II
On one of the ridges of that wintry waste
stood the low log house in which John Bergson
was dying. The Bergson homestead was easier
to find than many another, because it over-
looked Norway Creek, a shallow, muddy stream
that sometimes flowed, and sometimes stood
still, at the bottom of a winding ravine with
steep, shelving sides overgrown with brush and
cottonwoods and dwarf ash. This creek gave a
sort of identity to the farms that bordered upon
it. Of all the bewildering things about a new
country, the absence of human landmarks is
one of the most depressing and disheartening.
The houses on the Divide were small and were
usually tucked away in low places; you did not
see them until you came directly upon them.
Most of them were built of the sod itself, and
were only the unescapable ground in another
form. The roads were but faint tracks in the
grass, and the fields were scarcely noticeable.
The record of the plow was insignificant, like
the feeble scratches on stone left by prehistoric
races, so indeterminate that they may, after all,
be only the markings of glaciers, and not a rec-
ord of human strivings.
In eleven long years John Bergson had made
but little impression upon the wild land he had
come to tame. It was still a wild thing that had
its ugly moods; and no one knew when they
were likely to come, or why. Mischance hung
over it. Its Genius was unfriendly to man. The
sick man was feeling this as he lay looking out
of the window, after the doctor had left him,
on the day following Alexandra's trip to town.
There it lay outside his door, the same land, the
same lead-colored miles. He knew every ridge
and draw and gully between him and the
horizon. To the south, his plowed fields; to the
east, the sod stables, the cattle corral, the pond,
--and then the grass.
Bergson went over in his mind the things
that had held him back. One winter his cattle
had perished in a blizzard. The next summer
one of his plow horses broke its leg in a prairie-
dog hole and had to be shot. Another summer he
lost his hogs from cholera, and a valuable
stallion died from a rattlesnake bite. Time and
again his crops had failed. He had lost two
children, boys, that came between Lou and
Emil, and there had been the cost of sickness
and death. Now, when he had at last struggled
out of debt, he was going to die himself. He
was only forty-six, and had, of course, counted
upon more time.
Bergson had spent his first five years on the
Divide getting into debt, and the last six getting
out. He had paid off his mortgages and had
ended pretty much where he began, with the
land. He owned exactly six hundred and forty
acres of what stretched outside his door; his own
original homestead and timber claim, making
three hundred and twenty acres, and the half-
section adjoining, the homestead of a younger
brother who had given up the fight, gone back
to Chicago to work in a fancy bakery and dis-
tinguish himself in a Swedish athletic club. So
far John had not attempted to cultivate the
second half-section, but used it for pasture
land, and one of his sons rode herd there in
open weather.
John Bergson had the Old-World belief that
land, in itself, is desirable. But this land was
an enigma. It was like a horse that no one
knows how to break to harness, that runs wild
and kicks things to pieces. He had an idea that
no one understood how to farm it properly, and
this he often discussed with Alexandra. Their
neighbors, certainly, knew even less about
farming than he did. Many of them had
never worked on a farm until they took up
their homesteads. They had been HANDWERKERS
at home; tailors, locksmiths, joiners, cigar-
makers, etc. Bergson himself had worked in a
shipyard.
For weeks, John Bergson had been thinking
about these things. His bed stood in the sitting-
room, next to the kitchen. Through the day,
while the baking and washing and ironing were
going on, the father lay and looked up at the
roof beams that he himself had hewn, or out at
the cattle in the corral. He counted the cattle
over and over. It diverted him to speculate as
to how much weight each of the steers would
probably put on by spring. He often called his
daughter in to talk to her about this. Before
Alexandra was twelve years old she had begun
to be a help to him, and as she grew older he
had come to depend more and more upon her
resourcefulness and good judgment. His boys
were willing enough to work, but when he
talked with them they usually irritated him. It
was Alexandra who read the papers and fol-
lowed the markets, and who learned by the mis-
takes of their neighbors. It was Alexandra who
could always tell about what it had cost to fat-
ten each steer, and who could guess the weight
of a hog before it went on the scales closer than
John Bergson himself. Lou and Oscar were in-
dustrious, but he could never teach them to use
their heads about their work.
Alexandra, her father often said to himself,
was like her grandfather; which was his way of
saying that she was intelligent. John Bergson's
father had been a shipbuilder, a man of consid-
erable force and of some fortune. Late in life he
married a second time, a Stockholm woman of
questionable character, much younger than he,
who goaded him into every sort of extrava-
gance. On the shipbuilder's part, this marriage
was an infatuation, the despairing folly of a
powerful man who cannot bear to grow old.
In a few years his unprincipled wife warped the
probity of a lifetime. He speculated, lost his
own fortune and funds entrusted to him by
poor seafaring men, and died disgraced, leav-
ing his children nothing. But when all was said,
he had come up from the sea himself, had built
up a proud little business with no capital but his
own skill and foresight, and had proved himself
a man. In his daughter, John Bergson recog-
nized the strength of will, and the simple direct
way of thinking things out, that had charac-
terized his father in his better days. He would
much rather, of course, have seen this likeness
in one of his sons, but it was not a question of
choice. As he lay there day after day he had to
accept the situation as it was, and to be thank-
ful that there was one among his children to
whom he could entrust the future of his family
and the possibilities of his hard-won land.
