The Long Winter (22 page)

From time to time Almanzo looked back and Cap shook his head. Neither of them saw any wisp of smoke against the cold sky. The small, cold sun seemed to hang motionless but it was climbing. The shadows narrowed, the waves of snow and the prairie's curves seemed to flatten. The white wilderness leveled out, bleak and empty.

“How far we going?” Cap shouted.

“Till we find that wheat!” Almanzo called back. But he, too, was wondering whether there was any wheat in the endless emptiness. The sun was in the zenith now, the day half gone. There was still no threat in the northwestern sky, but it would be unusual to have more than this one clear day between blizzards.

Almanzo knew they should turn back toward town.

Numb from cold, he stumbled off the sled and ran on beside it. He did not want to go back to the hungry town and say that he had turned back with an empty sled.

“How far you figure we've come?” Cap asked.

“About twenty miles,” Almanzo guessed. “Think we better go back?”

“Never give up till you're licked!” Cap said cheerfully.

The y looked around. The y were on an upland. If the lower air had not been a little hazy with a glitter of blowing snow, they could have seen perhaps twenty miles. But the prairie swells, that seemed level under the high sun, hid the town to the northwest. Thenorthwest sky was still clear.

Stamping their feet and beating their arms on their chests they searched the white land from west to east, as far south as they could see. There was not a wisp of smoke anywhere.

“Which way'll we go?” Cap asked.

“Any way's as good as any other,” Almanzo said.

The y rewound their mufflers again. Their breath had filled the mufflers with ice. The y could hardly find a spot of wool to relieve the pain of ice on skin that it had chafed raw. “How are your feet?” he asked Cap.

“The y don't say,” Cap replied. "They'll be all right, I guess. I'm going on running."

“So am I,” Almanzo said. "If they don't warm up pretty soon, we better stop and rub them with snow.

Let's follow this swell west a ways. If we don't find anything that way we can circle back, farther south."

“Suits me,” Cap agreed. Their good horses went willingly into a trot again and they ran on beside the sleds.

The upland ended sooner than they had expected.

The snow field sloped downward and spread into a flat hollow that the upland had hidden. It looked like a slough. Almanzo pulled Prince to a walk and got onto the sled to look the land over. The flat hollow ran on toward the west; he saw no way to get around it without turning back along the upland. Then he saw, ahead and across the slough, a smear of gray-brown in the snow blowing from a drift. He stopped Prince and yelled, “Hi, Cap! That look like smoke ahead there?”

Cap was looking at it. “Looks like it comes out of a snowbank!” he shouted.

Almanzo drove on down the slope. After a few minutes he called back, “It's smoke all right! There's some kind of house there!”

The y had to cross the slough to reach it. In their hurry, Cap drove alongside Almanzo and the buckskin went down. This was the deepest hole they had got a horse out of yet, and all around it the snow broke down into air-pockets under the surface till there seemed no end to their floundering. Shadows were beginning to creep eastward before they got the buckskin to solid footing and began cautiously to go on.

The thin smoke did rise from a long snowbank, and there was not a track on the snow. But when they circled and came back on the southern side, they saw that the snow had been shoveled away from before a door in the snowbank. The y pulled up their sleds and shouted.

The door opened and a man stood there, aston-ished. His hair was long and his unshaven beard grew up to his cheekbones.

“Hello! Hello!” he cried. "Come in! Come in!

Where did you come from? Where are you going?

Come in! How long can you stay? Come right in!" He was so excited that he did not wait for answers.

“We've got to take care of our horses first,”

Almanzo answered.

The man snatched on a coat and came out, saying,

“Come along, right over this way, follow me. Where did you fellows come from?”

“We just drove out from town,” Cap said. The man led the way to a door in another snowbank. The y told him their names while they unhitched, and he said his name was Anderson. The y led the horses into a warm, sod stable, snug under the snowbank.

The end of the stable was partitioned off with poles and a rough door, and grains of wheat had trickled through a crack. Almanzo and Cap looked at it and grinned to each other.

They watered Prince and the buckskin from the well at the door, fed them oats, and left them tied to a mangerful of hay beside Anderson's team of black horses. Then they followed Anderson to the house under the snowbank.

