by Janet Dailey
“What do you think?” he asked.
Webb didn’t have to ask what he meant. “I think Doyle is going to do it. He’s going to sell off the TeePee.”
The knowledge didn’t set well with either of them. Times change, and both men had seen a lot of change. More was coming, it seemed, and they didn’t like the looks of it.
Surrounded by the rolling plains of eastern Montana, the immigrants listened wide-eyed to the man in the white suit. Tall stalks of grass rubbed their heads against his knees. Harve Wessel had carefully chosen the place for his lecture on the dryland method of wheat farming. As far as the eye could see in any direction, there was virgin grassland, government land free for the taking. Time and the elements had carved a cutbank into the side of a small rise in the land, giving him a naturally elevated platform from which to speak.
With the confidence of a salesman convinced his product was sold, he invited questions. “Is there anything you don’t understand about the dryland method?”
Everyone looked around to see if anyone else was going to speak. Stefan Reisner made a negative shake of his head when the locater Harve Wessel looked squarely at him. He was in the front row of the immigrants, with Lillian standing by his side, her head tipped slightly back to view the locater.
“Now, for those of you who are short of funds”—which was virtually all of them, as Wessel knew—“I can help you obtain a loan from our new bank—your new bank—so you can buy seed and the equipment you need. The interest is ten percent, but the land is free.” he emphasized. “Any questions?”
“What will we do about a place to live?” someone asked.
“Wagons or tents will get you through the summer until you sell your first crop. There’s going to be a lumberyard in Blue Moon where you can buy wood to throw you up a place. Borrow money from the bank for that, if you don’t want to wait. Or”—he paused—“you can build you a sod house out of all this ‘prairie marble.’”
A woman spoke up. “What will we use for fuel to cook with and to heat our homes in the winter? There aren’t any trees around here.” “I’m glad you asked that,” he stated and looked down at Lillian Reisner. “Young lady, hand me a chunk of that black rock by your feet.”
There were any number of shiny black rocks at her feet, broken from the wide seam showing in the exposed earth of the cutbank. Bending, Lillian picked up a large, rough-edged chunk and handed it to him. A curious frown narrowed her eyes because the rock had looked just like coal.
“Now, I’ve been telling you people what treasures you can find in this land. This is one of them.” Harve Wessel held up the piece of black rock for all to see. “It’s coal. It’s a few feet underground just about anywhere you want to look. And in places, like here”—he pointed to the coal seam in the cutbank—“it’s at the surface. There’s your fuel!”
Slowly Lillian swung her attention to Stefan. She had no more doubt about the wisdom of coming to Montana. It was only a matter of finding their piece of land.
4
The wind rustled through the green-growing grass, bowing its tall spring stalks and creating shimmering hues of emerald, jade, and turquoise under a sapphire sky. It seemed a jewel-studded land with wild flowers of ruby red and topaz yellow strewn all around and a horizon that was limitless. At last, the promises of riches that had lured her parents to America’s shores were about to be fulfilled.
With her head lifted high to the shining sun, Lillian Reisner filled her lungs with the freshly scented air. Blind hope had been her traveling companion for such a long distance. To be standing here in the middle of this vastness made her feel as if something wonderful were bursting inside. It was a sensation of freedom beyond expression.
No more buildings crowding in to block out the sun. No more smoke-clouded skies and air that choked the lungs with the stench of sewage and animal waste. No more living on top of neighbors, hearing all their quarrels and crying.
“Listen to the wind, Stefan.” She turned her shining face on the tall, square-jawed man. “I can’t ever remember hearing the wind before.”
“And the birds, too.” His speech was laden with the guttural accent of his native Deutschland. “My ears have so long heard only pigeons that the songs of birds in the meadow I forget. I vas a young man vhen ve left Germany—your papa and me. You vere only a gleam in your papa’s eye.”
It was a story Lillian had been told many times: the long ocean voyage in steerage, her parents’ ardent wish that their first child be born in America where the streets were paved with gold. She was a native citizen, raised in the German ghetto of New York City. Both of her parents had believed in the dream of America all the way up to their deaths within a few months of each other. It hadn’t mattered that the streets weren’t paved with gold. The markets held more food than they had ever seen, lb them, it had remained a land of plenty, untarnished with disillusionment.
Listening to Stefan’s thick accent, Lillian remembered how once she had been so ashamed of the way her parents talked, how intolerant she had been, unable to appreciate the strength and courage it had taken to leave their homeland for a strange, new country with a different culture. To her deep regret, it was a discovery she had made after they were gone.
Now she had made a journey so very much similar to theirs—traveling across this huge continent of America, eager, yet unsure of what she would find waiting for her. This big, open stretch of land was awesome—a long, lonely distance from anywhere. But she wasn’t intimidated by the empty landscape.
Her father and Stefan had shared a dream of owning their own farm in America. She was here with Stefan, taking her father’s place, to make that long-ago dream a reality. Respect and deep affection were in the look she gave the forty-three-year-old man who was her husband. Despite the grayness in his hair, he was iron-strong, yet kind and good.
