The Young Adult Award-Winners Megapack

by Emily Cheney Neville

  And Sayre with complete understanding responded, “They may have been near a good town.”

  Certainly there was no way for Sayre or her father to get any news of the judging team boys that night. The Parsons eighty was shut into an isolation complete and impenetrable. It was a lonely place at any time, lying as it did on a little-used back road of a desolate, largely abandoned part of the Pawaukee. Tonight that road was impassable with snow drifts. The nearest neighbors, the Hansens, were a mile away. There was no telephone at the Hansens or within several miles of them. The Hansens, too, beyond all question, were completely snowbound. There was nothing to do but go to bed and await the coming of another day, while the storm howled on outside.

  17

  Early Returns

  All night the snow fell with a density that no eye could far penetrate. All night and all the next day the wind eddied and rushed in long, billowing waves which carried hither and yon and everywhere in thick, heavy swirls both the falling and the fallen snow. But by the following morning the fierceness of the wind had begun to subside into more and more gentle gusts and the snow to fall more lightly. Overhead the clouds began to thin, until from behind them the sun sent out a diffused luminosity over a wide, silent, beautiful white world. By night the air had become still to complete serenity; the sky, cloudless; the temperature, bitterly cold. The blizzard was over.

  The world around Upham awoke and began to dig itself out. It could not wait for the warm Chinook wind which would appear before long to complete the work of disposing of the snow. In Western America of the twentieth century even settlers dwelling in remote, lonely sections do not stay isolated long when they are near overland roads such as the Yellowstone Highway. In such localities tractors and snowplows find time to do their work even on the back and cross-section roads when enterprising settlers demand it.

  Thus it happened that late Tuesday afternoon Nels Hansen’s big form filled the Morgan doorway. “Vell, neighbors—you make it all right?”

  “Oh, Mr. Hansen! Have you heard anything?” came Sayre’s irrelevant reply. “Are you going to town?”

  “Yess. Vant to come? You or your pa?”

  Dad was just going out to milk. He paused, pail in hand; but read the eagerness in Sayre’s big eyes. “You go, daughter,” he said with characteristic unselfishness.

  Sayre flashed out of the room to get her wraps while Mr. Morgan bent searching question upon his visitor, the empty milk pail vibrating visibly. “Any news?”

  There was no easing of the father’s anxiety in the way Mr. Hansen’s instantaneous understanding brought solemn reply, “Ven I hear anyt’ang, I vill let you know right avay.”

  By the time she had reached town Sayre, too, had become well aware that not only in Mr. Hansen’s eyes but in those of the most optimistic people, her and her father’s fears were not so foolish as they both had hoped they were. The outside world was thinking and talking now of nothing but the news of the storm. Belated newspapers had reached the town at last, containing early reports. Mr. Hansen bought one for the girl. While he went about his errands, she sat on the seat of the truck, devouring the paper’s contents with spellbound, yet reluctant eagerness.

  Not for fifteen years had Wyoming, land of snows and spring blizzards as it was in many sections, known a widespread storm of such magnitude. Not for thirty years had it known one so late in the season, coming so swiftly, so unheralded, and with such force. Throughout the state it had worked havoc and destruction. Trains were blocked. Telegraph lines were down. Telephones were out of commission. What the effects would be on stock, especially on the open ranges, could only be guessed at. Travelers everywhere on the highway were stranded, lost, unheard from, marooned without food, without proper protection from the cold, and nobody as yet knew where most of them were. In spite of that last statement stories of individual experiences of hardship, exposure, effort and tragedy filled to overflowing the sheets that Sayre held. She read two or three of these stories.

  Not far from Laramie rescuers had found two young boys inside a closed car, wrapped in all the blankets the car contained, yet near to unconsciousness. When revived they told a story of having been left there by their father, when their car had stalled two days before, with instructions not to move until he returned with help. As for the father, not even a trace of his struggling footsteps had as yet been found.

  Still nearer Laramie an open car had been discovered whose back seat contained the body of a young woman frozen to death, with a baby, still alive, wrapped snugly in her arms.

