O Pioneers! | Page 8

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
record 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 prairiedog 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 distinguish 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 followed the markets,
and who learned by the mistakes of their neighbors. It was Alexandra
who could always tell about what it had cost to fatten 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 industrious, 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 considerable force and of some
fortune. Late in life he married