In her own way she loved him. If the emotion lacked passion, Lillian wasn’t troubled by it. Romantic love was a luxury of the rich who could afford such things. A common woman had to be more practical and pick a man who could provide her food, shelter, and companionship. Lillian was satisfied with her choice.
“You have waited a long time to have land you could call your own.” Lillian watched the pride of possession steal into his eyes, then turned to make a sweeping gesture with her arm. “Here it is, three hundred and twenty acres.”
“That Mr. Vessel, he said he vould show us the best.” He nodded in satisfaction, his stoic features altering their expression not at all, but the look in his eyes was very expressive.
Yesterday they had filed the homestead claim, made arrangements at the bank for a loan with Mr. Wessel’s help, and purchased seed, equipment, and the supplies they needed to start a new life. With the team of draft horses and a used wagon, they had picked up the belongings they’d left at the train station and driven here to their property where they would build their home. It was twenty miles from town and six miles from their closest neighbor, but after traveling so far, they were undaunted by these distances.
“Look at this, Lillian.” Stefan indicated the ground at his feet and nudged the grass aside with the toe of his high-topped leather shoe. When he crouched down for a closer study, Lillian did the same, smoothing her skirt close to her legs so it wouldn’t be in the way. His callused and blunt-fingered hand exposed the tangle of grass stalks that held the soil together. “Ve vill make to grow the vheat dis thick.”
“Yes, we will.” She knew he was seeing it happen in his mind’s eye, the transformation of this sea of grass into an ocean of waving wheat.
His hand closed around a clump of grass and gave a steady pull, muscles straining to break the tenacious grip of the grass’s roots in the soil. That Stefan Reisner succeeded in ripping it out of its earth bed was a clear measure of his physical prowess. He tossed the clump aside and clawed out a handful of dirt. With smiling eyes, he looked at Lillian and offered her the soil. She cupped her hands while he crumbled the chunks into them.
“Our land,” he said simply.
The brown dirt was cool against her palms. She closed her fingers around the dry earth, feeling its roughness and reminding herself that this soil was a source of food for plant life. This was fertility in her hands, the first chain in nature’s cycle.
“On this spot, ve vill build our home,” he said as he pushed to his feet. “First, ve must plow the ground and plant our vheat.”
“We’ll need to plow a space for a garden, too, so we can grow our own vegetables,” Lillian added.
Behind them, one of the horses stamped the ground, rattling the harness chains. Lillian straightened and brushed the dirt from her hands without getting it all. While Stefan walked to the wagon to begin unloading it, she lingered to make another slow study of the rolling grassland sprinkled with wild flowers.
For so long, this land had been unproductive, solely the domain of cattle and the men who tended them, the cowboys. The corners of her mouth were edged with a faint smile by the latter thought. The first one she’d met in the flesh hadn’t turned out to be anything like what she had expected a cowboy to be. She had thought they were wild and rowdy, always ready for a fight, but the one she’d met had been polite and friendly.
She could still remember his dark eyes and the way they looked at her, frankly admiring and alive with interest. He’d always had elbowroom, never confined or crowded. It showed in his manner, the way he carried himself, so loose and at ease with his surroundings, accustomed to the bigness of the sky.
There was a difference in him that came from living his life in the outdoors. His features were browned by the sun, making Stefan appear pale in comparison. He looked proud and vigorous, his shoulders squared, not stooped like Stefan’s. He was strong and rugged, like this land, possessing an earthiness that Stefan didn’t have.
With a mute shake of her head, Lillian realized that it wasn’t fair to compare Stefan with the cowboy. Stefan was easily fifteen years older. Perhaps when he had been in his prime, the differences wouldn’t have been so marked. Besides, it wasn’t wise to begin building up images of that cowboy in her mind.
And it was equally foolish to stand around daydreaming when there was so much work to be done.
Riding fence was a lonely job, but Webb had never minded the loneliness of it, the long days with only his horse, the land, and a big chunk of sky for company.
While the mouse-colored dun horse walked along the fenceline, Webb reached out to check the tautness of the wire wherever it appeared to be slack, and test the posts to make certain they were solidly in the ground. His actions were automatic, leaving his mind free to wander along its own trails.
The horse’s stride made long swishes through tall grass already making its early-summer change from green to yellow. The sound and the color prompted Webb to try to conjure up a picture of this land covered with golden stalks of wheat. It was a tame sight that didn’t seem to belong in this wild, open range.
For the last two months, the grumblings in the bunkhouse had centered on the drylanders, the term being given to the homesteading farmers. They were being called a lot of other things by the cowboys, too—bohunks, nesters, and honyockers. Since spring, these immigrants had been arriving by the trainload. Homesteads were springing up on the plains like weeds, threatening to take over the rich grasslands that had been the ranchers’ domain.
Webb didn’t like the idea any more than the next cowboy, but he’d become more philosophical about it. In his father’s time, this country had been the last area of free range for the cattleman. Now it was the last area of free land for the farmer. It had always been so in the settling of the western lands. First came the trapper, then the rancher, and finally the farmer. No amount of resistance by the established order had ever changed the outcome. The invasion of the plow had begun.
