Chapter VIII: Part 8

The old chief sat as immobile and dignified as a king in court. We soon learned that the Indian horse-and-bead traders are a different species from the high powers of the tribe sitting in council, making treaties. It was like appearing before a high tribunal.

"Take Indian lands. All time more," grunted one of them.

"The settlers' land is no good to the Indian," I argued; "no water, no berries, no wood, no more value. The government is making the whites pay money, not giving them allotments as they do the red men."

If they would not give us _minne-cha-lu-za_, I went on, we could not print the paper any more, or keep _she-la_, or trade for posts.

They went into ceremonious council, and delivered their concession officially by an interpreter, Little Thunder I think it was, attired in all his regalia of headdress with eagle feathers, beaded coat, and fringed breeches.

It appealed to their sense of power to grant the favor. At last the whites had to come to them for help. Whether the deal was official or unofficial, no one cared. In those crucial days Washington seemed to the homesteaders as remote as the golden gates.

We took a short-cut back. There was not a single building anywhere in sight, and the only moving thing was a herd of range cattle going slowly toward water. Through the silence came a deep, moaning sound, the most eerie, distressed sound I ever heard. I was passing an Indian cemetery, and beside a grave stood an Indian woman--alone with her dead.

As is the Indian custom, she had come alone, walking many miles across the plain. She would probably slash her breast or mutilate her flesh in some other way as a sacrament to her grief. As I rode on slowly, her wailing cry rose and fell until it grew dim in my ears, blending with the moaning sound of the wind.

Some of the settlers turned stock over on the Indian lands after our negotiations, and the Indians hauled loads of life-giving water to the print shop now and then. Our collection of antique animals we turned loose to go back and live off the Indians.

"Might be it will rain," Heine said one day. "Did you see that cloud come by in front of the moon last night?"

But it wasn't a cloud. It was smoke.

XIV

THE LAND OF THE BURNT THIGH

We were living in the Land of the Burnt Thigh, the famous hunting ground of the Brulé Indians, whose name was derived from a great prairie fire which had once swept the land.

The story of that great fire was told me by a famous interpreter who had heard the tale many times from his grandfather. It was three seasons after the big flood of 1812, he said, and the grass was high on Bad River, bringing many buffalo down from the north. About two weeks after the leaves turned they went to the prairie to get the winter's meat. Being a hunting party, the women and children accompanied them. The young boys wandered from the camps, shooting prairie dogs and small birds. One day when a number of boys were returning to camp, a great prairie fire swept down from the north.

The boys ran for the river, but the fire was too swift for them, and they were overtaken. Throwing themselves on the ground, they turned their faces from the fire and wrapped their heads and bodies in their robes, waiting for the fire to pass. Where they lay the grass was high and there were many small bushes; so when the fire came, the ground was hot and they were all burned on the right thigh, though otherwise unhurt.

The escape of the boys was considered so remarkable that the Sioux called this tribe the "people with the burnt thigh." Apparently some French trader rendered the name into his language, and thus we have "Brulé" or burned.

The Land of the Burnt Thigh was famous not only for its great prairie fire and the fact that it had been the feeding ground of the buffalo, which had come in big herds to winter pasture; but also because it had been a notorious rendezvous for horse thieves. In the early days lawless gangs turned to stealing horses instead of robbing banks. A bold outfit of horse thieves plied their trade over a vast section of the Bad River country, of which the Brulé had been a part. Here in the tall grass they found refuge and feed for the horses, with water in the creeks and water holes almost the year around. In the night they would drive their loot in, and the law was helpless in dealing with them.

Much has been said of Indians stealing the white man's horses and little of the depredations of the whites upon the Indians. These gangs stole constantly from the Indians, taking the best of their herds. A little band of Indians, realizing that they must get back their horses at any cost, tracked the thieves and here on the Burnt Thigh attacked them. But they were driven back by the outlaws, who had their lookout, according to the Indians, on the very site of Ammons; concealing themselves here in the tall grass, they could see anyone approaching for miles around. They had seen the Indians coming, just as we had seen them that first day at the settlement. The gang opened fire, killed several of their number, and routed the rest.

The Indians made no protest. All they knew of law was the power of the government, a force not to be appealed to for protection, but rather one against which the red men must struggle for their rights. They had no recourse, therefore, against the thieves. And it was not until the National Guard was sent to round them up that this lawless band was tracked to its lair and captured.

On the Land of the Burnt Thigh that summer the grass was dry, and nowhere was there water with which to fight fire. Heat waves like vapor came up from the hard, dry earth. One could see them white-hot as they rose from the parched ground like thin smoke. From the heat expansion and the sudden contraction when the cool of the night came on, the earth cracked open in great crevices like wide, thirsty mouths, into which horses stumbled and fell beneath their riders.

A young couple went to town one day and returned that night, looking for their home. They wandered around their claim, seeking their shack. It lay in ashes, destroyed by a prairie fire.

Heine came wading through the hot yellow grass. "Did you carry matches with you, Heine?"

"Nope," he answered laconically. "I don't need no matches."