  The driver of a high-powered car, making Laramie during the early part of the storm, told of twenty or more tourists taking refuge in an unoccupied, flimsy summer hotel building near the summit of a hill on the Yellowstone Highway. He told of others forcing their way as best they could toward the nearest ranch houses, filling stations, and such other places of refuge as the sparsely settled country afforded. And of cars stalled and abandoned along the highways; of cars skidding into ditches or being driven there deliberately by drivers who could see absolutely nothing around them through the impenetrable blanket of falling, whirling snow.

  Sayre thrust the paper away from her to the floor of the truck under her feet. No, Mr. Hansen might want it. She picked it up again, folded it with trembling fingers in hasty unevenness, and thrust it under the cushion of the seat. Then she climbed out over the wheel. She wasn’t going to sit in that truck any longer and think.

  But think she did, in spite of herself, even while walking along the street. If what that paper told was the condition of things comparatively near to towns, what was the condition in the wide, desolate regions of the state, where the federal highways were the only marks of civilization?

  She began stopping and greeting people for the sake of escape, even those she knew only slightly. But that did no good. Nobody had anything to talk about except the storm. Yet later she wondered what had made her feel that way; everyone really said so little. People seemed queerly reluctant to talk to her at all. They were sympathetic and yet aloof in a way which aroused her anxiety even more than the tales she had read. She felt herself once more the target of all eyes as she had been that Saturday night of the news of the alfalfa embargo. Only tonight she was a very different kind of target. And of the boys of the judging teams everyone avoided all mention except for the statement that Mr. Hoskins would leave no stone unturned in his search.

  Then, just as she was turning the post-office corner, she came suddenly face to face with Mr. Kitchell. Her relief found voice in one glad, spontaneous cry: “You’re back!”

  But Mr. Kitchell was speaking, too, as spontaneously as she, but with none of her joy. “Sayre! Your road’s open? Why wasn’t I told as I gave instructions to be? Your father’s in town?”

  Sayre shook her head.

  “I must get out to your place at once then. To see him.”

  His voice startled her. And his face—that awful gray, hollow look it had. He was hurrying on to answer her first exclamation. “Only part of us are back. Got in yesterday. In my car. You hadn’t heard?”

  “Not Charley?”

  “No. Nor Frank Hoskins.”

  “Not Charley—nor Frank Hoskins,” she repeated. “You mean they’re together? Out there? Alone?”

  “Just that, Sayre. Left behind.”

  Oh, why did he say it so solemnly?

  “It was this way.” The teacher launched into his story. “We were on a cross-section road miles from a town. We’d taken it to save time. A bearing in Frank’s roadster burned out on a long, steep hill. Of course we had a new one with us, and plenty of tools. We’re too experienced Wyomingites to attempt any ‘cross-state travel without equipment for emergencies.

  “We all stopped (Charley, and Linne Peterson, and Bill Evans and Tom Carter were riding with me) and went back to Frank’s car to lend a hand. I’d asked Charley, especially, as the best mechanic in the crowd, to see what he could do.

  “Spens Trowbridge was riding with Frank
. You see, Sayre—well, there had been feeling, quite a good deal of it, before we’d left Laramie. And none of the boys had wanted to ride with Frank. So Spens, you know how Spens is. Like so many humorous people, he hates friction and is always willing to be the peacemaker. So he’d climbed in with Frank—as if to cover up, if he could, the other boys’ attitudes.

  “Well, when we went back to Frank’s car, I found that Spens was sick, had a high fever. It was flu, of course. A number of cases had broken out among the stock-judging teams at Laramie. Spens should have complained sooner. Should never have been riding, sick as he was, in that open car at all.

  “There was only one thing for me to do, get Spens home as soon as I could. So I put him in Charley’s place in my car and hurried on, leaving Frank and Charley behind to get Frank’s car into shape. Charley assured me it was all right—that he’d have Frank’s car in shape to travel within an hour or two, and that he and Frank could then easily overtake us. They would have, too, if it hadn’t been for the storm.

