Where the Trail Divides | Page 5

Hans Mueller had been moving on and

on; another half minute and he would have been behind the base of the
hill out of sight; when, as from the turf at one's feet there springs
a-wing a covey of prairie grouse, from the tall grass about the retreating
figure there leaped forth a swarm of other similar dark figures: a dozen,
a score--in front, behind, all about. Apparently from mother earth
herself they had come, autochthonous. Almost unbelieving, the
spectator blinked his eyes; then, as came swift understanding,
instinctively he shielded the woman in his arms from the sight, from
the knowledge. Not a sound came to his ears from over the prairie: not
a single call for help. That black swarm simply arose, there was a brief,
sharp struggle, almost fantastic through the curling heat waves; then
one and all, the original dark figure, the score of others, disappeared--as
suddenly as though the earth from which they came had swallowed
them up. Look as he might, the spectator could catch no glimpse of a
moving object, except the green-brown grass carpet glistening under
the afternoon sun.
Yet a moment longer the man stood so; then, his own face as pale as
had been that of coward Hans Mueller, he leaned against the lintel of
the door.
"Yes, we're too late now, Margaret," he echoed.
CHAPTER II
FULFILMENT
The log cabin of Settler Rowland, as a landmark, stood forth. Barred it
was--the white of barked cotton-wood timber alternating with the
brown of earth that filled the spaces between--like the longitudinal
stripes of a prairie gopher or on the back of a bob-white. Long wiry
slough grass, razor-sharp as to blades, pungent under rain, weighted by
squares of tough, native sod, thatched the roof. Sole example of the
handiwork of man, it crowned one of the innumerable rises, too low to
be dignified by the name of hill, that stretched from sky to sky like the
miniature waves on the surface of a shallow lake. Back of it, stretching
northward, a vivid green blot, lay a field of sod corn: the ears already

formed, the ground whitened from the lavishly scattered pollen of the
frayed tassels. In the dooryard itself was a dug well with a mound of
weed-covered clay by its side and a bucket hanging from a pulley over
its mouth. It was deep, for on this upland water was far beneath the
surface, and midway of its depth, a frontier refrigerator reached by a
rope ladder, was a narrow chamber in which Margaret Rowland kept
her meats fresh, often for a week at a time. For another purpose as well
it was used: a big basket with a patchwork quilt and a pillow marking
the spot where Baby Rowland, with the summer heat all about, slept
away the long, sultry afternoons.
Otherwise not an excrescence marred the face of nature. The single
horse Rowland owned, useless now while his crop matured, was
breaking sod far to the west on the bank of the Jim River. Not a live
thing other than human moved about the place. With them into this
land of silence had come a mongrel collie. For a solitary month he had
stood guard; then one night, somewhere in the distance, in the east
where flowed the Big Sioux, had sounded the long-drawn-out cry of a
timber wolf, alternately nearer and more remote, again and again. With
the coming of morning the collie was gone. Whether dead or answering
the call of the wild they never knew, nor ever filled his place.
Lonely, isolated as the place itself, was Sam Rowland that afternoon of
late August. Silent as a mute was he as to what he had seen; elaborately
careful likewise to carry out the family programme as usual.
"Sleepy, kid?" he queried when dinner was over.
Baby Bess, taciturn, sun-browned autocrat, nodded silent
corroboration.
"Come, then," and, willing horse, the big man got clumsily to all fours
and, prancing ponderously, drew up at her side.
"Hang tight," he admonished and, his wife smiling from the doorway as
only a mother can smile, ambled away through the sun and the dust;
climbed slowly, the tiny brown arms clasped tightly about his neck,
down the ladder to the retreat, adjusted the pillow and the patchwork

quilt with a deftness born of experience.
"Go to sleepy, kid," he directed.
"Sing me to sleep, daddy," commanded the autocrat.
"Sing! I can't sing, kid."
"Yes, you can. Sing 'Nellie Gray.'"
"Too hot, girlie. My breath's all gone. Go to sleep."
"Please, papa; pretty please!"
The man succumbed, as he knew from the first he would do, braced
himself in the aperture, and sang the one verse that he knew of the song
again and again--his voice rough and unmusical as that of a