"Suppose a prairie fire should come?" Everyone was supposed to carry matches; no child was allowed to leave home without matches and instructions to back-fire if he saw a fire coming. Heine sat down and wiped the sweat from his face with the sleeve of his little shirt.

"I look first behind when I start. Can't no prairie fire come till I get here."

"But with these hot winds--"

We watched constantly for the first sign of smoke. Sacks, old heavy comforts and pieces of carpet were kept at hand as fire extinguishers, in case there were enough water on hand to wet them--which was seldom.

There were no more water holes, and it got dryer and hotter. Ben Smith's men were still drilling for water. They were down 1500 feet. From the print shop we could hear the drill grinding through hard earth.

Prairie fires began to break out all around the Strip. The homesteaders began to be afraid to leave their shacks for fear they would find them gone on their return. Ammunition for the fight was pitifully meager. They fought with plows that turned firebreaks, back-fired to stop the progress of the fire, beat it out with their wet sacks.

If fire ever got a start on the Burnt Thigh now, with its thick high grass as dry as powder and no water, every habitation would be completely annihilated. Protests about our lack of protection seethed until they found expression in the newspaper. We had no equipment, no fire fighters, no lookouts, no rangers. Surely the government owed us some means of fighting the red devil of the plains.

One evening when the parched ground was beginning to cool we noticed a strange yellow haze settling over the earth, felt a murky heat. The world was on fire! Not near the settlement, miles away it must be, probably on the Indian lands beyond the Strip.

From the heat in the air, the threatening stillness, the alertness of the animals as they lifted their heads high in the air with nostrils dilated, we knew it was coming toward us. The heavy reddish fog portended a big fire, its tongue of flame lapping up everything as it came.

Already a group of homesteaders was gathering at the print shop, organizing systematic action; men from every section hurrying in with little sacks and kegs of water splashing until they were half empty; a pathetic, inadequate defense to set up against so gigantic an enemy. Chris Christopherson rattled by with his tractor to turn broad furrows. Dave Dykstra, who would never set the world on fire but would do a good deal in putting it out, hastened up to help. Here they came! Men with kegs of water, men with pieces of carpet, men with nothing but their hands and their fear to pit against the fire.

Off to the south the sky was red now, and the smell of fire was in our nostrils, faint but unmistakable. None of us knew how fast a big fire could travel. The settlers still knew so pitiably little about combating the frontier.

From the Indian settlement came Swift Running Deer on the horse which had taken the State Fair prize last year. In Sioux (the young buck was too excited to remember his English) he said the fire was on beyond the Brulé somewhere. Most of the Indians had ridden off to it while he had come to tell the whites.

"If the wind stay down, it mebbe no come, but heap big fire like that take two day--three day--mebbe seven to die."

It was still and peaceful now, but there was little hope that two or three days could pass without wind--and if the wind came from that direction there was no hope for the Brulé.

Coyote Cal, who had come riding through the Strip, stopped at the print shop. Ida Mary tried to persuade him to ride around to the homesteads and tell the girls who lived alone that the fire was still a long way off and that men had gone to fight it.

Coyote Cal stretched his long, angular figure to full height and stood there hesitant. "No, miss, I'd ruther fight fire," he said at length.

"But the girls will be frantic with fear."

"Hain't no use a calf-bawlin' over a prairie fire. If it gits yuh, it gits yuh, an' that's all there is to it."

With these consoling words he swung into the saddle and turned his horse's head toward the fire.

Ma Wagor came outside where Ida Mary and I watched the reflection of flame against the darkening sky. The air was still. There was no wind.

"I'm goin' home to milk the cow," Ma announced. She had paid forty dollars for that cow, she reminded us, and she wanted every last drop of milk out of her. Besides, she didn't believe in anybody leaving this world hungry.

The red dusk found the plains stirring. The ominous silence was broken by rumbling wagons hurrying with their barrels of water, tractors chugging, turning long fresh rows of dirt as breaks, teams everywhere plowing around shacks and corrals.

Night came on, inky black. The red light on the horizon and billowy clouds of smoke intensified the darkness. Over the range, cattle were bellowing in their mad fear of fire. They were coming closer to the reservation fence, running from danger.

The hours crept past; around us on the plains the settlers had done all they could, and they were waiting as Ida Mary and I were waiting, watching the red glow on the sky, thinking of the men who were desperately beating out the advancing flames, wondering if each tiny gust foretold the coming of the wind.

Inside the shack we moved about restlessly, putting the money we had on hand in tin cans, the legal paper in the little strong box, and burying them in the small, shallow cave. If the fire came, we would seek refuge there ourselves, but it wouldn't be much use. We knew that.

Out again to look at the sky, and then up and down the print shop, restlessly up and down. Ida Mary made coffee; we had to do something, and there was nothing for us to do but wait. Wait and listen to the silence, and look our own fear squarely in the eyes and know it for what it was.

"What's that?" said Ida Mary in a queer, hoarse voice. She put down her cup and sat rigid, listening. Then she jumped to her feet, her face white. "Edith," she cried, "it's the wind--it's the wind!"

Out of nowhere came the moaning sound of the wind, sweeping unchecked across space, blowing from the south! While we listened with caught breath, it seized some papers and sent them rattling across the table, blew a lock of hair in my eyes, made the dry grass rustle so that it sounded for one glorious moment like rain.

