Franklin. "Let me out."
"That's right, Cap," said Sam. "Git out an' go on ahead a way, then holler to me, so'st I kin come up to you. When we git around the corner we'll be all right."
But when they got around the corner they were not all right. At such times the mind of man is thrown off its balance, so that it does strange and irregular things. Both these men had agreed a moment ago that the wind should be on the right; now they disagreed, one thinking that Hancock's house was to the left, the other to the right, their ideas as to the direction of the Buford ranch being equally at variance. The horses decided it, breaking once again down wind, and striking a low-headed, sullen trot, as though they would out-march the storm. And so the two argued, and so they rode, until at last there was a lurch and a crash, and they found themselves in rough going, the sled half overturned, with no fence, no house, no landmark of any sort visible, and the snow drifting thicker than before. They sprang out and righted the sled, but the horses doggedly pulled on, plunging down and down; and they followed, clinging to reins and sled as best they might.
Either accident or the instinct of the animals had in some way taken them into rough, broken country, where they would find some shelter from the bitter level blast. They were soon at the bottom of a flat and narrow valley, and above them the wind roared and drove ever on a white blanket that sought to cover them in and under.
"We've lost the trail, but we done the best we could," said Sam doggedly, going to the heads of the horses, which looked questioningly back at him, their heads drooping, their breath freezing upon their coats in spiculae of white.
"Wait!" cried Franklin. "I know this hole! I've been here before. The team's come here for shelter--"
"Oh, it's the White Woman breaks--why, sure!" cried Sam in return.
"Yes, that's where it is. We're less than half a mile from the house. Wait, now, and let me think. I've got to figure this out a while."
"It's off there," said Sam, pointing across the
coulee; "but we can't get there."
"Yes, we can, old man; yes, we can!" insisted Franklin. "I'll tell you. Let me think. Good God! why can't I think? Yes--see here, you go down the bottom of this gully to the mouth of the
coulee, and then we turn to the left--no, it's to the right--and you bear up along the side of the draw till you get to the ridge, and then the house is right in front of you. Listen, now! The wind's north-west, and the house is west of the head of the
coulee; so the mouth is east of us, and that brings the wind on the left cheek at the mouth of the
coulee, and it comes more and more on the right cheek as we turn up the ridge; and it's on the front half of the right cheek when we face the house, I'm sure that's right--wait, I'll mark it out here in the snow. God! how cold it is! It must be right. Come on; come! We must try it, anyway."
"We may hit the house, Cap," said Sam calmly, "but if we miss it we'll go God knows where! Anyhow, I'm with you, an' if we don't turn up, we can't help it, an' we done our best."
"Come," cried Franklin once more. "Let's get to the mouth of the
coulee. I know this place perfectly."
And so, advancing and calling, and waiting while Sam fought the stubborn horses with lash and rein out of the shelter which they coveted. Franklin led out of the flat coulee, into the wider draw, and edged up and up to the right, agonizedly repeating to himself, over and over again, the instructions he had laid down, and which the dizzy whirl of the snow mingled ever confusedly in his mind. At last they had the full gale again in their faces as they reached the level of the prairies, and cast loose for what they thought was west, fearfully, tremblingly, the voyage a quarter of a mile, the danger infinitely great; for beyond lay only the cruel plains and the bitter storm--this double norther of a woeful Christmastide.
Once again Providence aided them, by agency of brute instinct. One of the horses threw up its head and neighed, and then both pressed forward eagerly. The low moan of penned cattle came down the wind. They crashed into a fence of lath. They passed its end--a broken, rattling end, that trailed and swept back and forth in the wind.
"It's the chicken corral," cried Sam, "an' it's down! They've been burnin'--"
"Go on! go on--hurry!" shouted Franklin, bending down his head so that the gale might not quite rob him of his breath, and Sam urged on the now willing horses.
They came to the sod barn, and here they left the team that had saved them, not pausing to take them from the harness. They crept to the low and white-banked wall in which showed two windows, glazed with frost. They could not see the chimney plainly, but it carried no smell of smoke. The stairway leading down to the door of the dugout was missing, the excavation which held it was drifted full of snow, and the snow bore no track of human foot. All was white and silent. It might have been a vault far in the frozen northern sea.
Franklin burst open the door, and they both went in, half pausing. There was that which might well give them pause. The icy breath of the outer air was also here. Heaps and tongues of snow lay across the floor. White ashes lay at the doors of both the stoves. The table was gone, the chairs were gone. The interior was nearly denuded, so that the abode lay like an abandoned house, drifted half full of dry, fine powdered snow. And even this snow upon the floors had no tracks upon its surface. There was no sign of life.
Awed, appalled, the two men stood, white and huge, in the middle of the abandoned room, listening for that which they scarce expected to hear. Yet from one of the side rooms they caught a moan, a call, a supplication. Then from a door came a tall and white-faced figure with staring eyes, which held out its arms to the taller of the snow-shrouded forms and said: "Uncle, is it you? Have you come back? We were so afraid!" From the room behind this figure came a voice sobbing, shouting, blessing the name of the Lord. So they knew that two were saved, and one was missing.
They pushed into the remaining room. "Auntie went away," said the tall and white-faced figure, shuddering and shivering. "She went away into her room. We could not find the fence any more. Uncle, is it you? Come!" So they came to the bedside and saw Mrs. Buford lying covered with all her own clothing and much of that of Mary Ellen and Aunt Lucy, but with no robe; for the buffalo robes had all gone with the wagon, as was right, though unavailing. Under this covering, heaped up, though insufficient, lay Mrs. Buford, her face white and still and marble-cold. They found her with the picture of her husband clasped upon her breast.
"She went away!" sobbed Mary Ellen, leaning her head upon Franklin's shoulder and still under the hallucination of the fright and strain and suffering. She seemed scarce to understand that which lay before them, but continued to wander, babbling, shivering, as her arms lay on Franklin's shoulder. "We could not keep her warm," she said. "It has been very, very cold!" _