The one room's low ceiling was made of poles covered with hay and sagging under the weight of snow.

The walls were sods. Anderson left the door ajar to let in a little light.

“I haven't got my window shoveled out since the last blow,” he said. “The snow piles over that little rise to the northwest and covers me up. Keeps the place so warm I don't need much fuel. Sod houses are the warmest there are, anyway.”

The room was warm, and steamy from a kettle boiling on the stove. Anderson's dinner was on a rough table built against the wall. He urged them to draw up and eat with him. He had not seen a soul since last October, when he had gone to town and brought home his winter's supplies.

Almanzo and Cap sat down with him and ate heartily of the boiled beans, sourdough biscuit and dried-apple sauce. The hot food and coffee warmed them, and their thawing feet burned so painfully that they knew they were not frozen. Almanzo mentioned to Mr. Anderson that he and Cap might buy some wheat.

“I ' m not selling any,” Mr. Anderson said flatly. “All I raised, I'm keeping for seed. What are you buying wheat for, this time of year?” he wanted to know.

The y had to tell him that the trains had stopped running, and the people in town were hungry.

“There's women and children that haven't had a square meal since before Christmas,” Almanzo put it to him. “They've got to get something to eat or they'll starve to death before spring.”

“That's not my lookout,” said Mr. Anderson. “Nobody's responsible for other folks that haven't got enough forethought to take care of themselves.”

“Nobody thinks you are,” Almanzo retorted. “And nobody's asking you to give them anything. We'll pay you the full elevator price of eighty-two cents a barrel, and save you hauling it to town into the bargain.”

“I've got no wheat to sell,” Mr. Anderson answered, and Almanzo knew he meant what he said.

Cap came in then, his smile flashing in his raw-red face chapped by the icy wind. “We're open and aboveboard with you, Mr. Anderson. We've put our cards on the table. The folks in town have got to have some of your wheat or starve. All right, they've got to pay for it. What'll you take?”

“I ' m not trying to take advantage of you boys,” Mr.

Anderson said. “I don't want to sell. That's my seed wheat. It's my next year's crop. I could have sold it last fall if I was going to sell it.”

Almanzo quickly decided. “We'll make it a dollar a bushel,” he said. “Eighteen cents a bushel above market price. And don't forget we do the hauling to boot.”

“I'm not selling my seed,” said Mr. Anderson. “I got to make a crop next summer.”

Almanzo said meditatively, “A man can always buy seed. Most folks out here are going to. You're throwing away a clear profit of eighteen cents a bushel above market price, Mr. Anderson.”

“How do I know they'll ship in seed wheat in time for sowing?” Mr. Anderson demanded.

Cap asked him reasonably, “Well, for that matter, how do you know you'll make a crop? Say you turn down this cash offer and sow your wheat. Hailstorm's liable to hit it, or grasshoppers.”

“That's true enough,” Mr. Anderson admitted.

“The one thing you're sure of is cash in your pocket,” said Almanzo.

Mr. Anderson slowly shook his head. “N o , I'm not selling. I like to killed myself breaking forty acres last summer. I got to keep the seed to sow it.”

Almanzo and Cap looked at each other. Almanzo took out his wallet. “We'll give you a dollar and twenty-five cents a bushel. Cash.” He laid the stack of bills on the table.

Mr. Anderson hesitated. Then he took his gaze away from the money.

“' A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,'”

Cap said.

Mr. Anderson glanced again at the bills in spite of himself. Then he leaned back and considered. He scratched his head. “Well,” he said finally, “I might sow some oats.”

Neither Almanzo nor Cap said anything. They knew his mind was quivering in the balance and if he decided now against selling, he would not change. At last he decided, “I guess I could let you have around sixty bushels at that price.”

Almanzo and Cap rose quickly from the table.

“Come on, let's get it loaded!” said Cap. “We're a long way from home.”

Mr. Anderson urged them to stay all night but Almanzo agreed with Cap. “Thanks just the same,”

he said hurriedly, “but one day is all we have between blizzards lately, and it's past noon now. We're already late getting started back.”

“The wheat's not sacked,” Mr. Anderson pointed out, but Almanzo said, “We brought sacks.”