We ran outside and stood in the darkness, our dresses whipping around us, looking at the sky. Here and there above the red haze we saw a bright, jagged tongue of flame leap up, licking the black sky.

The homesteaders who had not gone to the fire found waiting alone intolerable, and one by one they drifted in to the store, waiting taut and silent.

At midnight we heard the staccato beats of a horse's hoofs. A messenger was coming. Only one horse on the plains could travel like that; it was Black Indian. And a moment later Lone Star Len flung himself from the horse and came in.

He had been fighting flame. His face was blackened almost beyond recognition.

"It's all right," he said at once, before we could question him. "The fire's over on the government land. It's beyond the Strip."

His eyes and lips were swollen, face and hands blistered. "It's still ragin'," he went on, "but there is a little creek, dry mostly, between the fire and the Strip. It's not likely to get this far. 'Course, the wind is bad. It's blowin' sparks across on the grass, this side of the creek. But some of the settlers and Indians are watchin' it."

Ida Mary came in from the shack with sandwiches and black coffee and set them before him.

"You didn't need to bother doin' that for me," he protested; "you girls better go to bed."

"When did you have anything to eat?" Ida Mary asked, as he drank the hot coffee and devoured the food ravenously, moving his hands as though they hurt him unbearably.

"This mornin'. Been working with that fire since noon; I had started for the chuck-wagon when I smelt smoke...."

"Lone Star, why did you risk your life to save a reservation full of homesteaders?" I asked him.

He stood for a moment with a chagrined expression on his smoke-scarred face.

"Cattle needs the grass," he replied as he stalked out and rode slowly, wearily away into the flame-lighted night.

The fire had broken out on range and government land off toward the White River country--to the southeast, where Lone Star rode herd. As the country for the most part was uninhabited, the fire had swept the plains for miles before the fighters reached it. Sparks and flames had jumped the creek, but by now the grass was burned back far enough on both sides so that the danger for this region was past.

The amused natives told how a man had jolted up on a stiff horse, a painting outfit in his saddlebag, to watch the fire. "This is great," he exclaimed as he plied brush and color. Then, as a volley of wild sparks shot across the narrow stream and went into flame nearby, he threw down the brush, rushed in among the fire-fighters, worked madly until the flames were extinguished, then went back and finished the picture.

"Who is he?" someone in the gaping crowd asked.

"The cartoonist from Milwaukee," a Brulé settler answered.

For several days longer the fire raged, with the air smoky and a red and black pall over the earth. Then it faded as our other terrors had faded, and was gone.

* * * * *

Already, in the midst of fire and water famine, there stalked ghosts of cold and hunger--the coming winter. With no money left to provide the necessities of life, the homesteaders stared into the face of a food famine. Most of them were now living on meager rations, counting every penny, their crops shriveled in the fields.

Ada put her small wages into flour and coffee. And Heine remarked, "My Ma says might be we'll starve and freeze yet. She's goin' to pray." We watched him trudge back across the plains, a sturdy little fellow, one suspender holding up patched overalls over a faded blue shirt, bare feet which walked fearlessly and by some miracle escaped the constant menace of rattlesnakes, ragged straw hat shading the serious round face. The plains had made him old beyond his six years.

With the realization of danger which the prairie fire had brought, _The Wand_ began to advocate government rangers and lookouts to be stationed at strategic points. I was in the print shop writing an article on conditions when Lone Star came in.

"I want to get my paper forwarded, Miss Printer," he stated; "I'm leavin' the country. It's gettin' too crowded in these parts. Too lonesome. I don't see how people can live, huddled up with somebody on every quarter-section."

"Where are you going now?"

"Goin' to an honest-to-God range country," he said. "A short-grass country, but rich feed. You can get away from landgrabbers there. It's bigger'n all creation."

"Where shall I send the paper?"

"Wyoming. The Rawhide country. Just send the paper to Lost Trail. I'll be goin' on there. I know a cattleman around Lost Trail."

Rawhide country. Lost Trail. About them was the atmosphere of far-flung space, of solitude and peace.

"I may go there myself some day," I told him.

"If you do," he said soberly, "leave this doggone newspaper shebang behind. It's a pest to the country. Don't clutter up any more range with homesteadin' herds. Worse than grasshoppers; at least the grasshoppers leave, and the homesteaders appear to be here to stay."

He rode off, a strange, solitary figure, topped the ridge and dropped out of sight as swiftly as he had appeared that first morning, stopping the eagle in its flight. When he had gone I turned back to my article. In this gigantic homestead project, _The Wand_ declared, there should be protection. We demanded of the local land offices why the Department of the Interior did not establish Service Bureaus on government territory to expedite development, to lessen hardship and danger. But the Land Offices could not help us. They were only the red-tape machines of the Public Lands Department.

The federal government was taking in revenue by the millions from the homesteaders. Millions of acres of homestead land at from $1.25 to $6 an acre provided a neat income for the United States Treasury. And, we contended, the homesteaders of America should be given consideration. There was nothing radical about these articles, but here again I became known as "that little outlaw printer."

