Turkey Red
BY FRANCES GILCHRIST WOOD
From Pictorial Review
The old mail-sled running between Haney and Le Beau, in the days when Dakota was still a Territory, was nearing the end of its hundred-mile route.
It was a desolate country in those days; geographers still described it as The Great American Desert, and in looks it deserved the title. Never was there anything so lonesome as that endless stretch of snow reaching across the world until it cut into a cold grey sky, excepting the same desert burned to a brown tinder by the hot wind of summer.
Nothing but sky and plain and its voice, the wind, unless you might count a lonely sod shack blocked against the horizon, miles away from a neighbour, miles from anywhere, its red-curtained square of window glowing through the early twilight.
There were three men in the sled; Dan, the mail-carrier, crusty, belligerently Western, the self-elected guardian of every one on his route; Hillas, a younger man, hardly more than a boy, living on his pre-emption claim near the upper reaches of the stage line; the third a stranger from that part of the country vaguely defined as "the East." He was travelling, had given him name as Smith, and was as inquisitive about the country as he was reticent about his business there. Dan plainly disapproved of him.
They had driven the last cold miles in silence when the stage-driver turned to his neighbour. "Letter didn't say anything about coming out in the spring to look over the country, did it?"
Hillas shook his head. "It was like all the rest, Dan. Don't want to build a railroad at all until the country's settled."
"God! Can't they see the other side of it? What it means to the folks already here to wait for it?"
The stranger thrust a suddenly interested profile above the handsome collar of his fur coat. He looked out over the waste of snow.
"You say there's no timber here?"
Dan maintained unfriendly silence and Hillas answered: "Nothing but scrub on the banks of the creeks. Years of prairie fires have burned out the trees, we think."
"Any ores--mines?"
The boy shook his head as he slid farther down in his worn buffalo coat of the plains. "We're too busy rustling for something to eat first. And you can't develop mines without tools." "Tools?"
"Yes, a railroad first of all."
Dan shifted the lines from one fur-mittened hand to the other, swinging the freed numbed arm in rhythmic beating against his body as he looked along the horizon a bit anxiously. The stranger shivered visibly.
"It's a god-forsaken country. Why don't you get out?"
Hillas, following Dan's glance around the blurred sky line, answered absently, "Usual answer is 'Leave? It's all I can do to stay here.'"
Smith regarded him irritably. "Why should any sane man ever have chosen this frozen wilderness?"
Hillas closed his eyes wearily. "We came in the spring."
"I see!" The edged voice snapped, "Visionaries!"
Hillas's eyes opened again, wide, and then the boy was looking beyond the man with the far-seeing eyes of the plainsman. He spoke under his breath as if he were alone. "Visionary, pioneer, American. That was the evolution in the beginning. Perhaps that is what we are." Suddenly the endurance in his voice went down before a wave of bitterness. "The first pioneers had to wait, too. How could they stand it so long!"
The young shoulders drooped as he thrust stiff fingers deep within the shapeless coat pockets. He slowly withdrew his right hand holding a parcel wrapped in brown paper. He tore a three-cornered flap in the cover, looked at the brightly coloured contents, replaced the flap and returned the parcel, his chin a little higher.
Dan watched the northern sky-line restlessly. "It won't be snow. Look like a blizzard to you, Hillas?"
The traveller sat up. "Blizzard?"
"Yes," Dan drawled in willing contribution to his uneasiness, "the real Dakota article where blizzards are made. None of your eastern imitations, but a ninety-mile wind that whets slivers of ice off the frozen drifts all the way down from the North Pole. Only one good thing about a blizzard--it's over in a hurry. You get to shelter or you freeze to death."
A gust of wind flung a powder of snow stingingly against their faces. The traveller withdrew his head turtlewise within the handsome collar in final condemnation. "No man in his senses would ever have deliberately come here to live."
Dan turned. "Wouldn't, eh?"
"No."
"You're American?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"I was born here. It's my country."
"Ever read about your Pilgrim Fathers?"
"Why, of course."
"Frontiersmen, same as us. You're living on what they did. We're getting this frontier ready for those who come after. Want our children to have a better chance than we had. Our reason's same as theirs. Hillas told you the truth. Country's all right if we had a railroad."
"Humph!" With a contemptuous look across the desert. "Where's your freight, your grain, cattle--"
"West-bound freight, coal, feed, seed-grain, work, and more neighbours."
"One-sided bargain. Road that hauls empties one way doesn't pay. No company would risk a line through here."
The angles of Dan's jaw showed white. "Maybe. Ever get a chance to pay your debt to those Pilgrim pioneers? Ever take it? Think the stock was worth saving?"
He lifted his whip-handle toward a pin-point of light across the stretch of snow. "Donovan lives over there and Mis' Donovan. We call them 'old folks' now; their hair has turned white as these drifts in two years. All they've got is here. He's a real farmer and a lot of help to the country, but they won't last long like this."
Dan swung his arm toward a glimmer nor' by nor'east. "Mis' Clark lives there, a mile back from the stage road. Clark's down in Yankton earning money to keep them going.
She's alone with her baby holding down the claim." Dan's arm sagged.