The y hurried to the stable. Mr. Anderson helped them shovel the wheat from the bin into the two-bushel sacks, and they loaded the sleds. While they hitched up they asked Mr. Anderson how best to get across the slough, but he had not crossed it that win-ter, and for lack of landmarks he could not show them exactly where he had driven through the grass last summer.

“You boys better spend the night here,” he urged them again, but they told him good-by and started home.

They drove from the shelter of the big snowbanks into the piercing cold wind, and they had hardly begun to cross the flat valley when Prince broke down into an air-pocket. Swinging out to circle the dangerous place, Cap's buckskin felt the snow give way under him so suddenly that he screamed as he went plunging down.

The horse's scream was horrible. For a moment Almanzo had all he could do to keep Prince quiet.

Then he saw Cap down in the snow, hanging on to the frantic buckskin by the bits. Plunging and rearing, the buckskin almost jerked Cap's sled into the hole. It tipped on the very edge and the load of wheat slid partly off it.

“All right?” Almanzo asked when the buckskin seemed quiet.

“Yep!” Cap answered. Then for some time they worked, each unhitching his own horse down in the broken snow and wiry grass, and floundering about in it, trampling and stamping to make a solid footing for the horse. The y came up chilled to the bone and covered with snow.

They tied both horses to Almanzo's sled, then unloaded Cap's sled, dragged it back from the hole, and piled the snowy, hundred-and-twenty-five-pound sacks onto it again. The y hitched up again. It was hard to make their numb fingers buckle the stiff, cold straps. And gingerly once more Almanzo drove on across the treacherous slough.

Prince went down again but fortunately the buckskin did not. With Cap to help, it did not take so long to get Prince out once more. And with no further trouble they reached the upland.

Almanzo stopped there and called to Cap, “Think we better try to pick up our trail back?”

“Nope!” Cap answered. "Better hit out for town.

We've got no time to lose." The horses' hoofs and the sleds had made no tracks on the hard snowcrust. The only marks were the scattered holes where they had floundered in the sloughs and these lay east of the way home.

Almanzo headed toward the northwest, across the wide prairie white in its covering of snow. His shadow was his only guide. One prairie swell was like another, one snow-covered slough differed from the next only in size. To cross the lowland meant taking the risk of breaking down and losing time. To follow the ridges of higher ground meant more miles to travel. The horses were growing tired. The y were afraid of falling into hidden holes in the snow and this fear added to their tiredness.

Time after time they did fall through a thin snow crust. Cap and Almanzo had to unhitch them, get them out, hitch up again.

The y plodded on, into the sharp cold of the wind.

Too tired now to trot with their heavy loads, the horses did not go fast enough so that Almanzo and Cap could run by the sleds. The y could only stamp their feet hard as they walked to keep them from freezing, and beat their arms against their chests.

The y grew colder. Almanzo's feet no longer felt the shock when he stamped them. The hand that held the lines was so stiff that the fingers would not unclasp.

He put the lines around his shoulders to leave both hands free, and with every step he whipped his hands across his chest to keep the blood moving in them.

“Hey, Wilder!” Cap called. “Aren't we heading too straight north?”

“How do I know?” Almanzo called back.

The y plodded on. Prince went down again and stood with drooping head while Almanzo unhitched him and trampled the snow, led him out, and hitched him again. The y climbed to an upland, followed it around a slough, went down to cross another slough.

Prince went down.

“You want me to take the lead awhile?” Cap asked, when Almanzo had hitched up again. “Save you and Prince the brunt of it.”

“Suits me,” said Almanzo. “We'll take turns.”

After that, when a horse went down, the other took the lead until he went down. The sun was low and a haze was thickening in the northwest.

“We ought to see the Lone Cottonwood from that rise ahead,” Almanzo said to Cap.

After a moment Cap answered, “Yes, I think we will.”

But when they topped the rise there was nothing but the same endless, empty waves of snow beyond it and the thick haze low in the northwest. Almanzo and Cap looked at it, then spoke to their horses and went on. But they kept the sleds closer together.

The sun was setting red in the cold sky when they saw the bare top of the Lone Cottonwood away to the northeast. And in the northwest the blizzard cloud was plain to be seen, low along the horizon.