With that historical perspective, he regarded his father’s continuing efforts through his political connections to halt or check the flow of homesteaders pouring into the area as both futile and unrealistic. Five years ago, his father had forecasted the coming of the farmers, and Webb couldn’t understand why he was fighting a war that was already lost.
As the mouse-colored horse topped the gentle slope of a hill, its head came up, its ears pricking with sudden interest at some object on the other side of the fence, outside the Triple C boundaries. Webb felt the horse’s sides expand to whicker a greeting to the team of draft horses in the wide hollow of the adjoining section of land. They were leaving a brown wake behind them, a straight swath through the grass.
It was strictly reflex that caused Webb to rein his horse to a stop. The rattle of harness chains came clearly across the silence of the rolling plains. Coming into view behind the muscled haunches of the draft team Webb saw, first, the man driving them, then the plow, a descendant of the famed sod-buster that had tamed the prairies of the Midwest. The old iron plow of early settlers couldn’t cut through the densely matted sod that was baked rock-hard by summer heat and frozen solid by winter’s cold until a man named John Deere invented a plow with a revolving blade and a steel moldboard that was able to cut the sod and turn it over.
There were refinements, but the principle was the same in the modern version of the implement Webb saw. He relaxed the checking pressure on the bit and let the gray dun start down the slope to the hollow where the homesteader was plowing up the virgin sod. The working team were too busy to respond to the cow pony’s whinnied greeting except to swing bobbing heads in its direction.
The man at the reins wore suspenders to hold up his loose-fitting trousers. Sweat was leaving wet stains on the front of his shirt, nearly reaching the patches under his arms. The small-billed cap on his head shaded little of his sun-reddened and whiskerless face.
When Webb noticed the homesteader’s cheeks were smooth-shaven, he realized he had thought the man might be the father of the girl he’d met at the train station. But the man was not only beardless, he was also younger, about Webb’s age. Still, his gaze swept past the dryland farmer and his horse-drawn plow to follow the trail of newly turned earth until he found its starting point.
About a quarter of a mile from the fenceline, the weathered boards of a wagon nearly blended into the tan background of the plains. His eye was caught first by the dull-white slash of a tent roof; then the wagon took shape. Two small children were playing in front of the tent, supervised by an older girl-child. All of them were fair-haired, making it unlikely that they were related to the girl he’d met with dark copper hair. Webb’s gaze came back to the man.
Like his horses, the homesteader was too intent on his work to notice the horse and rider approaching him on the opposite side of the fence. It wasn’t until Webb was nearly level with the horse team that the man saw him. His reaction was to instantly halt the team, his gaze darting warily over the tall rider.
From what Webb had heard in the bunkhouse, the homesteader’s attitude was understandable. The railroads and the small-town businesses had welcomed the immigrants to the area, but the reception from their neighbors—the ranchers and cowboys—had been on the frigid side, varying from icy disdain to blatant hostility.
The mouse-colored horse wanted to stop and become acquainted with the equine newcomers, so Webb let it. The saddle leather groaned as Webb shifted position and pushed his hat to the back of his head. The gelding stretched its neck over the barbed wire to nose at the near horse, as indifferent as its owner to the overture of interest.
“It looks like it’s going to get hotter as the day wears on.” Webb remarked on the weather, since it dictated conditions that affected both rancher and farmer.
An affirmative response was made by the downward movement of the drylander’s chin, but not once did his eyes leave Webb to inspect the skies for himself. Webb turned his glance to the churned-up earth behind the plow.
“Are you planning on sowing this in wheat?” He asked the obvious.
The chin came up again with a defiant thrust. “Yes.”
“Isn’t
it a little late in the year?”
Something flickered across the man’s face. Webb wasn’t sure whether it was doubt or simple concern. It was too quickly replaced by a desperate determination that he would later recognize as a quality common to virtually all the drylanders. For a fleeting second, he let his thoughts run back to the auburn-haired Lillian, glad that her family had been among the early arrivals, because their crop would have time to mature, provided there was rain. This man was gambling there wouldn’t be an early killing frost.
“Mr. Wessel said we had time to plant and harvest.” The drylander’s voice had an accent Webb couldn’t place, but the conviction of belief was unmistakable.
Impatience with the man’s blind faith in this land promoter Wessel thinned the hint of friendliness from Webb’s features, turning them hard. His stony gaze veered to the distant wagon and tent, and the children playing so carefree under the warm sun.
“That your family?” Webb slashed the same narrowed glance at the farmer.
There was worry behind the man’s bristling posture, as if Webb’s reference to his family were somehow threatening, but Webb was wondering how those youngsters would make it if the crop failed, as it probably would with such a late planting, and there was no money to buy food for the winter.
“That’s my Helga and my children,” the man stated.
“Do you have any idea how rough it’s going to be out here for them?” Webb seriously doubted it.
“I have gun.” The drylander returned Webb’s steady look. “If trouble comes to my family, I will use it.”
Although there was no outward change in his expression, Webb was startled by this response. He had been referring to the hardships inherent in this land and its climate. He hadn’t meant to imply any other source of physical harm to the man or his family. Had there been instances of violence or harassment by ranchers or cowboys that he hadn’t heard about?
