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