Had I been experienced, I might have carried this appeal to Washington and said, "Put the revenue from these lands back into them. That is not charity, it is development of natural resources."

Any such entreaty, coming from an upstart of a girl printer, would have been like a lamb bleating at a blizzard. But the homesteaders might have been organized as a unit, with official power to petition for aid. I did not know then that I could do such things.

Meantime the print shop buzzed with activity. The harvest of proofs, on which I had gambled the paper, was on. It kept one person busy with the clerical work on them. While the Strip was yet a no-man's land, I had pledged the printing equipment company 400 proofs as collateral. That was a low estimate. As a matter of fact _The Wand_ won an all-time record, publishing in one week 88 proofs, the highest number ever to be published in any issue of a newspaper of which the government had record. From the Department of the Interior, from the Land Office, from other newspapers congratulations poured in. It seems to me that some sort of medal was awarded to us for that.

It wasn't the record which mattered, of course. To us the publication of these notices signified that the settlers had stuck it out with parched throats to get their deeds; that some 14,000 acres of wasteland had passed into private units in one week's time.

It meant endless work. Type, numbers, checking, straining eyes and nerves beyond endurance. But it also meant (for that one lot) over $400 income for the newspaper. Proof money had been coming in for several weeks. Every mail brought long heavy envelopes from the Land Office, containing proof applications made there. From among the homesteaders we hired amateur typesetters to help out, and anybody who happened to be handy turned the press; on occasion we resorted to old Indian warriors, and once to a notorious cattle rustler.

And all this time we watched the sky for rain and skimmed the green scum from the dam water to drink. Looking up from the type one morning, I saw an old Indian standing before me, old Porcupine Bear. Slipping in on moccasined feet, an Indian would appear before one without warning. At first this sudden materializing at my elbow had alarmed me, but I had long grown accustomed to it.

Old Porcupine Bear was a savage-looking character--one of the very old warriors who seldom left camp. One never knew how old some of these aged Indians were, and many of them did not know themselves how many seasons they had lived. This old man, we figured, must be a hundred years old.

"Will there be rain, Porcupine?" I asked him. "Will you hold your Rain Dance soon?"

The deep wrinkles in his leathery face were hard set as if from pain. His coal-black hair, streaked with gray and hanging loose over his shoulders, looked as if it had not been combed for days.

"_To-wea_," he wailed. "_My to-wea_ (my woman). Him sick. The fever. Goin' die." He dropped his face into the palm of his hard hand and let it lie there motionless in demonstration of her passing. He wanted to get a box like white squaws had, the boxes in which they went to the Happy Hunting Ground.

He was on the road to Pierre for a coffin. Others of the tribe, we gathered, had put in money to help buy it. He opened a beaded sack and showed us. There was enough to buy a pretty good one. In broken Sioux and signs we advised him to wait--mebbe-no-die. Mebbe-walk-some-more. He shook his head stubbornly. His herbs--he was a medicine man who had healed many sick ones--had not worked. Even his _pazunta_ had failed.

The Indian's _pazunta_ was his shield against disease--against all evil. It drives the Evil Spirit away. It may be anything he selects--an herb, a stone, a rabbit's foot--so long as he selects it secretly and divulges to no one what it is. The _pazunta_ is invested with divine curative power, according to the Indians.

When he got back to his wigwam with the satin-lined "last-sleep-box," Porcupine Bear found his _to-wea_ cooking supper; so the old brave, it was said, slept in the good soft bed himself. "Why not?" said Ida Mary. He had slept on the ground and fought many hard battles; let him have his cushioned resting place while he could enjoy it; but I shuddered at the thought.

A week or so later he came again. It was a day when I was at the breaking point. He stood looking at me, shaking his head as he had done over his _to-wea_. I must have looked like a ghost, for in a gesture of friendship he said:

"You want my last-sleep-box?"

The prairie fire had not got me down, but at the thought of that box I went to bed and stayed there three days.

XV

UP IN SMOKE

There was almost $750 in the tin box down in the trunk ready to be deposited. At breakfast we exulted over it. The Ammons sisters were always draining the bank dry. Sedgwick would open his eyes when we walked into the bank with that bag of money.

We planned to go to Presho that day. It was hardly safe to have so much money in the shack, and we were eager to put it in a safe place. It represented months of planning and effort and hard work. But the labor didn't seem bad to look back on that morning, not with the reward at hand. It had been worth while, because the end of the road was in sight and we had accomplished much that we had hoped to do--more, in some respects.

It was unbearably hot that morning, and we decided against the trip to Presho. After all, one more day wouldn't matter, and the sun was so scorching we quailed at the thought of that long ride. There was an ominous oppression in the air, and heat waves made the ground appear to waver before our eyes. Here and there flames flared up without any explainable origin, as though from the heat of the grass itself.

The day crept on to mid-afternoon, and the hot wind came up from the ground, blistering our faces. There was no one near the print shop, where the metal was hot to the touch, no movement over the plains. We sent our helpers home, while Ma, Ida Mary and I moved about languidly, doing only what was absolutely necessary.

