At six o'clock that night I reached the desolate end of my journey. My father met me at the station and led the way to the low square bleak cottage which he had rented for the winter. Mother, still unable to lift her feet from the floor, opened the door to us, and reaching her, as I did, through that terrifying tempest, made her seem as lonely as a castaway on some gelid Greenland coast.

Father was in unwonted depression. His crop had again failed to mature. With nearly a thousand acres of wheat, he had harvested barely enough for the next year's seed. He was not entirely at the end of his faith, however; on the contrary, he was filled with desire of the farther west. "The irrigated country is the next field for development. I'm going to sell out here and try irrigation in Montana. I want to get where I can regulate the water for my crops."

"You'll do nothing of the kind," I retorted. "You'll go no further west. I have a better plan than that."

The wind roared on, all that night and all the next day, and during this time we did little but feed the stove and argue our widely separated plans. I told them of Franklin's success on the stage with Herne, and I described my own busy, though unremunerative life as a writer, and as I talked the world from which I came shone with increasing splendor.

Little by little the story of the country's decay came out. The village of Ordway had been moved away, nothing remained but the grain elevator. Many of our old neighbors had gone "to the irrigation country" and more were planning to go as soon as they could sell their farms. Columbia was also in desolate decline. Its hotel stood empty, its windows broken, its doors sagging.

Nothing could have been more depressing, more hopeless, and my throat burned with bitter rage every time my mother shuffled across the floor, and when she shyly sat beside me and took my hand in hers as if to hold me fast, my voice almost failed me. I began to plead "Father, let's get a home together, somewhere. Suppose we compromise on old Neshonoc where you were married and where I was born. Let's buy a house and lot there and put the deed in mother's name so that it can never be alienated, and make it the Garland Homestead. Come! Mother's brothers are there, your sister is there, all your old pioneer comrades are there. It's in a rich and sheltered valley and is filled with associations of your youth.—Haven't you had enough of pioneering? Why not go back and be sheltered by the hills and trees for the rest of your lives? If you'll join us in this plan, Frank and I will spend our summers with you and perhaps we can all eat our Thanksgiving dinners together in the good old New England custom and be happy."

Mother yielded at once to the earnestness of my appeal. "I'm ready to go back," she said. "There's only one thing to keep me here, and that is Jessie's grave," (Poor little girl! It did seem a bleak place in which to leave her lying alone) but the old soldier was still too proud, too much the pioneer, to bring himself at once to a surrender of his hopes. He shook his head and said, "I can't do it, Hamlin. I've got to fight it out right here or farther west."

To this I darkly responded, "If you go farther west you go alone. Mother's pioneering is done. She is coming with me, back to comfort, back to a real home beside her brothers."

As I grew calmer, we talked of the past, of the early days in Iowa, of the dimmer, yet still more beautiful valleys of Wisconsin, till mother sighed, and said, "I'd like to see the folks and the old coulee once more, but I never shall."

"Yes, you shall," I asserted.

We spoke of David whose feet were still marching to the guidons of the sunset, of Burton far away on an Island in Puget Sound, and together we decided that placid old William, sitting among his bees in Gill's Coulee, was after all the wiser man. Of what avail this constant quest of gold, beneath the far horizon's rim?

"Father," I bluntly said, "you've been chasing a will-o'-the-wisp. For fifty years you've been moving westward, and always you have gone from certainty to uncertainty, from a comfortable home to a shanty. For thirty years you've carried mother on a ceaseless journey—to what end? Here you are,—snowbound on a treeless plain with mother old and crippled. It's a hard thing to say but the time has come for a 'bout face. You must take the back trail. It will hurt, but it must be done."

"I can't do it!" he exclaimed. "I've never 'backed water' in my life, and I won't do it now. I'm not beaten yet. We've had three bad years in succession—we'll surely have a crop next year. I won't surrender so long as I can run a team."

"Then, let me tell you something else," I resumed. "I will never visit you on this accursed plain again. You can live here if you want to, but I'm going to take mother out of it. She shall not grow old and die in such surroundings as these. I won't have it—it isn't right."

At last the stern old Captain gave in, at least to the point of saying, "Well, we'll see. I'll come down next summer, and we'll visit William and look the ground over.—But I won't consider going back to stay till I've had a crop. I won't go back to the old valley dead-broke. I can't stand being called a failure. If I have a crop and can sell out I'll talk with you."

"Very well. I'm going to stop off at Salem on my way East and tell the folks that you are about to sell out and come back to the old valley."

* * * * *

This victory over my pioneer father gave me such relief from my gnawing conscience that my whole sky lightened. The thought of establishing a family hearth at the point where my life began, had a fine appeal. All my schooling had been to migrate, to keep moving. "If your crop fails, go west and try a new soil. If disagreeable neighbors surround you, sell out and move,—always toward the open country. To remain quietly in your native place is a sign of weakness, of irresolution. Happiness dwells afar. Wealth and fame are to be found by journeying toward the sunset star!" Such had been the spirit, the message of all the songs and stories of my youth.

Now suddenly I perceived the futility of our quest. I felt the value, I acknowledged the peace of the old, the settled. The valley of my birth even in the midst of winter had a quiet beauty. The bluffs were draped with purple and silver. Steel-blue shadows filled the hollows of the sunlit snow. The farmhouses all put forth a comfortable, settled, homey look. The farmers themselves, shaggy, fur-clad and well-fed, came into town driving fat horses whose bells uttered a song of plenty. On the plain we had feared the wind with a mortal terror, here the hills as well as the sheltering elms (which defended almost every roof) stood against the blast like friendly warders.

The village life, though rude and slow-moving, was hearty and cheerful. As I went about the streets with my uncle William—gray-haired old pioneers whose names were startlingly familiar, called out, "Hello, Bill"—adding some homely jest precisely as they had been doing for forty years. As young men they had threshed or cradled or husked corn with my father, whom they still called by his first name. "So you are Dick's boy? How is Dick getting along?"

