TOLD ON THE TRAIL.

Press, Volume LVIII, Issue 10974, 25 May 1901, Page 3

TOLD ON THE TRAIL.

'•V>_ " . -By HVK. HA-U-is. : "-doesn't Jack Hargrave live hereaboxtts?" 1.-mquir-d -_>f Uncle Amos, as he. waa driving mc from a small North Dakota prairie -settlement to tshe nearest-railway station. "Jack married an old sweetheart of mine—Lois EUiot. Last I heard of him h& was 'pro-ving up' on a claim out here some place." - "That**. Jack's oH claim, over there," said Uncle Amos, pointing with hie whip 'handle"to a descrtedrand _d-lupi<_at-d claim shaaty * "But" Jack's quit.," he tfdflW. * -"• *■ "Ah! given up. farming, has he? I don't wonder that he couldn't.content hkaeelf in these wilds.'' "Yes, Jack's quit. Hanged h___-lf to a beam in the barn." "What! committed suicide? Great Scott! I never heard of it." "Well, -v'see, it's sech a common occurrence on "these blamed prairies," said Uncle Amos, with a weary sigh. "Half the fellers out here gets tired and quits that way. Bat Jack bad reason! enough fer it. Heard about his wife, didn't ye?" No, I had''beard nothing. D___r little Lois—how'well I remembered her laughing face and her merry ways—tbe brightest girl in college and the ringleader in all our sport/ Whart a death in life it must have been to such a girl to be condemned ,to live on these desolate, wind-swept prairies 1 I looked over at the deserted I claim shanty and an fancy I saw her little, pale, homesick face pressed against the window pane. Unci- Amos seemed to read my thoughts, for he turned melancholy eyes toward tlie forsaken home, and said with much feding: "This country's all right fer men an' mules, but it's a denied shame to bring women an' dogs out here" I agreed with him as to the latter half of the phrase, but I have not grudge enough against m-n. and mules to condemn them to life servitude here. "I thought a heap o' Jack and her," continued Uncle Amos, with a reminiscent air. "The next morning after that happened to his wife, I went over to the claim to see him. Gol! Seems like I'll never get that feller's face out o' my mind! Some nights when the wind's a howlin' it jest hants ms. Poor Jack was the heartbrokenest feller I ever see, an' good reason fe_* it, top. He told mc all about how it happened, an' I couldn't find _ a word o' comfort to say; it seems like there ain't any when fate plays a feller a j trick like that. \ "He give mc a letter she left on the table; she'd jest been a .writin* ■ to' her , mother before she started out in that bliz- | zard. Before Jack could send it he got | word o' his mother-in-law's - death, so he give it to mc; said he fcnowed I thought a heap o' Lois an' he wanted mc to keep] it. I might a knowed he meant to put ] an end to hisself or be wouldn't a give mc that letter—but ■■*__** never thought of it then. ■ ' . I "I bated to leave the poor feller there j alone that mornin' when I went away, but I had to drive some one to the station an' I jest had to leave him. .He was a settin' there with his arms stretched out over the table, an' his head bowed down on 'em, an' a sdbbin' in a way to fetch a lump into a man's throat, when I left him. 1 tried to say somethin' comfortm', but ye know how 'tis; there jest want nothin' to say. I ain't ever got free from rememberin' the way Jack looked. "An' jest after I-left he must a gone out to the bam an' hanged hisself to a beam. I've got that letter of his wife's; maybe you'd like to read it. seem' as you're a friend of both of 'em." He fumbled in his coat pocket and produced a worn and soiled sheet of note paper. I spread it open on my knee and read: — Coyote Cottage, Gopher Gulch. Dearest Mamma, — Over miles of rolling prairie I send you a love kiss on the wind. Telegraphy is slow compared with a Dakota wind. As I write, there are sixteen tumbleweeds chasing each other playfully past the front' door. But I forget that you have never seen that interesting and unique vegetable growth known as a tumbleweed, though the name may give you some faint idea I of its mission in life. For the benefit of your {esthetic Boston intellect I will ex- | plain that a tumbleweed is a ragged round thing that looks like a roll .of wire. It has one little root that fastens it to the earth, and when that gives way before the soft caresses of the festive prairie wind (which blows from stilly morn till dewy eve) off it starts like a thing possessed 1 It rolls over, and over, and over, in a wild career after the one that started just in front of it. And as there are no trees and no fenoes in this benighted land, the thing goes careering on into tlie next county, and so on ad infinitum. There's something uncanny in the way they seem to know just i where they started for. The things seem possessed of diabolical intelligence. | Though "a rolling stone gathers no moss," a rolling tumbleweed gathers a little of everything—dried grass, and rubbish, etc., and when it finally fetches up against some stray barn it is as hideous a thing to look at as you care to see. I cannot describe the soenery around our humble domicile, mamma dear, for the very simple but obvious reason thatup to date none has occurred. It is just one vast, hungry, rolling prairie with the wind howling over it. I wondt-r Dore didn't come out here and sit on a gopher hill while he made sketches for his "Inferno." Even the American Indian found this too barren a land to live in, and folded his tent like j the Arab and went away to steal some j other place. And between you and mc, I have a higher opinion of the American Indian than I ever had before. ,