There was a curious, acrid smell in the air. As though a bolt of lightning had struck, I stopped my work on the paper and cried out, "What's that?"

"Fire," screamed Ida Mary; "fire!"

Smoke enveloped us. There was a deafening crackle. Blinding red flame. We ran to the door, and there, not ten feet away, our shack was burning to the ground. The little lean-to kitchen, covered with tar paper, was sending its flames high into the air. Frantically we ran to the front door, shouting above the crackling and roar of flame, "The trunk! The money! The settlers' money!"

The print shop would go, too--and the notices had several weeks to run--but the essential thing was to get the money back. We must do that, must! Oh, for a rolling bank on wheels!

At the front door black smoke came rolling out, choking us. Ida Mary threw a sack over her head and started into the shack. Ma Wagor and I dragged her back into the open air. The building was burning as though it had been made of paper, a torch of orange flames. We watched it go, home, money, clothes, a few valuable keepsakes, furniture--everything we possessed licked up by the flames. The piano, too--I was glad it had brought so much pleasure to the settlers.

The wind! Now the fire was spreading. The print shop was burning, its inflammable tar paper and dry boards blazing like powder. "Hurry, hurry!" we called frantically to each other. From the print shop I grabbed the most valuable papers while Ida Mary snatched what she could from the post office. Stoical, silent, making every move count, Ma Wagor was busy in the store, her store, in which she had taken such pride and such infinite pleasure. Ma was getting more "confusement" now than she had bargained for.

Blinded with smoke, we caught up the sacks into which we had stuffed the papers and threw them into the cave, the only shelter left on the whole claim.

In less than thirty minutes the post office, the store with its supply of food, the print shop were gone. The harvest of long months of labor and storm, thirst and fire, vanished as though it had never been--gone up in clouds of heavy, black smoke.

If the wind would only go down, we groaned; but the sparks had already caught the grass around us. A prairie fire! If it ever jumped those breaks, the Strip would be devastated with the wind sweeping the plain as it was doing. What irony that we who had printed our precautions and warnings for others, should burn up the Strip! We who had labored so to save it! And there was no chance for us. We could not outrun a prairie fire. The horses, which were untied, had gone full speed across the prairie at the first smell and sight of fire.

Now the oilhouse had caught, and we turned, panic-stricken, running headlong across the plains, our feet burning, not knowing where we were going so long as we could escape the explosion of the oil. Inside the firebreaks the grass was burning. Listening for the explosion of the oil was like waiting for the crack of doom. Then we remembered. Pa Wagor had sunk the barrels underground, using siphons, "just in case of fire."

Sparks leaping up, flying across the breaks--the prairie was on fire! We checked our flight, sanity returning with the emergency. We had to go back--simply had to go back and fight that first outbreak of flame. The Strip was at stake. Life and property were at stake. Falling, rising, running, falling again, dragging each other up, we went back. "Help!" we called to the empty prairie, "Help!"

There was nothing to smother the fast-spreading blaze. Not a thing. Not even a sack or a hat. We tore off parts of the clothes from our scantily clad bodies. Ma took off her petticoat. There was a sack in the barn which we wet in a keg set in the yard, wet the canvas which covered the keg. With that, with our feet we trampled down the sparks as they fell, the flames as they rose--shoes hot and charred, holes burning through.

Across the prairie a team was coming at a dead run. "Bless the Lord," Ma Wagor panted, "it's Sam Frye!"

A bright red flare shot up from behind and around me. My dress was on fire. Ida Mary clawed dirt from the hard-baked ground, and with it in her hands twisted my burning smock into knots to keep the flames from spreading. With almost animal instinct I threw myself down in the firebreak, pressing hard against the ground to extinguish any smoldering sparks on my clothing, and lay panting, cooling in the dirt.

Sam Frye, the mail-carrier, was there, taking charge. All at once a crowd had gathered, attracted by the leaping flames on what had been the settlement of Ammons, running to fight the threatening prairie fire. Men went to work, fighting fresh outbursts of flames and putting out fire on the ruins. Women hovered about us in sympathy, some with tears streaming down their sunburned cheeks under the straw hats and bonnets. Neither Sister nor I could shed a tear.

Dazed and dizzy, we stumbled back across the breaks to the charred ashes of our labors. Apart from the tangible losses that lay in coals, the newspaper, the voice of the Brulé, was gone. "Down into frontier history," Senator Phillips said. Into it had gone the ambitions, the heartbreaking labor, the vision of two girls.

Half-naked, our scanty clothing burned and torn, hair singed, faces and parts of our bodies scorched and black with smoke--tar paper makes black, smudgy smoke--eyes red and burning, we stood there in the middle of the open spaces that had dealt us their blow. Our _pazuntas_ hadn't worked, that was all. But at least we had checked the prairie fire. We had won that much from the Brulé, the "Burned" land.

We clung to each other wordlessly. There was nothing to say. Everything that made up our daily life and our plans for the future had been wiped out in thirty minutes.

"We still have the claim," Ida Mary murmured at last; "nothing can destroy the land."

"But all our bright hopes--"

How the fire got such a start before we detected it was a mystery. With the shack walls already burning hot and the strong wind, it had been like spontaneous combustion. Ma Wagor was baking bread on an old oil stove. Perhaps a draft from the open window had fanned the fire. But the origin didn't matter now.