"He has a big farm," I replied, "nearly a thousand acres, but he's going to sell out next year and come back here."

They were all frankly pleased. "Is that so! Made his pile, I s'pose?"

"Enough to live on, I guess," I answered evasively.

"I'm glad to hear of it. I always liked Dick. We were in the woods together. I hated to see him leave the valley. How's Belle?"

This question always brought the shadow back to my face. "Not very well,—but we hope she'll be better when she gets back here among her own folks."

"Well, we'll all be glad to see them both," was the hearty reply.

In this hope, with this plan in mind, I took my way back to New York, well pleased with my plan.

After nearly a third of a century of migration, the Garlands were about to double on their trail, and their decision was deeply significant. It meant that a certain phase of American pioneering had ended, that "the woods and prairie lands" having all been taken up, nothing remained but the semi-arid valleys of the Rocky Mountains. "Irrigation" was a new word and a vague word in the ears of my father's generation, and had little of the charm which lay in the "flowery savannahs" of the Mississippi valley. In the years between 1865 and 1892 the nation had swiftly passed through the buoyant era of free land settlement, and now the day of reckoning had come.



CHAPTER XXXIV

We Go to California

The idea of a homestead now became an obsession with me. As a proletariat I knew the power of the landlord and the value of land. My love of the wilderness was increasing year by year, but all desire to plow the wild land was gone. My desire for a home did not involve a lonely cabin in a far-off valley, on the contrary I wanted roads and bridges and neighbors. My hope now was to possess a minute isle of safety in the midst of the streaming currents of western life—a little solid ground in my native valley on which the surviving members of my family could catch and cling.

All about me as I travelled, I now perceived the mournful side of American "enterprise." Sons were deserting their work-worn fathers, daughters were forgetting their tired mothers. Families were everywhere breaking up. Ambitious young men and unsuccessful old men were in restless motion, spreading, swarming, dragging their reluctant women and their helpless and wondering children into unfamiliar hardships—At times I visioned the Middle Border as a colony of ants—which was an injustice to the ants, for ants have a reason for their apparently futile and aimless striving.

My brother and I discussed my notion in detail as we sat in our six-by-nine dining room, high in our Harlem flat. "The house must be in a village. It must be New England in type and stand beneath tall elm trees," I said. "It must be broad-based and low—you know the kind, we saw dozens of them on our tramp-trip down the Connecticut Valley and we'll have a big garden and a tennis court. We'll need a barn, too, for father will want to keep a driving team. Mother shall have a girl to do the housework so that we can visit her often,"—and so on and on!

Things were not coming our way very fast but they were coming, and it really looked as though my dream might become a reality. My brother was drawing a small but regular salary as a member of Herne's company, my stories were selling moderately well and as neither of us was given to drink or cards, whatever we earned we saved. To some minds our lives seemed stupidly regular, but we were happy in our quiet way.

It was in my brother's little flat on One Hundred and Fifth Street that Stephen Crane renewed a friendship which had begun a couple of years before, while I was lecturing in Avon, New Jersey. He was a slim, pale, hungry looking boy at this time and had just written The Red Badge of Courage, in fact he brought the first half of it in his pocket on his second visit, and I loaned him fifteen dollars to redeem the other half from the keep of a cruel typist.

He came again and again to see me, always with a new roll of manuscript in his ulster. Now it was The Men in the Storm, now a bunch of The Black Riders, curious poems, which he afterwards dedicated to me, and while my brother browned a steak, Steve and I usually sat in council over his dark future.

"You will laugh over these lean years," I said to him, but he found small comfort in that prospect.

To him I was a man established, and I took an absurd pleasure in playing the part of Successful Author. It was all very comical—for my study was the ratty little parlor of a furnished flat for which we paid thirty dollars per month. Still to the man at the bottom of a pit the fellow on top, in the sunlight, is a king, and to Crane my brother and I were at least dukes.

An expression used by Suderman in his preface to Dame Care had made a great impression on my mind and in discussing my future with the Hernes I quoted these lines and said, "I am resolved that my mother shall not 'rise from the feast of life empty.' Think of it! She has never seen a real play in a real theater in all her life. She has never seen a painting or heard a piece of fine music. She knows nothing of the splendors of our civilization except what comes to her in the newspapers, while here am I in the midst of every intellectual delight. I take no credit for my desire to comfort her—it's just my way of having fun. It's a purely selfish enterprise on my part."

Katharine who was familiar with the theory of Egoistic Altruism would not let my statement go uncontradicted. She tried to make a virtue of my devotion to my parents.

"No," I insisted,—"if batting around town gave me more real pleasure I would do it. It don't, in fact I shall never be quite happy till I have shown mother Shore Acres and given her an opportunity to hear a symphony concert."

Meanwhile, having no business adviser, I was doing honorable things in a foolish way. With no knowledge of how to publish my work I was bringing out a problem novel here, a realistic novelette there and a book of short stories in a third place, all to the effect of confusing my public and disgusting the book-seller. But then, no one in those days had any very clear notion of how to launch a young writer, and so (as I had entered the literary field by way of a side-gate) I was doing as well as could have been expected of me. My idea, it appears, was to get as many books into the same market at the same time as possible. As a matter of fact none of them paid me any royalty, my subsistence came from the sale of such short stories as I was able to lodge with The Century, and Harper's, The Youth's Companion and The Arena.

The "Bacheller Syndicate" took a kindly interest in me, and I came to like the big, blonde, dreaming youth from The North Country who was the nominal head of the firm. Irving Bacheller, even at that time struck me as more of a poet than a business man, though I was always glad to get his check, for it brought the Garland Homestead just that much nearer. On the whole it was a prosperous and busy winter for both my brother and myself.