  “I’m western born and bred, but only once or twice in my life have I seen a storm that came up as quickly as that one last so long at such an intensity. We, the boys in my car, had a pretty hard time. Spens was growing sicker all the time. As for the rest of us, well, there was nothing for us to do but fight. And fight we did; we simply battled every inch of our way toward town. None of the boys except Spens seem much the worse for the exposure. But Spens is a mighty sick boy. Has a fever of a hundred and four right now.”

  Sayre’s answering impulse was partial relief. Evidently the way that Mr. Kitchell looked was not entirely because of Charley and Frank.

  “How far back did you leave them? Charley and Frank, I mean.”

  “About two hundred miles.”

  “On one of those off-roads, where tourists hardly ever travel?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where it’s all more cactus than sagebrush? Desert?”

  “Yes, nothing else there but the road and a few fences.”

  “No sheep herders anywhere around?”

  “No. It’s too early for them in that country, too many poison weeds in the early vegetation, too far from water and shelter for the lambing ewes.” Mr. Kitchell seemed to find relief in the irrelevant information. At each succeeding answer his manner was becoming more courageously frank, more marked with respect. Where had this daughter of Charles Morgan, Senior, derived the instinct to shoot so unflinchingly straight to the bull’s eye of a situation?

  The girl’s questioning went on. “You’ve heard nothing at all about them since you got back?”

  “No, Sayre.”

  “What’s being done about it?”

  “Everything that can be. As fast as communication opens up we’re getting in touch with county or local authorities—sheriffs, commissioners, all such men—telling them about the boys. Asking them to search. Getting reports on the rescue work that’s being done. Mr. Hoskins left on the first train out for the county seat to keep the search speeded up, above all, on that back cross road. I’m expecting a report from him any minute. On my way to the telegraph office now. Telephone connections aren’t through from there yet. I scarcely leave the telegraph office. I’ll send word to you the minute I get it. Tell your father so.”

  At Mr. Kitchell’s first move to walk on, Sayre turned around. “I’ll go to the telegraph office with you,” she said quietly.

  Somewhere very far off in the back of her mind, she was conscious of wondering how she could walk so straight on legs that were so full of that queer quivering. They were, like her voice (which outwardly sounded composed beyond all wont), making themselves behave in stubborn defiance of the dread that trembled all through her. In reality every bit of her felt weak and dazed except her power to think. That seemed to be a process which was going on swiftly and clearly, entirely outside of her real self. Mr. Kitchell’s words, as they walked along, came to her as through a haze.

  “Try not to worry, Sayre. There are no sturdier, more physically fit specimens of humanity around than those two boys. And they know how to fight against odds to the finish. Football’s taught them that. Besides, they’ve got good heads. Charley, especially, is not only an intelligent but a very resourceful boy. They’re taking care of themselves somewhere. I’m confident of that.”

  “So am I,” replied Sayre firmly, hardly knowing what she said.

  The teacher hesitated before he added, “And I wouldn’t listen to any of this gossip that’s going around, if I were you. There are some people—”

  Sayre did not notice how abruptly the teacher paused, nor how he closed his mouth into a tight line as if he felt too intensely about something to trust himself to speak of it.

  “I don’t want to listen to anybody. I’ll just wait. That’s all there is to do, isn’t it?”

  “I’m afraid it is.”

  By the time Sayre was traveling homeward with Mr. Hansen she had begun to realize how very hard “just waiting” was. She was dreading, too, the moment when she must meet Dad at their own back door. Although she tried to draw all the comfort she could from her neighbor’s homely, kindly, self-reliant presence, it was only with effort she could keep her mind centered on what he was saying.

  “Dere is in dis country, Sayre, some old cats vat ain’t got no more human feelings dan dey has got sense. All dey got is tongues, vat vaggle all de time in de middle and at bot’ ends. Vell, let ’em vaggle, I say. Only—don’t leesten to ’em. Leestenin’ is as sure a sign of no sense as vaggling is.”