Ma Wagor had worked heroically, helping us to save the important records, the mail, and the prairie from being swept by fire. When it was all over she did not whimper about her loss.

When I saw Pa coming, I ran to her. "Ma, here comes Pa. This will kill him. You had better go meet him." He had not wanted her to buy the store in the first place; now there were debts piled up, and only the homestead to pay them.

She sat on the ground, burying her face in her hands. "Let him come to me," she replied. "It's his place to comfort me in time of trouble."

True to her feminine intuition, he went to her and put his arm around her shoulders. "Elizabeth," he said. No response. "Elizabeth," he entreated. "Don't give way like this. We will pull through somehow."

I felt a hand on my arm, and Alex Van Leshout's voice hoarse in my ear. "The latchkey of the Circle V is on the outside. If you girls will come over, I'll move out. If you need me or Hop-Along, all I have is at your service. You're a good Indian, Edith."

Sometimes I envy the women who are able, during a catastrophe, to stop and grieve over it. I never seem to have had the time. There was always something that demanded to be done, whatever the circumstances.

The fire had no sooner been put out, the claim bare as the day I first saw it--save for charred grass, and a great mound of ashes, and the smell of smoke--when Sam Frye opened the mail sacks. Sitting bedraggled in his old buggy, Ida Mary distributed the mail to the patrons who had gathered. Even though the post office was gone, the mail must go on. We were never destined to be back-trailers.

The sultry, tragic day came to a close, with the plains light long after the sun had gone down, and the Ammons settlement gone, and a devastating sense of emptiness. Ida Mary and I realized that we had no place to go. With typical frontier hospitality, every home on the reservation was open to us; but that night we longed to be alone. It wasn't commiseration we needed, but quiet in which to grasp what had happened to us. We decided on Margaret's shack, left vacant when she had proved up. She had left a few household essentials there.

There some of the frontier women followed us, to bathe and salve the burns we had forgotten, bandaging those which were the worst. I had suffered most when my clothing caught fire, but miraculously there were no serious burns.

They left us alone as night came, Ma and Pa Wagor, Ida Mary and me. It was Ma who roused first from the general lethargy in which we were all steeped. She began bustling around. "Guess we'd better have something to eat," she said briskly.

"There's nothing left to eat," Ida Mary reminded her.

Triumphantly, Ma brought forth a big bundle tied up in her old gingham apron. In it were cans of salmon, tomatoes and other essential foods. And a can of pineapple, Ma's panacea for all ills! "I knew we'd be hungry after all that, so I jerked up a little stuff while you were getting the papers out."

She brought in an armful of prairie hay, built a fire in the cookstove and made strong tea. She was no longer the clinging vine of an hour before.

And there in the little shack down the draw, penniless, almost naked, all our belongings and our plans for the future in charred ashes on the claim, we slept from exhaustion.

No matter with what finality things seem to end, there is always a next day and a next. During those first few hours the extent of our disaster had dazed us. Then, the odds seemed so overwhelmingly against us that there was no use in going on. The only trouble was that we couldn't stop. Post office or no post office, there was the mail. Print shop or no print shop, there were the proof notices.

We were like the cowboy who, hanging to a running steer's tail, was dragged against the hard ground and through brush until he was cut, battered and bruised.

Fearing he would be killed, the other cowboys, who watched, shouted wildly to him, "Let go! Let go!"

"Let go, hell!" he yelled back. "It's all I can do to hold on!"

Then there was Great-uncle Jack Ammons, back in the earlier days of Illinois, who had become critically ill from some lingering disease of long standing. One day the doctor called Aunt Jane aside and said, "Jane, if Jack has any business matters to attend to, it had better be done at once. I don't think he can last another forty-eight hours."

From the bedroom came a weak, irritable voice, "Jane! Jane! Where's my boots?"

Uncle Jack got up, fought the disease, and lived and prospered for many a year. We came of a family who died with their boots on.

I don't know whether it was a streak of Great-uncle Jack or whether, like the cowboy, we held on because we could not let go. The latter, perhaps, for we saw no way of escape. Many times, I think, people get too much credit for hanging on to things as a virtue when they are simply following the line of least resistance. We saw no means of escape, and were too stunned to plan.

Of one thing we were sure. We would not go back home for help. There would have to be some way of telling our father of the misfortune so as to soften the blow as much as possible, but we were determined not to add to his burdens, which were already too heavy for him.

"If the railroad company takes us to the state line," declared Ida Mary, "it will have to take us crated--or furnish us covering." In the garish morning light, indeed, we felt rather naked in those flimsy, torn clothes, the only garments we now owned.

"We can't go back, anyhow," I reminded her. "We can't leave things unfinished. The proof notices have to finish running, and Sam Frye will be throwing the mail sack in at the door." It was easier to get into things than to get out.

The settlers came that day with their widow's mite of food and clothes; the women's clothing too large, the children's too small. But it covered us--after a fashion. The store at Presho sent out a box of supplies. Coyote Cal and Sourdough rode up.