Chicago was in the early stages of building a World's Fair, and as spring came on I spent a couple of weeks in the city putting Prairie Folks into shape for the printer. Kirkland introduced me to the Chicago Literary Club, and my publisher, Frances Schulte, took me to the Press Club and I began to understand and like the city.

As May deepened I went on up to Wisconsin, full of my plan for a homestead, and the green and luscious slopes of the old valley gave me a new delight, a kind of proprietary delight. I began to think of it as home. It seemed not only a natural deed but a dutiful deed, this return to the land of my birth, it was the beginning of a more settled order of life.

My aunt, Susan Bailey, who was living alone in the old house in Onalaska made me welcome, and showed grateful interest when I spoke to her of my ambition. "I'll be glad to help you pay for such a place," she said, "provided you will set aside a room in it for me. I am lonely now. Your father is all I have and I'd like to spend my old age with him. But don't buy a farm. Buy a house and lot here or in LaCrosse."

"Mother wants to be in West Salem," I replied. "All our talk has been of West Salem, and if you can content yourself to live with us there, I shall be very glad of your co-operation. Father is still skittish. He will not come back till he can sell to advantage. However, the season has started well and I am hoping that he will at least come down with mother and talk the matter over with us."

To my delight, almost to my surprise, mother came, alone. "Father will follow in a few days," she said—"if he can find someone to look after his stock and tools while he is gone."

She was able to walk a little now and together we went about the village, and visited relatives and neighbors in the country. We ate "company dinners" of fried chicken and shortcake, and sat out on the grass beneath the shelter of noble trees during the heat of the day. There was something profoundly restful and satisfying in this atmosphere. No one seemed in a hurry and no one seemed to fear either the wind or the sun.

The talk was largely of the past, of the fine free life of the "early days" and my mother's eyes often filled with happy tears as she met friends who remembered her as a girl. There was no doubt in her mind. "I'd like to live here," she said. "It's more like home than any other place. But I don't see how your father could stand it on a little piece of land. He likes his big fields."

One night as we were sitting on William's porch, talking of war times and of Hugh and Jane and Walter, a sweet and solemn mood came over us. It seemed as if the spirits of the pioneers, the McClintocks and Dudleys had been called back and were all about us. It seemed to me (as to my mother) as if Luke or Leonard might at any moment emerge from the odorous June dusk and speak to us. We spoke of David, and my mother's love for him vibrated in her voice as she said, "I don't suppose I'll ever see him again. He's too poor and too proud to come back here, and I'm too old and lame and poor to visit him."

This produced in me a sudden and most audacious change of plan. "I'm not so certain about that," I retorted. "Frank's company is going to play in California this winter, and I am arranging a lecture tour—I've just decided that you and father shall go along."

The boldness of my plan startled her. "Oh, we can't do a crazy thing like that," she declared.

"It's not so crazy. Father has been talking for years of a visit to his brother in Santa Barbara. Aunt Susan tells me she wants to spend one more winter in California, and so I see no reason in the world why you and father should not go. I'll pay for your tickets and Addison will be glad to house you. We're going!" I asserted firmly. "We'll put off buying our homestead till next year and make this the grandest trip of your life."

Aunt Maria here put in a word, "You do just what Hamlin tells you to do. If he wants to spend his money giving you a good time, you let him."

Mother smiled wistfully but incredulously. To her it all seemed as remote, as improbable as a trip to Egypt, but I continued to talk of it as settled and so did William and Maria.

I wrote at once to my father outlining my trip and pleading strongly for his consent and co-operation. "All your life long you and mother have toiled with hardly a day off. Your travelling has been mainly in a covered wagon. You have seen nothing of cities for thirty years. Addison wants you to spend the winter with him, and mother wants to see David once more—why not go? Begin to plan right now and as soon as your crops are harvested, meet me at Omaha or Kansas City and we'll all go along together."

He replied with unexpected half-promise. "The crops look pretty well. Unless something very destructive turns up I shall have a few dollars to spend. I'd like to make that trip. I'd like to see Addison once more."

I replied, "The more I think about it, the more wonderful it all seems. It will enable you to see the mountains, and the great plains. You can visit Los Angeles and San Francisco. You can see the ocean. Frank is to play for a month in Frisco, and we can all meet at Uncle David's for Christmas."

The remainder of the summer was taken up with the preparations for this gorgeous excursion. Mother went back to help father through the harvest, whilst I returned to Boston and completed arrangements for my lecture tour which was to carry me as far north as Puget Sound.

At last in November, when the grain was all safely marketed, the old people met me in Kansas City, and from there as if in a dream, started westward with me in such holiday spirits as mother's health permitted. Father was like a boy. Having cut loose from the farm—at least for the winter, he declared his intention to have a good time, "as good as the law allows," he added with a smile.

Of course they both expected to suffer on the journey, that's what travel had always meant to them, but I surprised them. I not only took separate lower berths in the sleeping car, I insisted on regular meals at the eating houses along the way, and they were amazed to find travel almost comfortable. The cost of all this disturbed my mother a good deal till I explained to her that my own expenses were paid by the lecture committees and that she need not worry about the price of her fare. Perhaps I even boasted about a recent sale of a story! If I did I hope it will be forgiven me for I was determined that this should be the greatest event in her life.

My father's interest in all that came to view was as keen as my own. During all his years of manhood he had longed to cross the plains and to see Pike's Peak, and now while his approach was not as he had dreamed it, he was actually on his way into Colorado. "By the great Horn Spoons," he exclaimed as we neared the foot hills, "I'd like to have been here before the railroad."

Here spoke the born explorer. His eyes sparkled, his face flushed. The farther we got into the houseless cattle range, the better he liked it. "The best times I've ever had in my life," he remarked as we were looking away across the plain at the faint shapes of the Spanish Peaks, "was when I was cruising the prairie in a covered wagon."

