CHAPTER II

The sun, shining through the propped-up canvas of the wagon, wakened
Abbie. Wide-eyed, she looked out through the aperture upon the same
setting of the night before. But now it was changed. The child lived a
life in each of two distinct worlds and it is not possible to say which
one she most enjoyed. One of them was made of moonbeams and star-dust,
of night winds and cloud fancies, of aristocratic gentlemen and lovely
ladies. The other was the equally pleasant one of boiled potatoes and
salt pork, of games with Basil and Mary, of riding a-top old Buck or
picking wild flowers at the edge of the timber.

Just now the prosaic world of everyday seemed the more attractive of the
two. James had replenished the night fire and Mother was cooking
breakfast, with the odor of frying pork and corn-cakes strong on the
air. The team of horses and the oxen were eating close by, the horses
guzzling their grain noisily, the oxen chewing slowly and stolidly.

Maggie O’Conner Mackenzie was a heavy, dumpy woman, her body the shape
of a pudding-bag tied in the middle. One shawl was wrapped around the
shapeless figure and a smaller one, over her head, was knotted under her
fat chin. Strands of heavy black hair showed around the edges of the
head-shawl, and the face enclosed in its folds was round and smooth, fat
and placid. Only her dark Irish eyes, the color of the blue-black waters
at Kilkee, and a dimple in the middle of her rolling chin, gave a touch
of reality to the old romance of the peasant girl.

This was the last day of the journey which had been of three weeks’
duration. (Six decades later James Mackenzie was to make the journey
back with a grandson in one day.)

Breakfast over, the little cavalcade set out with much noisy
chatter,—reminders not to forget this or that.

“Did ye put out the last o’ the fire, Dennie?”

“Fasten that buckle on Whitey’s bridle, Belle.”

The mother drove the horse team,—James, the oxen. Walking along beside
the latter, James’ boyish “Gee” or “Haw” or “Whoa How” rang out with
valiant attempts to make the notes stentorian. Buck was a red and white
animal, Boy a brindle. As they walked, they swung their huge heads
rhythmically from side to side, the brass buttons a-top their horns
shining in the morning sun. Almost at the first rod’s length of the
journey little Basil had to stop the procession to change from one wagon
to the other. Belle rode on the seat with her mother, but, because it
was early and cool, Abbie, Mary and Dennie walked behind, darting off
the trail to gather Mayflowers or wild Bouncing-Bets. Sometimes they
jumped over the young rosin-weeds and wild blue phlox and occasionally
they caught on the back of the wagon, clutching onto the household goods
and swinging their feet off the ground for a few moments.

About nine, they forded a stream. The oxen ahead crossed slowly,
lumberingly, with many stops in that foolish, stolid way they had. When
they were across, Mother Mackenzie drove her team into the creek bed. As
the horses were going up the bank, one of them stumbled, crowding
against its mate. There was a creaking, and backing, a shouting and a
tipping. One sack of flour began tailing slowly, and then another and
another. Eight sacks of flour, pushing against each other, slipped
slowly into the water like fat, clumsy, old men, reluctant to wet their
feet.

Maggie Mackenzie was out and managing her horses by way of their
bridles, while James, running back from his own wagon, assisted in
bringing order out of the catastrophe. Then some one called excitedly,
“Look out for the bedding,” and two great pillows started floating down
stream with majestic motion, as though the geese from which their
contents had been plucked, were suddenly coming to life.

“Och!” And “Och!” The mother wrung her hands in distress. Eight sacks of
flour and two pillows were a fortune.

Abbie and Dennie and little Basil, their laughter high with excitement,
all ran along the side of the creek bed after the pillows. In the
meantime, James and Belle were wading into the stream and pulling out
the sacks. To the mother the disaster seemed more than she could bear.
“Och! If I ever get there,” said Maggie O’Conner Mackenzie, “sure ’n’
I’ll never l’ave the spot.” Sure, and she never did. Many years later
she died a quarter of a mile from the place where she first stepped out
of the wagon.

When the last sack was retrieved, the entire family, with much dire
foreboding, crowded around James, who was opening a sack to see how the
contents fared. It was as though the whole of life’s future hung on the
outcome. To their extreme relief the wet flour had formed but a thin
paste, which, with a few moments drying in the sun, now high and hot,
would form a crust and keep the precious contents unharmed.

In spite of the delay the family reached the settlement on the Cedar
River by the middle of the afternoon and stopped near the log cabin of
Tom Graves, the man whom the older sister Janet had come out to marry.
Janet, herself, hearing the creaking of the wagons, came hurrying down
the grassy trail to meet them, a three-weeks-old baby in her arms. The
baby was something by way of surprise to the entire group of relatives,
his arrival having taken place after the family had started westward.