"Beats tarnation, now don't it," Coyote Cal consoled us.

"I told you this country wasn't fit for nothin' but cowhands," growled Sourdough. "Here, the punchers rounded up a little chicken feed." He fairly threw at us a dirty tobacco pouch, filled with coins. "Coming before pay day like this, tain't much," he grumbled, as though the catastrophe might have waited for pay day--things couldn't be done to suit Sourdough.

A wagonload of Indians drove up, men and squaws and papooses. They climbed out, unhitched, turned the team loose to graze. They came in mumbling in a sort of long wail, "No-print-paper, hu-uh, hu-uh," but gleeful as children over the gifts they carried. A bright-hued shawl, thick hot blankets, beaded moccasins. There was a sack of "corn in the milk" (roasting ears) which had been raised over by the river, and stripped (dried) meat. We did not know whether it was cow, horse or dog, but we knew it had been black with flies as it hung on the lines drying--we had seen them drying meat. However, parboiling should make it clean.

And early that morning we saw Imbert coming from Presho, hurrying to Ida Mary, his face drawn and haggard. They went into each other's arms without a word, and at last Ida Mary was able to cry, tears of sorrow and relief, with her face against his breast.

I lay weak and ill, wasting from a slow fever. I slept fitfully, while streams of cool water went gurgling by, and cool lemonade, barrels of it. But every time I stooped to take a drink the barrels went rattling across the plain into a prairie fire.

"Maybe you've got typhoid," Ma would say as she bathed my hot head and hands with towels wrung out of vinegar and warm water, fanning them to coolness. "You'll be all right, Sis," Ida Mary would say; "just hold on--" We did not call a doctor. There was no money left for doctors.

Rest, sleep, and nourishment were what I needed, but conditions were far from favorable for such a cure. The deserted shack was baking hot. It was not the cheerful place it had seemed while Margaret lived in it, with the bare floor, the old kitchen stove, the sagging wire couch and a couple of kitchen chairs. We had scanty, sticky food, and warm, sickening water. We didn't even bother to keep it clean. The routine of our life had been burned away. The handful of dishes went dirty, the floor went unswept. But Ma brought milk and custards that she had made at home, I drank the juice of dried fruits, and Imbert brought us water from the Millers' well. We sank jars of it deep into the ground to keep cool.

Heine broke a new trail across the plains and a few days after the fire the horses came home. They had wandered back to the old site, snorted at the black ruins, and gone thundering across the prairie led by Lakota with the wild horse's fear of fire. We never expected to see them again. But one day they saw Sam Frye coming with the mail. They followed him down the draw, and when he stopped and threw out the mail sack Lakota gave a loud neigh and walked straight into Margaret's old barn. Where the mail sacks went was home to Lakota.

Moving the post office around the prairie, piling the mail in an open box in the corner, may have been criminally illegal, but we gave it no thought.

The mail, in a haphazard fashion, was being handled. Our next problem was the proof notices. They must go on. It was vital to the settlers. Many of them could not live without the money they were borrowing on the final proofs. Without the press there seemed no solution to that problem.

On the sixth day after the fire Ida Mary got up early, while I slept in the cool of the morning; she made a blast from the dry grass under one cap of the stove, boiled coffee, ate her lean breakfast, and put food on a chair beside my bed. Then she darkened the room, slipped out, saddled Lakota, rode up to the cave, and brought out the mail sack of legal papers we had saved from the fire. She took out the notices--those in course of publication and others due to be published. Then she rode on to McClure, made arrangements with the printer of the McClure _Press_, and began setting up the notices.

When the stage came in that noon with the Ammons mail, there was a letter from E. L. Senn, the proof king, offering us the use of the shop and part-time service of his printer to meet the emergency. Although we had cornered the great proof business on the Lower Brulé, he was coming to our rescue to save it for us.

That night Ida Mary came home, hot, weary, with lines of fatigue in her youthful face and about her blue eyes. But there was a resolute look, too, marking her strong will; and in her voice a tone of satisfaction.

It was a long, arduous task, setting up again all those notices in small type. The type of the McClure shop would not set half of the notices. We sent the balance of them to be set, some in Presho, some in Pierre, got them back by stage, and _The Wand_, despite fire and all other obstacles, went on with its work--a few days late, strictly a proof sheet, but without lapse of publication.

And Ida Mary kept things going, conserving her strength as well as she could, with Imbert and Ma Wagor helping. Ma said, "I'd 'a' died if I hadn't found something to do."

It was mid-August, with no sign of the drought breaking. In the shack down the draw we sat during spare hours sorting type at Margaret's kitchen table, picking, separating six-point, eight-point, ten-point letters and spaces, leads, slugs. Ma Wagor and other neighbors helped at odd times; Heine separated the type into piles of like sizes. Sorting that type-pi was a job to which no one in the world but a printer can give the deserved sympathy.

Heine, raking around in the cooling embers on my claim, had found several cases of pied type and a few odds and ends of printing equipment down under a piece of heavy tin roofing, the only thing salvaged from the wreckage.