The wind out here, like Tennyson's brook, "goes on for ever." Oh, after you have been here a while you don't mind hearing the chimney come rattling down on the roof; and it's nothing at all to see your wearing apparel flop gracefully down off the clothes line and go sailing airily off into the next tier of counties. You need never expect to see it again unless the

wind changes. The farmers out here have to stack their fall ploughing to keep it from blowing away, and it is a constant wonder to your Lois how the dogs keep the hair on their backs. Our nearest neighbour lives half a mile from our palatial residence; but that ia considered right next door on a Dakota prairie, you know. The said neighbour is an old lady with grey sidfe curls, an ear trumpet, rund a pronounced Yankee twang. She hails from Vermont, and believes devoutly that the Garden of Eden was originally located in that State. She is a kindly old soul, and she came out here, -she says, for the benefit of her son's health. The son is evidently non compos mentis. He is about nineteen years old, and has a wan, meagre, pathetic, little face —makes mc think of a piece of celery that has been' covered up all winter in the cellar. . The idea of coming out to this God-for-saken country to cure an addled brain! If there is anything calculated to addle a good, sound, healthy, norm.. I brain it is to look out all day upon a naked prairie, and listen to the wind howling up and down the.scale of B-minor while you beat the devil's tattoo on the window pane. That is all the poor fellow does, except play the violin, And how he does play 1 "Bhere is a good deal of truth in, Emerson's theory of "compensation" ; you know he says there is always something to "make the balance good." That poor boy, for instance, really has not the brains the law allows geese, but if you could hear him play the violin! Sometimes I wonder if the soul hasn't gone out from his vacant eyes and entered into the instrument. In his hands it sobs and moans, and sometimes carols joyfully.;'. I entice him over here occasionally, and we play Chopin together. I believe my- piano is the only one within twenty miles, and such a time as we had getting it.here from that little railway stall--.! • It was a good deal like the Vicar ber the Vicar "blew" himself on a family group of such dimensions that it couldn't be got into the house till the doorway was enlarged?. Well, we catme near having to build the house around my piano, which came all the way from cultured Boston; and it did look so surprised at itself-when it was being transported over weaj-jf miles of trfeeless plains. When Gabriel piays his last trump, I aah Bure lie will come out here to play it— there'll be nothing to break the ripple of sound, j.- The- only, lovely thing I have found; as'yet," in these western wilds are the little purple "wind flowers" —exquisite, fragile, and as delicately tinted as a butterfly's, wing. They turn their pathetic little faces upward, all a-tremble on their J tiny stems, and seem to say: "What have I we. done that we should be exiled to this I barren land?" and they actually bob their little heads right up through the snow. But I have scribbled an infinite deal of nothing, and must write a hasty finis. If you discover some puckery spots on this paper, mamma dear, you will probably attribute it to "tears, idle tears" ; and I may as well adimit that any lachrymal glands have been a little active during the process of writing this letteT. But it is almost time for Jack to blow home, and a bride must not meet her husband with wet cheeks. I envy even a postage stamp that is stuck on a letter that goes to Boston. Since the snow came we are debarred from our one wild dissipation of driving about evenings j over the prairie trails (they tenderfoot you ] to dea.th if you say "roads," out here), and of gazing at —the climate: It is really the only tiling there is to gaze at. this "marvel- j lous climate" that western bloom literature j haa so' much to say about. How doth the . little wild .and woolly Westerner give point- j ers to. the .happy dweller in the effete East j and say: "Stay where you are ; there is no <. marvellous climate here; it is all in the eye i Of the" festive Land Shark." I On pur drives our chief diversion has been to watch the gophers dodge into their ; holes, ■ and get a dissolving view of their funny little frisky tails as they disappear, j Sometimes they ttan't disappear; they just sit up on their fat little haunches and wiggle their forepaws and make funny faces at yon. 1 All of which is wildly exciting. j Write mc very soon, nearest mamma, and tell mc all about your busy life among books and affairs and the moving throng. It ■•will be the very kindest thing you can do for your homesick LOIS. P.S.—I .have never had the pleasure of "meeting up" (as they say out here) with a Dakota -blizzard; but, if I mistake not, there is one on its windy way right now. __ The b_i__za_rd season is open. The air Is