Then he told me once again of his long trip into Minnesota before the war, and of the cavalry lieutenant who rounded the settlers up and sent them back to St. Paul to escape the Sioux who were on the warpath. "I never saw such a country for game as Northern Minnesota was in those days. It swarmed with water-fowl and chicken and deer. If the soldiers hadn't driven me out I would have had a farm up there. I was just starting to break a garden when the troops came."

It was all glorious to me as to them. The Spanish life of Las Vegas where we rested for a day, the Indians of Laguna, the lava beds and painted buttes of the desert, the beautiful slopes of the San Francisco Mountains, the herds of cattle, the careering cowboys, the mines and miners—all came in for study and comment. We resented the nights which shut us out from so much that was interesting. Then came the hot sand of the Colorado valley, the swift climb to the bleak heights of the coast range—and, at last, the swift descent to the orange groves and singing birds of Riverside. A dozen times father cried out, "This alone is worth the cost of the trip."

Mother was weary, how weary I did not know till we reached our room in the hotel. She did not complain but her face was more dejected than I had ever seen it, and I was greatly disturbed by it. Our grand excursion had come too late for her.

A good night's sleep and a hearty breakfast restored her to something like her smiling self and when we took the train for Santa Barbara she betrayed more excitement than at any time on our trip. "Do we really see the ocean?" she asked.

"Yes," I explained, "we run close along the shore. You'll see waves and ships and sharks—may be a whale or two."

Father was even more excited. He spent most of his time on the platform or hanging from the window. "Well, I never really expected to see the Pacific," he said as we were nearing the end of our journey. "Now I'm determined to see Frisco and the Golden Gate."

"Of course—that is a part of our itinerary. You can see Frisco when you come up to visit David."

My uncle Addison who was living in a plain but roomy house, was genuinely glad to see us, and his wife made us welcome in the spirit of the Middle Border for she was one of the early settlers of Green County, Wisconsin. In an hour we were at home.

Our host was, as I remembered him, a tall thin man of quiet dignity and notable power of expression. His words were well chosen and his manner urbane. "I want you people to settle right down here with me for the winter," he said. "In fact I shall try to persuade Richard to buy a place here."

This brought out my own plan for a home in West Salem and he agreed with me that the old people should never again spend a winter in Dakota.

There was no question in my mind about the hospitality of this home and so with a very comfortable, a delightful sense of peace, of satisfaction, of security, I set out on my way to San Francisco, Portland and Olympia, eager to see California—all of it. Its mountains, its cities and above all its poets had long called to me. It meant the Argonauts and The Songs of the Sierras to me, and one of my main objects of destination was Joaquin Miller's home in Oakland Heights.

No one else, so far as I knew, was transmitting this Coast life into literature. Edwin Markham was an Oakland school teacher, Frank Norris, a college student, and Jack London a boy in short trousers. Miller dominated the coast landscape. The mountains, the streams, the pines were his. A dozen times as I passed some splendid peak I quoted his lines. "Sierras! Eternal tents of snow that flash o'er battlements of mountains."

Nevertheless, in all my journeying, throughout all my other interests, I kept in mind our design for a reunion at my uncle David's home in San Jose, and I wrote him to tell him when to expect us. Franklin, who was playing in San Francisco, arranged to meet me, and father and mother were to come up from Santa Barbara.

It all fell out quite miraculously as we had planned it. On the 24th of December we all met at my uncle's door.

This reunion, so American in its unexpectedness, deserves closer analysis. My brother had come from New York City. Father and mother were from central Dakota. My own home was still in Boston. David and his family had reached this little tenement by way of a long trail through Iowa, Dakota, Montana, Oregon and Northern California. We who had all started, from the same little Wisconsin Valley were here drawn together, as if by the magic of a conjuror's wand, in a city strange to us all. Can any other country on earth surpass the United States in the ruthless broadcast dispersion of its families? Could any other land furnish a more incredible momentary re-assembling of scattered units?

The reader of this tale will remember that David was my boyish hero, and as I had not seen him for fifteen years, I had looked forward, with disquieting question concerning our meeting. Alas! My fears were justified. There was more of pain than pleasure in the visit, for us all. Although my brother and I did our best to make it joyous, the conditions of the reunion were sorrowful, for David, who like my father, had been following the lure of the sunset all his life, was in deep discouragement.

From his fruitful farm in Iowa he had sought the free soil of Dakota. From Dakota he had been lured to Montana. In the forests of Montana he had been robbed by his partner, reduced in a single day to the rank of a day laborer, and so in the attempt to retrieve his fortunes, had again moved westward—ever westward, and here now at last in San Jose, at the end of his means and almost at the end of his courage, he was working at whatever he could find to do.

Nevertheless, he was still the borderer, still the man of the open. Something in his face and voice, something in his glance set him apart from the ordinary workman. He still carried with him something of the hunter, something which came from the broad spaces of the Middle Border, and though his bushy hair and beard were streaked with white, and his eyes sad and dim, I could still discern in him some part of the physical strength and beauty which had made his young manhood so glorious to me—and deeper yet, I perceived in him the dreamer, the Celtic minstrel, the poet.

His limbs, mighty as of old, were heavy, and his towering frame was beginning to stoop. His brave heart was beating slow. Fortune had been harshly inimical to him and his outlook on life was bitter. With all his tremendous physical power he had not been able to regain his former footing among men.

In talking of his misfortunes, I asked him why he had not returned to Wisconsin after his loss in Montana, and he replied, as my father had done. "How could I do that? How could I sneak back with empty pockets?"

Inevitably, almost at once, father spoke of the violin. "Have you got it yet?" he asked.

"Yes," David replied. "But I seldom play on it now. In fact, I don't think there are any strings on it."

