Читать книгу Spring Came on Forever - Bess Streeter Aldrich - Страница 12

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Amalia rode quietly at the side of her new husband, Herman Holmsdorfer. She had no spoken reproach for her father, uttered no word of rebellion toward the man who had acquired her body.

Herman possessed her now,--he had a woman to keep his house and cook his food and lie by his side at night. He was secretly proud of her prettiness, too, but it would not have done to tell her so. Far more than the prettiness was the fact that she could cook and sew and scrub, tend chickens and help plant when he needed her. Also she would bear him many sons. Seven,--ach in the Fatherland one would get something for that. Here they would give bounty only for coyote skins.

Riding along the Cut-off trail he was fully satisfied with life as he knew it. One-hundred-sixty acres of good rich Nebraska Territorial soil for his portion at the end of the journey, a team, a woman of his own,--one of only two children, too, so that when Wilhelm Stoltz died Amalia would get half of her father's homestead. And Amalia being his, the land would be his. Must discourage any sign of remarrying in Wilhelm,--that would not do.

One-hundred-sixty acres, a good team and a woman,--thus did Herman Holmsdorfer gloat on his good luck and although he did not analyze the statement, thus did he grade them in point of value.

Loudly jovial he was on the trip. Amalia had gone to his head like a drink of Roggen Branntwein.

"The best cabin of all for you I build. Not a house of sod as the people far out on the prairies away from a stream, nor yet dugouts from the earth with only boards and branches and strips of sod over them. What think you? Of good logs from the natural timber along the river and creek-bed where is the fine land we have chosen. Say something, woman." He dug a heavy forefinger playfully into Amalia's pink cheek. "Is it not good?"

"It is good," Amalia said quietly.

Very quiet she had been ever since the day by the Cut-off trail near Nebraska City. Tractable, too, she was, and carefully polite to Herman. But something had frozen in Amalia's being that day, as the roots of the lilac bushes back home freeze in the winter. Outwardly pleasant and obedient, her heart had crept into an inner room, hurt and bleeding, to hide forever from the people about her. The kleine Taube, little dove, had been wounded,--but only wounded, so she could not die.

Thereafter she lived in two worlds,--the practical one in which all these others moved and had their being, working hard when the wagons stopped, taking her turn at the cooking, washing out the necessary clothing in the streams for her father and Fritz, and now Herman,--and another world in which she existed apart from them, entirely aloof in her thoughts and with nothing in common in her emotions. With characteristic docility she submitted to the rough caresses of the heavy-jowled man beside her, but by some cool withdrawal of the spirit found it possible to remain forever away from him.

For several days the ox train headed west on the trail, turned from it at the point designated by Herman and rode miles again across the wild treeless prairie, the long grass dotted with the white of daisies and the blue of prairie gentians.

Twice they sighted small bands of Indians and were frightened, and twice the scare went into nothing.

For a way beyond the Big Muddy the country had been undulating, a succession of rolling hills and prairie land. They rode through hills and valleys, uplands and lowlands, dark sandy loam and black bottom lands, blue joint verdure, and course slough spikes. And the feet of the oxen crushed a thousand wild blossoms in the prairie grass.

Sometimes the way was as level as a floor,--sometimes they went up and down through gullies and creek-beds. Sometimes the skies opened and the wagons stuck fast for hours in the black mire. Sometimes the sun shone and the drying winds blew, and they made fourteen miles a day. Sometimes they passed greenish sloughs, and occasionally near the streams, a virgin timber,--boxelder, elm and willow, burr oak, hackberry and ash, and the tangled vines of undergrowth. A few times they passed cabins, two or three were occupied, some were abandoned claim shanties. Once they halted by a pond of muddy water, warm and brackish, and once by the clear sparkling water of a spring-fed stream. All this where one day there would be villages and towns, churches, schools, countless farms, paved highways, concrete bridges and searchlights sweeping the night skies for the guidance of the mail planes.

Herman rode proudly all this way at the head of the caravan for it was he who knew the way to the new homesteads. On the sixth day he made a sudden halt, got out of the wagon and waved wildly to those few in his vision. One by one the wagons reached those already assembled, the drivers wondering what had caused the mid-afternoon stop.

"It is here that the lands begin," Herman had been saying to Amalia, ". . . here you shall keep my house for me."

"Yes, Herman," Amalia had said,--little Amalia who was to live in the same house with Herman, but always in Another Room.

It was then that three strange young men on horseback rode out to meet them. And now ensued a protracted argument. The young men had arrived during the absence of the Lutheran scouts, broken sod in a sizable area of prairie, built a shack, and what was to be done about it?

It was nightfall before the Lutheran men had come to the conclusion to buy the squatters off. Loath was a hard-working thrifty German to part with good money to English-speaking squatters, but after an assembled meeting of the heads of the Stoltz, Schaffer, Rhodenbach, Kratz, Gebhardt and Holmsdorfer families, they decided to offer the men one hundred dollars to leave. The young men wanted three hundred. The answer to that mathematical problem was as plain as the nose on every German's face,--two hundred.

So the deal went over and the young men settled on land adjoining that of the colonists,--a small enough business deal at the time, but one to be fraught with far-reaching consequences, for it came to be in time that they and their descendants mixed the English language and customs, English schools, and church services, social events and marriages with those of the Germans,--until no longer could one pick out the descendants of those Lutherans from the children of the English.

The business finished, all the new German settlers gathered around the huge central fire which had been built. Wilhelm Stoltz raised his great hand and a hush fell on them. When the least child had grown quiet he thanked God for leading them into the land which would nourish them and their children after them and their children's children,--told Him that He was closer here to his followers than He had seemed in the land from which they came.

Amalia, looking up at the low-hanging stars shining like so many yellow buttercups in a forest clearing, wondered why He seemed so much farther away.