A committee of settlers came, emptied a little sack on the table. In a little heap there lay pennies, dimes, quarters, a few silver dollars--precious coins that had been put aside to keep the wolf from the door--and a separate roll of bills. The offering of the Lower Brulé settlers! "To build a new shack and print shop," they said simply. "The homesteaders will do the building."

Of course, we must build another shack and reestablish residence or there would be no deed to the land. The money represented not only the hard-earned savings but the loyal support of the settlers. When we protested, they laughed. "But _The Wand_ has always been telling us to share," they said. Some of the business men of the towns added to the contribution to establish the newspaper.

One sweltering day, with everyone seeking escape from the broiling sun, all movement over the Strip was suspended. As I lay on the couch recuperating, there came a great explosion that roared through the dead hush like all the cannons of war gone off at once. Ida Mary, resting in the shade of the shack, came running in. It could not be thunder, for there was not a cloud in the sky. It had come from over Cedar Fork way.

Soon the plains were astir with settlers rushing in the direction of the explosion. A great rumbling force was sending steam high into the air. It was Ben Smith's Folly. He had struck gas--enough to pipe house and barns for light and fuel!

Then came a heaving, belching from far down in the earth's cavern. And up came the water--a great stream of it that ran over the dry hot ground! Water overflowing. That artesian well, flowing day and night, would save the people and stock until it rained.

And with the flowing of fresh, cool water on the Lower Brulé, life began to flow through my veins once more, and I got up, ready for what was to come.

XVI

FALLOWED LAND

So it happened that only a few weeks before proving-up time, Ida Mary and I had to start all over again. But with the coming of water into that thirsty land it didn't seem so difficult to begin again. And we weren't doing it alone. It was the settlers who built a new shack, a new building for a printing press; the settlers who clothed us during those first destitute days. "This is cooperation," they laughed at our protests. "_The Wand_ has always preached cooperation."

In the cool of the evening I rode out over the devastated prairie, past the charred timbers and ashes of my claim, across the scorched and stunted fields blighted by drought, avoiding the great cracks which had opened in the dry earth and lay gaping like thirsty mouths for rain. The crops were burnt, and the land which had seemed so fertile looked bleak and sterile.

I rode through the reservation gate. There was no one at home at Huey Dunn's, but his little field of shocked grain lay there in the midst of burnt grass and unharvested fields. Instead of dry chaff there were hard, fairly well-filled heads. It had withstood the drought sufficiently to mature. In an average year it would have yielded a good crop.

On his claim near the reservation a young man was doing quite a bit of experimenting. He was a graduate of an agricultural school. I looked at his fields, which also had come through the drought much better than others. From other farmers scattered here and there who had tried the fallowing plan I got records of methods and results. Then I rode back slowly, thinking of what might be done for the Brulé country.

Drinking water supply could be obtained. The next most vital problem was moisture for the crops. Most of the rainfall came in the growing season, but in dry years it was inadequate and much of it wasted on packed ground. To produce crops in the arid or semi-arid regions, out-of-season moisture--heavy snows and rains--must be conserved. There must be a way to harness it.

Next to lack of moisture was the short growing season. These were the principal barriers to converting the new West into an agricultural domain. The latter problem could be solved, the farmers said. Progress already was being made in developing seed adapted to the climate. The Indians had produced quick-maturing corn through their years of corn-raising in a small way. There could be developed a hardier, short-stalked grain, eating up less moisture, agricultural authorities maintained. The farmers said that nature itself gradually would do a great deal toward that end.

Experience. Science. Time. Of course, this was a land of the future, not of today. The homesteaders had expected to tame it in a year or two, when many years must be spent on even the smallest scientific discoveries. They had demanded miracles. That was because they had no resources with which to await results.

President Roosevelt had done much in turning public attention toward the necessity of reclaiming these public lands, and already much was being done. They had been too long neglected. Years ago, when the supply of government land had seemed inexhaustible, the tide of settlers had swept around the forgotten frontier, on beyond the arid and semi-arid land to the fertile soil and the gold fields on the Pacific Coast. But the time had come when this neglected prairie was the only land left for a land-hungry people. Some way had to be found to make the great arid plains productive.

The Department of Agriculture was turning its attention to the frontier, establishing bureaus and experiment stations in various western states, making scientific research.

At the request of _The Wand_, two agricultural agents from the State Experimental Farm came to examine the soil and advise us as to its possibilities, as to crops and cultivation. They reported it rich in natural resources, with splendid subsoil. We would have to depend greatly upon the subsoil and its moisture-retaining quality.

And over the frontier there was talk about a new system of conserving moisture. Some said it was bound to sweep the West. The method was called fallowing--the method Huey Dunn had used. It was a radical departure from anything farmers of the rain belts had ever used.

The few sodbreakers who had tried it thought they had found a way to conserve the moisture and at the same time to preserve the land, but it was not they who heralded the plan as a great new discovery. To them it was a way to raise their own crops. They may have learned it in the Old Country, where intensive farming was carried on, or, like Huey Dunn, figured it out for themselves. But it was ahead of the times in the new West and generally looked upon as an impractical idea spread largely by land agents as propaganda. Many of the farmers had never heard of it. What I had heard and read of fallowing now came back to mind. I was in a position to keep better posted on such things than they.