I could tell from the tone of his voice that he had no will to play, but he dug the almost forgotten instrument out of a closet, strung it and tuned it, and that evening after dinner, when my father called out in familiar imperious fashion, "Come, come! now for a tune," David was prepared, reluctantly, to comply.

"My hands are so stiff and clumsy now," he said by way of apology to me.

It was a sad pleasure to me, as to him, this revival of youthful memories, and I would have spared him if I could, but my father insisted upon having all of the jocund dances and sweet old songs. Although a man of deep feeling in many ways, he could not understand the tragedy of my uncle's failing skill.

But mother did! Her ear was too acute not to detect the difference in tone between his playing at this time and the power of expression he had once possessed, and in her shadowy corner she suffered sympathetically when beneath his work-worn fingers the strings cried out discordantly. The wrist, once so strong and sure, the hands so supple and swift were now hooks of horn and bronze. The magic touch of youth had vanished, and yet as he went on, some little part of his wizardry came back.

At father's request he played once more Maggie, Air Ye Sleepin', and while the strings wailed beneath his bow I shivered as of old, stirred by the winds of the past "roaring o'er Moorland craggy." Deep in my brain the sob of the song sank, filling my inner vision with flitting shadows of vanished faces, brows untouched of care, and sweet kind eyes lit by the firelight of a secure abundant hearth. I was lying once more before the fire in David's little cabin in the deep Wisconsin valley and Grandfather McClintock, a dreaming giant, was drumming on his chair, his face flame-lit, his hair a halo of snow and gold.

Tune after tune the old Borderman played, in answer to my father's insistent demands, until at last the pain of it all became unendurable and he ended abruptly. "I can't play any more.—I'll never play again," he added harshly as he laid the violin away in its box like a child in its coffin.

We sat in silence, for we all realized that never again would we hear those wistful, meaningful melodies. Wordless, with aching throats, resentful of the present, my mother and my aunt dreamed of the bright and beautiful Neshonoc days when they were young and David was young and all the west was a land of hope.

My father now joined in urging David to go back to the middle border. "I'll put you on my farm," he said. "Or if you want to go back to Neshonoc, we'll help you do that. We are thinking of going back there ourselves."

David sadly shook his grizzled head. "No, I can't do that," he repeated. "I haven't money enough to pay my carfare, and besides, Becky and the children would never consent to it."

I understood. His proud heart rebelled at the thought of the pitying or contemptuous eyes of his stay-at home neighbors. He who had gone forth so triumphantly thirty years before could not endure the notion of going back on borrowed money. Better to die among strangers like a soldier.

Father, stern old pioneer though he was, could not think of leaving his wife's brother here, working like a Chinaman. "Dave has acted the fool," he privately said to me, "but we will help him. If you can spare a little, we'll lend him enough to buy one of these fruit farms he's talking about."

To this I agreed. Together we loaned him enough to make the first payment on a small farm. He was deeply grateful for this and hope again sprang up in his heart. "You won't regret it," he said brokenly. "This will put me on my feet, and by and by perhaps we'll meet in the old valley."—But we never did. I never saw him again.

I shall always insist that a true musician, a superb violinist was lost to the world in David McClintock—but as he was born on the border and always remained on the border, how could he find himself? His hungry heart, his need of change, his search for the pot of gold beyond the sunset, had carried him from one adventure to another and always farther and farther from the things he most deeply craved. He might have been a great singer, for he had a beautiful voice and a keen appreciation of the finer elements of song.

It was hard for me to adjust myself to his sorrowful decline into old age. I thought of him as he appeared to me when riding his threshing machine up the coulee road. I recalled the long rifle with which he used to carry off the prizes at the turkey shoots, and especially I remembered him as he looked while playing the violin on that far off Thanksgiving night in Lewis Valley.

I left California with the feeling that his life was almost ended, and my heart was heavy with indignant pity for I must now remember him only as a broken and discouraged man. The David of my idolatry, the laughing giant of my boyhood world, could be found now, only in the mist which hung above the hills and valleys of Neshonoc.



CHAPTER XXXV

The Homestead in the Valley

To my father the Golden Gate of San Francisco was grandly romantic. It was associated in his mind with Bret Harte and the Goldseekers of Forty Nine, as well as with Fremont and the Mexican War, hence one of his expressed desires for many years had been to stand on the hills above the bay and look out on the ocean. "I know Boston," he said, "and I want to know Frisco."

My mother's interest in the city was more personal. She was eager to see her son Franklin play his part in a real play on a real stage. For that reward she was willing to undertake considerable extra fatigue and so to please her, to satisfy my father and to gratify myself, I accompanied them to San Francisco and for several days with a delightful sense of accomplishment, my brother and I led them about the town. We visited the Seal Rocks and climbed Nob Hill, explored Chinatown and walked through the Old Spanish Quarter, and as each of these pleasures was tasted my father said, "Well now, that's done!" precisely as if he were getting through a list of tedious duties.

There was no hint of obligation, however, in the hours which they spent in seeing my brother's performance as one of the "Three Twins" in Incog. The piece was in truth very funny and Franklin hardly to be distinguished from his "Star," a fact which astonished and delighted my mother. She didn't know he could look so unlike himself. She laughed herself quite breathless over the absurd situations of the farce but father was not so easily satisfied. "This foolery is all well enough," said he, "but I'd rather see you and your friend Herne in Shore Acres."

At last the day came when they both expressed a desire to return to Santa Barbara. "We've had about all we can stand this trip," they confessed, whereupon, leaving Franklin at his job, we started down the valley on our way to Addison Garland's home which had come to have something of the quality of home to us all.

We were tired but triumphant. One by one the things we had promised ourselves to see we had seen. The Plains, the Mountains, the Desert, the Orange Groves, the Ocean, all had been added to the list of our achievements. We had visited David and watched Franklin play in his "troupe," and now with a sense of fullness, of victory, we were on our way back to a safe harbor among the fruits and flowers of Southern California.