already full of flying snow, and the wind shrieks round the corners of the house like one of Poo's vampires let loose. Sounds like Mariana in the Moated Grange. There is a coyote off on the prairie, howling like a lost soul. He has howled himself hoarse, and his upper register is not what it might be. They have a balf-humac cry that is Dantean in its creepy horror, and this particular one haunts mc" like an evil spirit. I think he knows when Jack is not here,, and that I have the craven spirit of a coward. ■'.**" I am wond?rin_r if I dare make a run for it to the little old lady with the grey side curls. -Jack., is evidently detained by the storm: lie lr.-ows the little playful ways of a Dakot-*. -"usard too well to venture our in it. But, I shall go stark, staring", chattering mad and pull all my back hair out if I stay here alone any longer, and you wouldn't want to see your Lois minus her back hair, would you, mamma dear? Th© snow is flying so furiously now I can scarcely see a rod beyond the window. But lam going to make a dash for it. ■■■."'• Lois. "Well?" I said, looking up from the let ter, with "moist eyes and a curious twitch* ing about the corners of the mouth, "well. ana ;. .; . ." "It's the heartbreakinest story I ever come up against," said Uncle Amos, whose watery grey eyes were turned /rom mc, "And I never liketo pass that little deserted shanty. You see, after the poor girl finished writin' this letter, she Was so scared an' homesick an' lonesome that she snatched up a shawl and threw it round her head and started out into the storm. The wind was a shautin' as only a Dakoty wind can, and sweepin' the air full of snow, and sailin' round in circles. "She must a beat about blind like, tryin' to find the trail, and o' course she couldn't in stich a; blind!-..' storm. . People lost on thesa prairies in one p' our interestin' blizzaaxis always .does wandier round in circles. In the meantime Jack drove home in the very worst of it—six miles in the drivin' snow" a cuttin' his face like needles! He got home, nearly froze stiff, and was half scared to death to find the girl w-w'n't there. He knowed right off she must a gone over to the old lady's, he 'knowed how fond she wai of h-eitin' that half-witted -boy play the fid-' die. ' Got. but he'cotild maJce a fiddle talk 1 - 4 Jack was afraid she might try to come home, so he jest Htaited right over there after <her, .tmckeired out as he was. Jack was jest crazy fowl: ©f his wife-—worshipped faer. ' An* you could.a knocked him down with a feather wh-h'the old .lady xoefy him at -he di-tor aaid told liim Lois hadn't been there at all. Jack went as white as a sheet, Blue says. But ihe started out in that whist* lin.' blizzard to find her. "Well, he stumbled oh to the trail jest by chance, and got bade pretty nigh in the shanty when all to once that infernal coyote begun his howlin'. He could jest see th. dim outlines of the thing crawlin' alon; ■through -he snow. Jack was pretty ntgl off his head!, I recken. with bein' so sceure. about the girl; and he whipped out hi revolver an' said: 'I'll shoot that d-— coyote if it's the last thing I ever do. H. knowed she was scared of em, an,' this par ticuiar fetter had been worryin' the life out o' h«f with his eternal yelrpin'. "Jack was the best, shot in this part o' the country. I never see a feller-in my life with, sedh unarrin' aim on' steady nerve with a gun as Jack had. And he fired away at the thing twice. . Then he ran nearer to see ii: it needed another bullet to fina'sh the job, and, my God 1 "man, Jaci knew then he had shot his wife! Yes, sir, twice—with unerrin" aim, through the breast. An' he jest give one awful cry an* caught her in his arms. "God knows I'll never forget the look on Jack's face when he told mc about it. An' he said when her head fdl back on his shoulder she jest looked up at him and laughed soft like, an' gasped with her dyin'- breath: "You've made it . . .all right now, Jack.' "