When they had pulled themselves together, their greatest grief seemed to be that she died alone. In deepest remorse they blamed themselves. Standing there together in common sorrow, they said the same thing over and over to each other:

“Didn’t she seem as well as ever to you last week?”

“I’ll never forgive myself that I played bridge all afternoon.”

“Do you suppose she suffered much?”

“Or called for us?”

“Isn’t it dreadful? Poor Mother! So many of us . . . and not one of us here just when she needed us . . . and after all she’s done for us.”

Only one,—Laura Deal,—a twelve-year-old granddaughter, turned away from the window where she had been looking down the long double row of cedars, and said in a clear, steady voice: “I don’t think it was so dreadful. I think it was kind of nice. Maybe she didn’t miss you.” She looked slowly around the circle of her elders. “When you stop to think about it, maybe she didn’t miss you at all. One time Grandma told me she was the very happiest when she was living over all her memories. Maybe . . .” She hesitated, a little shy at expressing the thought in her heart, “Maybe she was doing that . . . then.”

This is the story of the old lady who died while the meat burned and the children played “Run, Sheep, Run,” across her yard.

CHAPTER I

Abbie Mackenzie was old Abbie Deal’s maiden name. And because the first eight years of her life were interesting only to her family, we shall skip over them as lightly as Abbie herself used to skip a hoop on the high, crack-filled sidewalks in the little village of Chicago, which stood at the side of a lake where the bulrushes grew.

We find her then, at eight, in the year 1854, camping at night on the edge of some timberland just off the beaten trail between Dubuque and the new home in Blackhawk County, Iowa, to which the little family was bound.

Abbie and a big sister of fifteen, Isabelle, were curled up together under two old patchwork quilts in one of the wagons. Another sister, Mary, and a little brother, Basil, were in the other wagon with their mother. Sixteen-year-old James and eleven-year-old Dennie, the men of the party, were sleeping near the oxen, so that the warmth of the animals’ bodies would keep them warm.

Because she had propped up a small section of the wagon’s canvas cover, Abbie could see out into the night. The darkness was a heavy, animate thing. It hung thickly about the wagon, vaguely weird, remotely fearsome. It seemed to see and hear and feel. It looked at Abbie with its stirs, heard her whispered words with its tree-leaves, felt of her warm little body with its cool breeze fingers. Something about the queer closeness of it almost frightened her. Something about the hushed silence of it made her think of her father who had died two years before. She summoned a picture of him into her mind, now,—recalling the paleness of his long, thin face, the neatness of his neckcloth, the gentle courtesy of his manner. Thinking of him so, she punched Isabelle with an active elbow. “Belle, tell me about Father and Mother.”