This was the pleasantest thought of all to me and in private I said to my uncle, "I hope you can keep these people till spring. They must not go back to Dakota now."

"Give yourself no concern about that!" replied Addison. "I have a program laid out which will keep them busy until May. We're going out to Catalina and up into the Ojai valley and down to Los Angeles. We are to play for the rest of the winter like a couple of boys."

With mind entirely at ease I left them on the rose-embowered porch of my uncle's home, and started east by way of Denver and Chicago, eager to resume work on a book which I had promised for the autumn.

Chicago was now full in the spot-light of the National Stage. In spite of the business depression which still engulfed the west, the promoters of the Columbian Exposition were going steadily forward with their plans, and when I arrived in the city about the middle of January, the bustle of preparation was at a very high point.

The newly-acquired studios were swarming with eager and aspiring young artists, and I believed, (as many others believed) that the city was entering upon an era of swift and shining development. All the near-by states were stirred and heartened by this esthetic awakening of a metropolis which up to this time had given but little thought to the value of art in the life of a community. From being a huge, muddy windy market-place, it seemed about to take its place among the literary capitals of the world.

Colonies of painters, sculptors, decorators and other art experts now colored its life in gratifying degree. Beauty was a work to advertise with, and writers like Harriet Monroe, Henry B. Fuller, George Ade, Peter Finley Dunne, and Eugene Field were at work celebrating, each in his kind, the changes in the thought and aspect of the town. Ambitious publishing houses were springing up and "dummies" of new magazines were being thumbed by reckless young editors. The talk was all of Art, and the Exposition. It did, indeed seem as if culture were about to hum.

Naturally this flare of esthetic enthusiasm lit the tow of my imagination. I predicted a publishing center and a literary market-place second only to New York, a publishing center which by reason of its geographical position would be more progressive than Boston, and more American than Manhattan. "Here flames the spirit of youth. Here throbs the heart of America," I declared in Crumbling Idols, an essay which I was at this time writing for the Forum.

In the heat of this conviction, I decided to give up my residence in Boston and establish headquarters in Chicago. I belonged here. My writing was of the Middle Border, and must continue to be so. Its spirit was mine. All of my immediate relations were dwellers in the west, and as I had also definitely set myself the task of depicting certain phases of mountain life, it was inevitable that I should ultimately bring my workshop to Chicago which was my natural pivot, the hinge on which my varied activities would revolve. And, finally, to live here would enable me to keep in closer personal touch with my father and mother in the Wisconsin homestead which I had fully determined to acquire.

Following this decision, I returned to Boston, and at once announced my plan to Howells, Flower and other of my good friends who had meant so much to me in the past. Each was kind enough to express regret and all agreed that my scheme was logical. "It should bring you happiness and success," they added.

Alas! The longer I stayed, the deeper I settled into my groove and the more difficult my removal became. It was not easy to surrender the busy and cheerful life I had been leading for nearly ten years. It was hard to say good-bye to the artists and writers and musicians with whom I had so long been associated. To leave the Common, the parks, the Library and the lovely walks and drives of Roxbury, was sorrowful business—but I did it! I packed my books ready for shipment and returned to Chicago in May just as the Exposition was about to open its doors.

Like everyone else who saw it at this time I was amazed at the grandeur of "The White City," and impatiently anxious to have all my friends and relations share in my enjoyment of it. My father was back on the farm in Dakota and I wrote to him at once urging him to come down. "Frank will be here in June and we will take charge of you. Sell the cook stove if necessary and come. You must see this fair. On the way back I will go as far as West Salem and we'll buy that homestead I've been talking about."

My brother whose season closed about the twenty-fifth of May, joined me in urging them not to miss the fair and a few days later we were both delighted and a little surprised to get a letter from mother telling us when to expect them. "I can't walk very well," she explained, "but I'm coming. I am so hungry to see my boys that I don't mind the long journey."

Having secured rooms for them at a small hotel near the west gate of the exposition grounds, we were at the station to receive them as they came from the train surrounded by other tired and dusty pilgrims of the plains. Father was in high spirits and mother was looking very well considering the tiresome ride of nearly seven hundred miles. "Give us a chance to wash up and we'll be ready for anything," she said with brave intonation.

We took her at her word. With merciless enthusiasm we hurried them to their hotel and as soon as they had bathed and eaten a hasty lunch, we started out with intent to astonish and delight them. Here was another table at "the feast of life" from which we did not intend they should rise unsatisfied. "This shall be the richest experience of their lives," we said.

With a wheeled chair to save mother from the fatigue of walking we started down the line and so rapidly did we pass from one stupendous vista to another that we saw in a few hours many of the inside exhibits and all of the finest exteriors—not to mention a glimpse of the polyglot amazements of the Midway.

In pursuance of our plan to watch the lights come on, we ate our supper in one of the big restaurants on the grounds and at eight o'clock entered the Court of Honor. It chanced to be a moonlit night, and as lamps were lit and the waters of the lagoon began to reflect the gleaming walls of the great palaces with their sculptured ornaments, and boats of quaint shape filled with singers came and went beneath the arching bridges, the wonder and the beauty of it all moved these dwellers of the level lands to tears of joy which was almost as poignant as pain. In addition to its grandeur the scene had for them the transitory quality of an autumn sunset, a splendor which they would never see again.

Stunned by the majesty of the vision, my mother sat in her chair, visioning it all yet comprehending little of its meaning. Her life had been spent among homely small things, and these gorgeous scenes dazzled her, overwhelmed her, letting in upon her in one mighty flood a thousand stupefying suggestions of the art and history and poetry of the world. She was old and she was ill, and her brain ached with the weight of its new conceptions. Her face grew troubled and wistful, and her eyes as big and dark as those of a child.

