To the north and west of them, Oliver Johnson, a young bachelor and a Dartmouth graduate, put out a timber claim. By planting and caring for ten acres of trees for eight years he would be able to obtain a good one hundred and sixty acres from the government.

In every activity on the place Will took pains to plan right. “We have to think what we’re doing and lay it out just as we want it in the future,” he told Abbie. “We’ll be able to build a good frame house one of these days and we want the whole place planned so we’ll not need to make changes.”

Abbie pondered a great deal over the arrangement. “Right over there, Will, the new house ought to be . . . on that rise of ground. Then some day there’ll be a road. I can kind-of see now how it will be. A nice house up there on the rise and the road running east and west past the house, then a lane road turning in from the main one. And fences. . . . Oh, I think, Will, when we get fences, I’ll like it better. It seems so sort of heathenish to come across the country any way. There ought to be nice straight roads everywhere and fences to show where our land begins and ends. And a picket fence around the house yard . . . a nice fence, painted white . . . with red hollyhocks and blue larkspur along by it, against the white pickets.”

Will laughed. “You’re quite a dreamer, Abbie-girl.”

Abbie did not laugh. She was suddenly sober. “You have to, Will.” She said it a little vehemently. “You have to dream things out. It keeps a kind of an ideal before you. You see it first in your mind and then you set about to try to make it like the ideal. If you want a garden,—why, I guess you’ve got to dream a garden.” Then she looked out at the small plot of vegetables, and laughed,—not quite joyfully, a little ruefully. They looked so wilted and so lackadaisical, so uninterested in life, those potatoes and turnips and beans.

All this time they had used the spring at the edge of the creek, and now Will was digging the well. Henry Lutz came over to operate the windlass that raised the buckets which Will filled with dirt. In return for the work, Will was to assist Henry in the same way as soon as his own well would be finished. On one of the days of the well-digging Henry brought word that the Burlington road had sent its first train across the Missouri at Plattsmouth. It made the men feel good. Things were coming along fine, they told each other.

On a later afternoon Henry could not come, and Abbie, as anxious as Will that the work should go forward, pitted her own young strength against the weight of the dirt-filled buckets. All afternoon, her face purple with heat and exertion, she worked under the sun’s fire and in the wind’s hot breath, only leaving her post to nurse the baby at her heated breast.