“But, Isabelle, if people waited to be rich to have children. If we! . . . Oh, Isabelle! . . . You’d make me laugh if I didn’t feel so like crying. ‘Can’t afford it?’ How can you afford to miss it . . . little children . . . their soft warm bodies and their little clinging hands . . . their cunning ways . . . miss motherhood?”

“Of course, I might have known you wouldn’t like it . . . but I want to devote all of my time to my voice. To have children you ought to have plenty of time and money for their development.”

Abbie Deal looked out of the window, down through the long row of cedars. “To have plenty of time and money for their development.” Instead of the cedars, heavy with snow, she was looking into a sod-house where a little painted blackboard stood against the mud-plastered walls, seeing one shelf of books and a slate and some ironed pieces of brown wrapping-paper. The mother there was hearing reading lessons while she kneaded bread, was teaching songs while she scrubbed, was giving out spelling words while she mended, was instilling into childish minds, ideals of honesty and clean living with every humble task.

For a long time Abbie Deal sat and looked out at the cedars bending under the snow, like so many mothers bending under their burdens. But she did not answer Isabelle. Maybe there was no answer. Perhaps there was no argument. She did not know.

CHAPTER XXV

John’s letters came again in the late spring, in them an echo of the breeze that blows over the Kotzebue Sound. “For Christmas dinner we had fish balls and egg sauce, baked white-fish, ptarmigan pot-roast, mashed potatoes, baked dressing, ice cream from condensed milk, and coffee. After the white people ate, the Eskimos took turn and made a thorough clean-up. When one of them found something that struck his palate, he proceeded to devour the entire contents of the dish. Eighty white people ate and twenty-five Eskimos. The miners came dressed in their parkas and mukluks. . . .

“Thermometer has been down to 38 degrees all day, 46 below in the night. This morning about eleven the ice began moving on the Keewalik and kept coming all day. There is an ice jam at the bluffs below town, and a number of cabins are in danger of being carried away. . . .

“Strike on Kugruh has been confirmed,—the whole river and benches have been staked.”

Abbie, with the letters in her lap, would look out over the familiar fields, green in their spring wheat and their parallel rows of young corn, and wonder how a child of the prairie could have gone so far away.

And now Nature began to seem less parsimonious with her rains. No longer was the sky a dry blue bowl turned over the dry brown earth. Heavy with moisture, the clouds gathered and fell in a blessing of light showers or heavy, soaking rains. Out of Nature’s benediction grew fine crops, better times, high land prices.