Other Main-Travelled Roads

Other Main-Travelled Roads, by Hamlin Garland

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Title: Other Main-Travelled Roads
Author: Hamlin Garland
Release Date: March 1, 2007 [EBook #20714]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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[Illustration: DADDY DEERING]
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OTHER MAIN-TRAVELLED ROADS
HAMLIN GARLAND SUNSET EDITION
HARPER & BROTHERS NEW YORK AND LONDON
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COPYRIGHT, 1892, 1899, 1910, BY HAMLIN GARLAND
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PRAIRIE FOLKS
PIONEERS
They rise to mastery of wind and snow; They go like soldiers grimly into strife, To colonize the plain; they plough and sow, And fertilize the sod with their own life As did the Indian and the buffalo.
SETTLERS
Above them soars a dazzling sky, In winter blue and clear as steel, In summer like an arctic sea Wherein vast icebergs drift and reel And melt like sudden sorcery.
Beneath them plains stretch far and fair, Rich with sunlight and with rain; Vast harvests ripen with their care And fill with overplus of grain Their square, great bins.
Yet still they strive! I see them rise At dawn-light, going forth to toil: The same salt sweat has filled my eyes, My feet have trod the self-same soil Behind the snarling plough.
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PREFACE
Nearly all the stories in this volume were written at the same time and under the same impulse as those which compose its companion volume, Main-Travelled Roads--and the entire series was the result of a summer-vacation visit to my old home in Iowa, to my father's farm in Dakota, and, last of all, to my birthplace in Wisconsin. This happened in 1887. I was living at the time in Boston, and had not seen the West for several years, and my return to the scenes of my boyhood started me upon a series of stories delineative of farm and village life as I knew it and had lived it. I wrote busily during the two years that followed, and in this revised definitive edition of Main-Travelled Roads and its companion volume, Other Main-Travelled Roads (compiled from other volumes which now go out of print), the reader will find all of the short stories which came from my pen between 1887 and 1889.
It remains to say that, though conditions have changed somewhat since that time, yet for the hired man and the renter farm life in the West is still a stern round of drudgery. My pages present it--not as the summer boarder or the young lady novelist sees it--but as the working farmer endures it.
Not all the scenes of Other Main-Travelled Roads are of farm life, though rural subjects predominate; and the village life touched upon will be found less forbidding in color. In this I am persuaded my view is sound; for, no matter how hard the villager works, he is not lonely. He suffers in company with his fellows. So much may be called a gain. Then, too, I admit youth and love are able to transform a bleak prairie town into a poem, and to make of a barbed-wire lane a highway of romance.
HAMLIN GARLAND.
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Contents
PAGE
Introductory Verse v Preface vii William Bacon's Man 3 Elder Pill, Preacher 29 A Day of Grace 65 Lucretia Burns 81 Daddy Deering 119 A Stop-Over at Tyre 143 A Division in the Coolly 203 A Fair Exile 245 An Alien in the Pines 263 Before the Low Green Door 293 A Preacher's Love Story 305 An Afterword: of Winds, Snows, and The Stars 350
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WILLIAM BACON'S MAN
I
The yellow March sun lay powerfully on the bare Iowa prairie, where the ploughed fields were already turning warm and brown, and only here and there in a corner or on the north side of the fence did the sullen drifts remain, and they were so dark and low that they hardly appeared to break the mellow brown of the fields.
There passed also an occasional flock of geese, cheerful harbingers of spring, and the prairie-chickens had set up their morning symphony, wide-swelling, wonderful with its prophecy of the new birth of grass and grain and the springing life of all breathing things. The crow passed now and then, uttering his resonant croak, but the crane had not yet sent forth his bugle note.
Lyman Gilman rested on his axe-helve at the woodpile of Farmer Bacon to listen to the music around him. In a vague way he was powerfully moved by it. He heard the hens singing their weird, raucous, monotonous song, and saw them burrowing in the dry chip-dust near him. He saw the young colts and cattle frisking in the sunny space around the straw-stacks,