At last utterly overcome she leaned her head against my arm, closed her eyes and said, "Take me home. I can't stand any more of it."

Sadly I took her away, back to her room, realizing that we had been too eager. We had oppressed her with the exotic, the magnificent. She was too old and too feeble to enjoy as we had hoped she would enjoy, the color and music and thronging streets of The Magic City.

At the end of the third day father said, "Well, I've had enough." He too, began to long for the repose of the country, the solace of familiar scenes. In truth they were both surfeited with the alien, sick of the picturesque. Their ears suffered from the clamor of strange sounds as their eyes ached with the clash of unaccustomed color. My insistent haste, my desire to make up in a few hours for all their past deprivations seemed at the moment to have been a mistake.

Seeing this, knowing that all the splendors of the Orient could not compensate them for another sleepless night, I decided to cut their visit short and hurry them back to quietude. Early on the fourth morning we started for the LaCrosse Valley by way of Madison—they with a sense of relief, I with a feeling of disappointment. "The feast was too rich, too highly spiced for their simple tastes," I now admitted.

However, a certain amount of comfort came to me as I observed that the farther they got from the Fair the keener their enjoyment of it became!—With bodies at ease and minds untroubled, they now relived in pleasant retrospect all the excitement and bustle of the crowds, all the bewildering sights and sounds of the Midway. Scenes which had worried as well as amazed them were now recalled with growing enthusiasm, as our train, filled with other returning sightseers of like condition, rushed steadily northward into the green abundance of the land they knew so well, and when at six o'clock of a lovely afternoon, they stepped down upon the platform of the weather-beaten little station at West Salem, both were restored to their serene and buoyant selves. The leafy village, so green, so muddy, so lush with grass, seemed the perfection of restful security. The chuckle of robins on the lawns, the songs of cat-birds in the plum trees and the whistle of larks in the pasture appealed to them as parts of a familiar sweet and homely hymn.

* * * * *

Just in the edge of the village, on a four-acre plot of rich level ground, stood an old two-story frame cottage on which I had fixed my interest. It was not beautiful, not in the least like the ideal New England homestead my brother and I had so long discussed, but it was sheltered on the south by three enormous maples and its gate fronted upon a double row of New England elms whose branches almost arched the wide street. Its gardens, rich in grape vines, asparagus beds, plums, raspberries and other fruiting shrubs, appealed with especial power to my mother who had lived so long on the sun-baked plains that the sight of green things growing was very precious in her eyes. Clumps of lilacs, syringa and snow-ball, and beds of old-fashioned flowers gave further evidence of the love and care which the former owners of the place had lavished upon it.

As for myself, the desire to see my aging parents safely sheltered beneath the benignant branches of those sturdy trees would have made me content even with a log cabin. In imagination I perceived this angular cottage growing into something fine and sweet and—our own!

There was charm also in the fact that its western windows looked out upon the wooded hills over which I had wandered as a boy, and whose sky-line had printed itself deep into the lowest stratum of my subconscious memory; and so it happened that on the following night, as we stood before the gate looking out upon that sunset wall of purple bluffs from beneath the double row of elms stretching like a peristyle to the west, my decision came.

"This is my choice," I declared. "Right here we take root. This shall be the Garland Homestead." I turned to my father. "When can you move?"

"Not till after my grain is threshed and marketed," he replied.

"Very well, let's call it the first of November, and we'll all meet here for our Thanksgiving dinner."

Thanksgiving with us, as with most New Englanders, had always been a date-mark, something to count upon and to count from, and no sooner were we in possession of a deed, than my mother and I began to plan for a dinner which should be at once a reunion of the Garlands and McClintocks, a homecoming and a housewarming. With this understanding I let them go back for a final harvest in Dakota.

The purchase of this small lot and commonplace house may seem very unimportant to the reader but to me and to my father it was in very truth epoch-marking. To me it was the ending of one life and the beginning of another. To him it was decisive and not altogether joyous. To accept this as his home meant a surrender of his faith in the Golden West, a tacit admission that all his explorations of the open lands with whatsoever they had meant of opportunity, had ended in a sense of failure on a barren soil. It was not easy for him to enter into the spirit of our Thanksgiving plans although he had given his consent to them. He was still the tiller of broad acres, the speculator hoping for a boom.

Early in October, as soon as I could displace the renter of the house, I started in rebuilding and redecorating it as if for the entrance of a bride. I widened the dining room, refitted the kitchen and ordered new rugs, curtains and furniture from Chicago. I engaged a cook and maid, and bought a horse so that on November first, the date of my mother's arrival, I was able to meet her at the station and drive her in a carriage of her own to an almost completely outfitted home.

It was by no means what I intended it to be, but it seemed luxurious to her. Tears dimmed her eyes as she stepped across the threshold, but when I said, "Mother, hereafter my headquarters are to be in Chicago, and my home here with you," she put her arms around my neck and wept. Her wanderings were over, her heart at peace.

My father arrived a couple of weeks later, and with his coming, mother sent out the invitations for our dinner. So far as we could, we intended to bring together the scattered units of our family group.

At last the great day came! My brother was unable to be present and there were other empty chairs, but the McClintocks were well represented. William, white-haired, gigantic, looking almost exactly like Grandad at the same age, came early, bringing his wife, his two sons, and his daughter-in-law. Frank and Lorette drove over from Lewis Valley, with both of their sons and a daughter-in-law. Samantha and Dan could not come, but Deborah and Susan were present and completed the family roll. Several of my father's old friends promised to come in after dinner.

The table, reflecting the abundance of the valley in those peaceful times, was stretched to its full length and as we gathered about it William congratulated my father on getting back where cranberries and turkeys and fat squashes grew.