  So unresponsive was the girl that the droning voice lapsed into a silence broken only by the sliding, revolving, softened crunch of deflated tires over snow-packed roads. Now they traveled between high-piled snowbanks. Now, between intervening dark patches of land swept clean by wind. All through a starlit winter night in spring, made unusually light by the reflection from wide expanses of snow.

  “De teacher say dat Mr. Hoskins vill go hunt from Casper?”

  The question startled Sayre back to awareness of her surroundings. “Yes.”

  “Vell, he vill hunt good. Von is his own boy. Vill he do udder t’angs, too, I vonder? Casper is vere de federal court is held, and it is most de date.”

  “What date?”

  Sayre could have hugged Mr. Hansen for his answering chuckle. It was so reassuring, so comforting. Or was he only trying to distract her?

  “Can you forget so good, Sayre, ven it is dat de Hoskins lawsuits come?”

  18

  Waiting

  Sayre slept only fitfully that night, and her father, she suspected, slept scarcely at all. She heard him several times moving about the house, and he was in the kitchen before daybreak, replenishing the kitchen fire. Sayre joined him to find him already preparing breakfast.

  “We’ll have to go to town today, daughter.”

  The half-apologetic way Dad uttered that statement touched Sayre with remorse. She had become alive this last day or two to little things she had not noticed before. “I’ve been too stingy this winter, and too bossy,” she thought, “saying that nobody must spend an extra penny for unnecessary trips to town, and things like that. Dad’s let me boss, and I’ve been too selfish and unfeeling to see why, that hidden way down inside of him he feels dreadfully about not being the one who’s really supporting this family any more.”

  Aloud she answered: “Yes, Dad dear. After we’ve done the chores, can’t we spend the rest of the day in town—that is, until we hear? Of course, we’ll hear from him today.”

  “Of course,” responded her father over his futile attempt to eat.

  Waiting in town proved even more of a strain than waiting at home, because there was no work to do. Hitty’s unrealizing chatter was the one distraction, and there were moments when that jangled taut nerves.

  There was no actual news, either. To be sure, more detailed and widespread accounts of the storm, harrowing tales of personal incident, reports of loss of stock and other damage packed the incoming newspapers. To Mr. Mo
rgan these made reading as irresistible as it was disquieting. But Sayre refused to do more than glance at the headlines. “I don’t want to know anything else until I hear about Charley,” she kept repeating.

  The Morgan trio roved about from one news center to another: the telegraph office; the post-office; the telephone exchange; the town hall; the newspaper’s bulletined window. They paused at last in front of the Hoskins store.

  Not since that night when Mr. Hoskins had turned Charley out of it had a Morgan gone into the place. Pride forbade, Sayre had asserted. Not until every charge and suspicion that the store’s proprietor had laid upon Charley’s name and honor was cleared beyond shadow of a doubt would a Morgan again put a foot across that threshold. What buying the family had to do, they would do elsewhere.

  Now Sayre felt her father’s footsteps linger. His eyes were turned inside the open doorway. No place of business in the whole countryside was so much the center of things as that store. Today its counters were crowded, and back around the stove, Sayre knew, would be the full circle of self-appointed neighborhood reporters. Her father had once been popular among them. Before them he had lived some of the proudest moments of his life.

  Suddenly it became clear to the girl’s new sensitiveness that Dad had missed that circle in a way young people like her and Charley could not understand.

  “Why don’t you go in, Dad? Mr. Hoskins isn’t there. And the store’s sure to be getting all the latest reports now that the telephones are working.”

  Mr. Morgan’s kind eyes rested on his daughter in questioning. “Hitty’s little feet are very tired with all this walking about,” he half apologized.

  “Dear old Dad,” Sayre mused as the oldest and the youngest Morgan, always such close chums, disappeared within that doorway. “Has he stayed out of that store most of all because of how I felt about any of us going in there? Even now he didn’t ask me to go in. In some ways, he’s so understanding.”

  Left alone in the street Sayre turned back toward the consolidated school building. It was the place in town which meant most to her. The hour was noon and the pupils were swarming out. Sayre hung back a little and watched them, keenly conscious that Frank Hoskins and Charley should be among them and were not.