Dust | Page 6

jests that now, when the tired, ill-nourished baby had fretted his
last, old Brindle, waxing fat and sleek on the wheat pasture, should
give more rich cream than the Wades could use. "He could have lived
on the skimmed milk we feed to the pigs," thought Martin.

In the Spring he went with his father into Fallon, the nearest trading
point, to see David Robinson, the owner of the local bank. By giving a
chattel mortgage on their growing wheat, they borrowed enough, at
twenty per cent, to buy seed corn and a plow. It was Wade's last effort.
Before the corn was in tassel, he had been laid beside Benny.
Martin, who already had been doing a man's work, now assumed a
man's responsibilities. Mrs. Wade consulted more and more with him,
relied more and more upon his judgment. She was immensely proud of
him, of his steadiness and dependability, but at rare moments,
remembering her own normal childhood, she would think with
compunction: "It ain't right. Young 'uns ought to have some fun. Seems
like it's makin' him too old for his age." She never spoke of these
feelings, however. There were no expressions of tenderness in the
Wade household. She was doing her best by her children and they knew
it. Even Nellie, child that she was, understood the grimness of the battle
before them.
They were able to thresh enough wheat to repay their debt of six
hundred bushels and keep an additional three hundred of seed for the
following year. The remaining seven hundred and fifty they sold at
twenty-five cents a bushel by hauling them to Fort Scott--thirty miles
distant. Each trip meant ten dollars, but to the Wades, to whom this one
hundred and eighty-seven dollars--the first actual money they had seen
in over a year--was a fortune, these journeys were rides of triumph,
fugitive flashes of glory in the long, gray struggle.
That Fall they paid the first installment of two hundred dollars on their
land and Martin persuaded his mother to give and Robinson to take a
chattel on their two horses, old Brindle, her calf and the pigs, that other
much-needed implements might be bought. Mrs. Wade toiled early and
late, doing part of the chores and double her share of the Spring
plowing that Martin, as well as Nellie, could attend school in Fallon.
"I don't care about goin'," he had protested squirmingly.
But on this matter his mother was without compromise. "Don't say
that," she had commanded, her voice shaken and her eyes bright with
the intensity of her emotion; "you're goin' to get an education."
And Martin, surprised and embarrassed by his mother's unusual
exhibition of feeling, had answered, roughly: "Aw, well, all right then.
Don't take on. I didn't say I wouldn't, did I?"

He was twenty-three and Nellie sixteen when, worn out and broken
down before her time, her resistance completely undermined, Mrs.
Wade died suddenly of pneumonia. Within the year Nellie married Bert
Mall, Peter's eldest son, and Martin, at once, bought out her half
interest in the farm, stock and implements, giving a first mortgage to
Robinson in order to pay cash.
"I'm making it thirty dollars an acre," he explained.
"That's fair," conceded the banker, "though the time will come when it
will be cheap at a hundred and a half. There's coal under all this county,
millions of dollars' worth waiting to be mined."
"Maybe," assented Martin, laconically.
As he sat in the dingy, little backroom of the bank, while Robinson's
pen scratched busily drawing up the papers, he was conscious of an odd
thrill. The land--it was all his own! But with this thrill welled a wave of
resentment over what he considered a preposterous imposition. Who
had made the land into a farm? What had Nellie ever put into it that it
should be half hers? His mother--now, that was different. She and he
had toiled side by side like real partners; her efforts had been real and
unstinted. If he were buying her out, for instance --but Nellie! Well,
that was the way, he noticed, with many women--doing little and
demanding much. He didn't care for them; not he. From the day Nellie
left, Martin managed alone in the shack, "baching it," and putting his
whole heart and soul into the development of his quarter-section.

II
OUT OF THE DUST
AT thirty-four, Martin was still unmarried, and though he had not
travelled far on that strange road to affluence which for some seems a
macadamized boulevard, but for so many, like himself, a rough
cow-path, he had done better than the average farmer of Fallon County.
To be sure, this was nothing over which to gloat. A man who received
forty cents a bushel for wheat was satisfied; corn