Maggie O’Conner Mackenzie, with much clucking and chirping and
adjustment of clothing, welcomed her first grandchild.

“Sure ’n’ he’s the big one. How did ye get along? Is he good? Did ye
have a doctor or a neighbor woman?”

Janet answered them all even while her mother was still talking. Oh,
yes, there was a doctor,—Doc Matthews over at town. Cedar Falls was
quite a place. It had a saw-mill and a hotel and a store, a dozen log
cabins, and a few frames ones. The school-house had the only tower bell
in the state. For pay Tom was to haul in a load of wood for the doctor’s
office stove,—he had a two-roomed house, part log and part frame.

The oxen behind them slathered and snorted. There was the smell in the
air of newly-cut chips. The woods back of the cabin looked thick and
impenetrable beyond the short arrows of the sun. And then Tom Graves,
himself, came out of the timber, his ax, the insignia of the fight, on
his shoulder.

“Here is my mother, Tom, and this is Belle and that one is Mary. And
that boy is James and this one Dennie and here’s little Basil. And over
there with the reddish-brown hair is Abbie,—we almost forgot her.”

So much was to be said, and all at once. “We’ve got a house all ready
for you, Mother. It was Grandpa Deal’s sheep shed. The Deals have been
here for three years, but they’ve moved down farther on the prairie now
in a fine big log house, and you can have this until you get your own
cabin done. We’ve cleaned it all out for you and hung a thick quilt over
the opening, and if it storms you can come in with us.”

And so Maggie O’Conner Mackenzie, who had lived in the great Aberdeen
town house and on the two Scotch country estates, was to make her bed
now in a sheep shed.

Every one turned in to help with the settling. From the wagons they took
out the walnut bedsteads and the bedding and the highboy. They brought
in the heavy, cumbersome guns and the powder-horn and the splint-bottom
chairs. Maggie Mackenzie brought in her flat-iron into which one put
glowing hickory embers through an iron door, and she hung up the iron
tallow-lamp with a home-spun wick hanging over the side like a tongue
hanging grotesquely from the side of a mouth. If she could have foreseen
that two granddaughters, Mrs. Harrison Scannell Rhodes and Mrs.
Frederick Hamilton Baker, were going to stage a polite but intensive
campaign over which one could have the old tallow-lamp in her sun
parlor, a half century later, she would have shaken her fat sides with
laughter.

Everything was out of the wagon now,—everything but one. Abbie,
standing in the grassy trail in front of the old sheep shed, was
watching for it. On tiptoe there in her ankle-length starched dress, her
red-brown hair wound around her head and tucked into a snood, she was
the picture of watchful waiting. She might have been carved in marble as
“Expectancy.”

“Let me! Let me!” she called, when her mother was bringing out the
calf-skin-covered box from under the wagon seat.

“If ye’ll carry it carefu’.”

No need to caution Abbie to be careful. In a warm feeling of pleasure
over the temporary possession, she clasped her arms around its hairy
sides and the “M.OC.” initials formed by nail-heads.

Inside the box lay all the accouterments of another life. In its
skin-covered depths was all the equipment of an entirely different
world. They were symbols of things in life to come. They represented the
future in which she would some day live. She got down on her knees on
the dirt floor, with its earthy odor, and pushed the little chest into
the far, dark corner under her mother’s bed. Lovingly and lingeringly
she relinquished her hold upon it. For a few moments she saw herself in
that future, her red-brown hair in curls, over her shoulders a white
silk shawl with roses in the corners, its folds held together with a
lavender breastpin. There was a string of pearls around her neck, and
she was waving a jeweled fan with long, white fingers that tapered at
the ends. There was soft music playing. She came out on a high stage
ready to sing. Lovely ladies and courtly men were clapping their hands.
Some of them stood up. She smiled at them and waved her jeweled
fan. . . .

“Abbie . . . Abbie . . . where are you?” Quite suddenly, the gorgeous
trappings fell away. She was back in the everyday world, hearing loud
voices calling her.

“Abbie!. . .” The voices were raised high in fright. She scrambled out
backward from under the bed.

“Abbie . . . Abbie . . .” Dennis and Mary were running toward her, their
faces white with fear. “The Indians are coming. A man here on horseback
says the Indians are coming down the river.”

Abbie scrambled back under the bed and brought out the hairy chest in
her arms. Not to any wild and heathenish Indian was Abbie Mackenzie
intending to relinquish the only tangible tie that bound her to the
lovely lady.