The winter twilight was fading. The sick
man heard his wife strike a match in the kitchen,
and the light of a lamp glimmered through the
cracks of the door. It seemed like a light shin-
ing far away. He turned painfully in his bed
and looked at his white hands, with all the
work gone out of them. He was ready to give
up, he felt. He did not know how it had come
about, but he was quite willing to go deep un-
der his fields and rest, where the plow could not
find him. He was tired of making mistakes. He
was content to leave the tangle to other hands;
he thought of his Alexandra's strong ones.
"DOTTER," he called feebly, "DOTTER!" He
heard her quick step and saw her tall figure
appear in the doorway, with the light of the
lamp behind her. He felt her youth and
strength, how easily she moved and stooped
and lifted. But he would not have had it again
if he could, not he! He knew the end too well to
wish to begin again. He knew where it all went
to, what it all became.
His daughter came and lifted him up on his
pillows. She called him by an old Swedish name
that she used to call him when she was little
and took his dinner to him in the shipyard.
"Tell the boys to come here, daughter. I
want to speak to them."
"They are feeding the horses, father. They
have just come back from the Blue. Shall I
call them?"
He sighed. "No, no. Wait until they come
in. Alexandra, you will have to do the best you
can for your brothers. Everything will come on
you."
"I will do all I can, father."
"Don't let them get discouraged and go off
like Uncle Otto. I want them to keep the land."
"We will, father. We will never lose the
land."
There was a sound of heavy feet in the
kitchen. Alexandra went to the door and beck-
oned to her brothers, two strapping boys of
seventeen and nineteen. They came in and
stood at the foot of the bed. Their father looked
at them searchingly, though it was too dark to
see their faces; they were just the same boys, he
told himself, he had not been mistaken in them.
The square head and heavy shoulders belonged
to Oscar, the elder. The younger boy was
quicker, but vacillating.
"Boys," said the father wearily, "I want you
to keep the land together and to be guided by
your sister. I have talked to her since I have
been sick, and she knows all my wishes. I
want no quarrels among my children, and so
long as there is one house there must be one
head. Alexandra is the oldest, and she knows
my wishes. She will do the best she can. If she
makes mistakes, she will not make so many as
I have made. When you marry, and want a
house of your own, the land will be divided
fairly, according to the courts. But for the next
few years you will have it hard, and you must
all keep together. Alexandra will manage the
best she can."
Oscar, who was usually the last to speak,
replied because he was the older, "Yes, father.
It would be so anyway, without your speaking.
We will all work the place together."
"And you will be guided by your sister, boys,
and be good brothers to her, and good sons to
your mother? That is good. And Alexandra
must not work in the fields any more. There is
no necessity now. Hire a man when you need
help. She can make much more with her eggs
and butter than the wages of a man. It was
one of my mistakes that I did not find that out
sooner. Try to break a little more land every
year; sod corn is good for fodder. Keep turning
the land, and always put up more hay than you
need. Don't grudge your mother a little time
for plowing her garden and setting out fruit
trees, even if it comes in a busy season. She has
been a good mother to you, and she has always
When they went back to the kitchen the boys
sat down silently at the table. Throughout the
meal they looked down at their plates and did
not lift their red eyes. They did not eat much,
although they had been working in the cold all
day, and there was a rabbit stewed in gravy for
supper, and prune pies.
John Bergson had married beneath him, but
he had married a good housewife. Mrs. Berg-
son was a fair-skinned, corpulent woman, heavy
and placid like her son, Oscar, but there was
something comfortable about her; perhaps it
was her own love of comfort. For eleven years
she had worthily striven to maintain some sem-
blance of household order amid conditions that
made order very difficult. Habit was very
strong with Mrs. Bergson, and her unremitting
efforts to repeat the routine of her old life among
new surroundings had done a great deal to keep
the family from disintegrating morally and get-
ting careless in their ways. The Bergsons had
a log house, for instance, only because Mrs.
Bergson would not live in a sod house. She
missed the fish diet of her own country, and
twice every summer she sent the boys to the
river, twenty miles to the southward, to fish
for channel cat. When the children were little
she used to load them all into the wagon, the
baby in its crib, and go fishing herself.
Alexandra often said that if her mother were cast upon a desert island, she would thank God for her deliverance, make a garden, and find something to preserve. Preserving was almost a mania with Mrs. Bergson. Stout as she was, she roamed the scrubby banks of Norway Creek looking for fox grapes and goose plums, like a wild creature in search of prey. She made a yel- low jam of the insipid ground-cherries that grew on the prairie, flavoring it with lemon peel; and she made a sticky dark conserve of garden toma- toes. She had experimented even with the rank buffalo-pea, and she could not see a fine bronze cluster of them without shaking her head and murmuring, "What a pity!" When there was nothing more to preserve, she began to pickle. The amount of sugar she used in these processes was sometimes a serious drain upon the family resources. She was a good mother, but she was glad when her children were old enough not to be in her way in the kitchen. She had never quite forgiven John Bergson for bringing her to the end of the earth; but, now that she was there, she wanted to be let alone to reconstruct her old life in so far as that was possible. She could still take some comfort in the world if she had bacon in the cave, glass jars on the shelves, and sheets in the press. She disap- proved of all her neighbors because of their slovenly housekeeping, and the women thought her very proud. Once when Mrs. Bergson, on her way to Norway Creek, stopped to see old Mrs. Lee, the old woman hid in the haymow "for fear Mis' Bergson would catch her bare- foot."
