Читать книгу Spring Came on Forever - Bess Streeter Aldrich - Страница 13

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Immediately the settlers went to work to lay out the farms. That all might border the river, they figured out a system whereby they narrowed each holding and allowed it to extend farther back so that every homestead might have its full one-hundred-sixty acres. Thus each family could have access to water, and because of the narrower measurements, be slightly closer to each other for protection from the Indians in case there was trouble. They realized that this homesteading out farther than the Omaha area might bring on Indian depredations any time.

For many days Wilhelm Stoltz and Herman Holmsdorfer, Rudolph Kratz and August Schaffer on horseback, with small pocket compasses and the lines from their horses' harness, laid out the acreage into the eleven farms, for there were that many men in the group over twenty-one. Wilhelm Stoltz nearly shed angry tears that Fritz was only fifteen. It seemed such a waste of years to be but fifteen with all this fine land everywhere.

All camped by the wagons near the river while the farms were being surveyed, with every one anxious for the day to come when that particular phase of the work should be finished so that the building might begin. The women cooked and washed at the river's brink, and gathered for the fires the dead branches of trees along its banks and the dried buffalo chips out on the prairie.

This camp was made in more permanent fashion than those of one-night duration on the way. Now several stoves were set up with quilts hung behind them to lessen the onslaught of the wild winds from across the open country.

Many times the two who had come to pick out the land, Herman Holmsdorfer and Rudolph Kratz, were congratulated for their choice. How terrible, the various members of the company said, not to have had this river with its native timber. Several times they had passed settlers on the way who had chosen land far from trees, claiming it was richer or lay more level. It was because they had not scouted about as Rudolph and Herman had done. There was wide, open prairie land here for the good crops which soon would grow, but there was timber, too, even though not large like the Illinois trees.

On a hot day in July with the wind stilled before the sullen approach of a storm, the work of the surveying was finished. It was a momentous occasion, for now came the choosing of the farms. They gathered about in a close circle. Herman Holmsdorfer placed all the numbers of the tracts on pieces of paper. Young Henry Gebhardt wrote all the names of the families on similar pieces. The numbers were placed in one hat,--the names in another.

"Who shall draw?" they asked.

"The two brides," some one said. "Anna Kratz and Amalia Holmsdorfer."

"The two brides," others chorused. "It is good luck for us all."

"Gutes Glück!" was heard on all sides.

"Hush!" said Wilhelm Stoltz, Amalia's father. "You talk of good luck. Ask instead the good God for His help and protection."

He raised his great hand high above his head and his loud voice rumbled forth, addressing Gott im Himmel. A similar scene had taken place on a far New England shore over two hundred years before. "Thou hast led these Thy chosen people . . ."

Amalia bowed her head. Why were the Lutherans chosen before all others? Was it true? How were they sure?

Love,--a very human love for one not of her church,--made Amalia Holmsdorfer all the years of her life liberal and kind to those who chose to think differently from her own people. Protestant, Catholic, Jew, and Gentile, those of Mormon faith and those of no faith at all found succor at her door until the day of her death.

And now the drawing. Anna Kratz drew a number. "Eleven . . ." she said in a clear, ringing voice.

Amalia drew a name to match with it. "Herman Holmsdorfer," she said quietly.

They all shouted and laughed at the joke. "Amalia is so anxious to get started she draws her own name first."

She looked down at the paper in her hand stupidly. It was true. Holmsdorfer was her own name. She had not remembered for a moment.

In the midst of the laughing and chattering Wilhelm Stoltz raised his hand high again. "Stille!" And there was immediate silence, for Wilhelm Stoltz, by some forcefulness of character even more pronounced than the other men also of domineering ways, was their acknowledged leader.

"Of one thing we have not thought. The years will pass. Our children and our children's children will live here on these farmlands. Better they should live side by side those of the same blood. Look you,--if ought happens to any of us,--to be taken in sickness or by death, it should be better that my Fritz and I dwell beside Herman and Amalia that the land may lie together."

"That is good," Herman shouted, and added to himself,--"Three-hundred-twenty acres of land I own instead of one-hundred-sixty should old Wilhelm and Fritz die before me." Almost he was licking his lips at the thought.

It was better so, the men agreed. The women were mere onlookers, consenting readily to whatever satisfied their men.

But one more question came from the lips of young Adolph Kratz. "I am now husband to Anna Rhodenbach. Shall the homestead I own lie then next to my father or her father?"

It was a weighty subject to be settled as the far distant lightning forked in the western sky. Wilhelm decided, this Lutheran Solomon, as he set himself up to be.

"Woman is frailer. It is thought she will die first. It is even so in the English laws. The homesteads of the younger men who have wives of our families shall lie next to the homesteads of the wife's parents. Thus at the deaths of the elderly women the daughter lives next to her father to care for him in his old age."

It was agreeable to all,--this settling so glibly by a domineering man the entire future of the lives of a dozen families. But this fluent and smooth forecast was by way of being something of a joke,--perhaps the Almighty may have thought so, too,--for it was to be, that years after Herren Kratz, Rhodenbach, Gebhardt, and Schaffer had been gathered to their fathers, hardy old Grossmütter Kratz, Rhodenbach, Gebhardt and Schaffer met summer afternoons on the porches of their fine farm homes, ate their Kaffeekuchen, drank their Kümmel, and jabbered endlessly in the old tongue, rather to the annoyance of a younger and very American generation.

They now rearranged the drawing, grouping them in clusters as agreed upon, three-hundred and twenty acres to the Rhodenbachs, they to settle between the two families which homestead each should have, three-hundred and twenty to the Stoltz-Holmsdorfers, and finishing the others in the same fashion.

The sky was darker now. The low thunderheads were piling up like a flexible mountain range that constantly changed in depth and height and shadows.

They finished the drawing. Wilhelm and Fritz were to be at one far end of the long line of homesteads, Amalia and Herman next, young Adolph Kratz and his bride, Anna, next, and the others in order.

No roads between these homesteads now. Later, along the side of the vast acreage, a rutty road running as wildly as a vagrant gypsy, dusty or muddy in summer, hard frozen or piled with countless drifts in the winter,--then after a time surveyed and "worked,"--still later straightened and graveled,--then leveled and paved so that cars doing sixty or seventy need not slow down and lose time where the oxen and the shaggy-legged horses of the Kratz, the Schaffer and the Gebhardt, the Stoltz, the Holmsdorfer and the Rhodenbach families once came to a lumbering stop in the midst of the prairie grass at the creek's bend.