My mother smiled at this jest, but my father, still loyal to Dakota, was quick to defend it. "I like it out there," he insisted. "I like wheat raising on a big scale. I don't know how I'm going to come down from operating a six-horse header to scraping with a hoe in a garden patch."

Mother, wearing her black silk dress and lace collar, sat at one end of the table, while I, to relieve my father of the task of carving the twenty-pound turkey, sat opposite her. For the first time in my life I took position as head of the family and the significance of this fact did not escape the company. The pen had proved itself to be mightier than the plow. Going east had proved more profitable than going west!

It was a noble dinner! As I regard it from the standpoint of today, with potatoes six dollars per bushel and turkeys forty cents per pound, it all seems part of a kindlier world, a vanished world—as it is! There were squashes and turnips and cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie and mince pie, (made under mother's supervision) and coffee with real cream,—all the things which are so precious now, and the talk was in praise of the delicious food and the Exposition which was just closing, and reports of the crops which were abundant and safely garnered. The wars of the world were all behind us and the nation on its way back to prosperity—and we were unafraid.

The gay talk lasted well through the meal, but as mother's pies came on, Aunt Maria regretfully remarked, "It's a pity Frank can't help eat this dinner."

"I wish Dave and Mantie were here," put in Deborah.

"And Rachel," added mother.

This brought the note of sadness which is inevitable in such a gathering, and the shadow deepened as we gathered about the fire a little later. The dead claimed their places.

Since leaving the valley thirty years before our group had suffered many losses. All my grandparents were gone. My sisters Harriet and Jessie and my uncle Richard had fallen on the march. David and Rebecca were stranded in the foot hills of the Cascade mountains. Rachel, a widow, was in Georgia. The pioneers of '48 were old and their bright world a memory.

My father called on mother for some of the old songs. "You and Deb sing Nellie Wildwood," he urged, and to me it was a call to all the absent ones, an invitation to gather about us in order that the gaps in our hearth-fire's broken circle might be filled.

Sweet and clear though in diminished volume, my mother's voice rose on the tender refrain:

Never more to part, Nellie Wildwood Never more to long for the spring.

and I thought of Hattie and Jessie and tried to believe that they too were sharing in the comfort and contentment of our fire.

George, who resembled his uncle David, and had much of his skill with the fiddle bow, had brought his violin with him, but when father asked Frank to play Maggie, air ye sleepin', he shook his head, saying, "That's Dave's tune," and his loyalty touched us all.

Quick tears sprang to mother's eyes. She knew all too well that never again would she hear her best-beloved brother touch the strings or join his voice to hers.

It was a moment of sorrow for us all but only for a moment, for Deborah struck up one of the lively "darky pieces" which my father loved so well, and with its jubilant patter young and old returned to smiling.

It must be now in the Kingdom a-comin' In the year of Jubilo!

we shouted, and so translated the words of the song into an expression of our own rejoicing present.

Song after song followed, war chants which renewed my father's military youth, ballads which deepened the shadows in my mother's eyes, and then at last, at my request, she sang The Rolling Stone, and with a smile at father, we all joined the chorus.

We'll stay on the farm and we'll suffer no loss For the stone that keeps rolling will gather no moss.

My father was not entirely convinced, but I, surrounded by these farmer folk, hearing from their lips these quaint melodies, responded like some tensely-strung instrument, whose chords are being played upon by searching winds. I acknowledged myself at home and for all time. Beneath my feet lay the rugged country rock of my nativity. It pleased me to discover my mental characteristics striking so deep into this typically American soil.

One by one our guests rose and went away, jocularly saying to my father, "Well, Dick, you've done the right thing at last. It's a comfort to have you so handy. We'll come to dinner often." To me they said, "We'll expect to see more of you, now that the old folks are here."

"This is my home," I repeated.

When we were alone I turned to mother in the spirit of the builder. "Give me another year and I'll make this a homestead worth talking about. My head is full of plans for its improvement."

"It's good enough for me as it is," she protested.

"No, it isn't," I retorted quickly. "Nothing that I can do is good enough for you, but I intend to make you entirely happy if I can."

Here I make an end of this story, here at the close of an epoch of western settlement, here with my father and mother sitting beside me in the light of a tender Thanksgiving, in our new old home and facing a peaceful future. I was thirty-three years of age, and in a certain very real sense this plot of ground, this protecting roof may be taken as the symbols of my hard-earned first success as well as the defiant gages of other necessary battles which I must fight and win.

* * * * *

As I was leaving next day for Chicago, I said, "Mother, what shall I bring you from the city?"

With a shy smile she answered, "There is only one thing more you can bring me,—one thing more that I want."

"What is that?"

"A daughter. I need a daughter—and some grandchildren."



- Transcriber's Note: Some inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have been preserved. Typographical errors corrected in the text: Page 21 McEldowney changed to McIldowney Page 61 Winneshiek changed to Winnesheik Page 80 Winneshiek changed to Winnesheik Page 80 Winnesheik changed to Winnesheik Page 164 arroya changed to arroyo Page 202 luminious changed to luminous Page 250 Canon changed to Canyon Page 259 missing word "he" inserted Page 270 buffetted changed to buffeted Page 294 maneuvres changed to manoeuvres Page 309 these changed to those Page 316 turretted changed to turreted Page 328 Douglas changed to Douglass Page 334 gratitud changed to gratitude Page 362 "of" added between "all us" Page 364 unwieldly changed to unwieldy Page 376 Harpers changed to Harper's Page 378 Proverty changed to Poverty Page 383 gratuitious changed to gratuitous Page 391 Kurd's changed to Hurd's Page 393 discusssions changed to discussions Page 410 Harpers changed to Harper's Page 414 wearyful changed to weariful Page 418 Harpers changed to Harper's Page 418 other changed to others Page 443 Harpers changed to Harper's Page 448 that changed to than -

THE END