“Ach!” Christine came in and clucked her sympathy. “A boy, too! With the land he should help.”

Abbie turned her face to the wall. Christine had no finer feelings. She lay and thought of her sister Janet and her dead baby. She could hear the faint pound, pound, of a hammer out at the barn. Every hammer stroke hit her heart. They were going to take the baby over to the Lutz burial knoll. There was no one there but Dannie and Grandpa Lutz. Dannie . . . Grandpa Lutz . . . and now little Basil Deal . . . three to make a cemetery. In a new country you had to make homes and roads and wells and schools . . . and you had to make a cemetery. You couldn’t get around it . . . you had to make a cemetery, too.

She lay there and thought of the knoll and the prairie grass and the low picket fence against which the tumbleweeds piled . . . where the blackbirds wheeled and the sun beat down and the wind blew. She hated the barrenness of it. If she could put him in a shady place it wouldn’t be quite so hard. But to put him in the sun and the coarse grass and the wind! She and Sarah would go over and plant some trees some day. She heard the rattle of the lumber-wagon and raised herself up to look through the little half-window set in the sod. She could see Will and Sarah in the wagon. Will was driving, and Sarah had a little wooden box across her lap. When the big lumber-wagon rattled away from the house, Abbie lay back on her pillow. For a long time she could hear the sound of the lumber-wagon rattling over the prairie.

CHAPTER XVI

It was several weeks before Abbie could get around again to do all her work. Christine or Sarah came over and helped a little each day. Service finds its greatest opportunity and its least begrudged hours of labor among neighbors in a new community through which lines have not been drawn and into which class has not yet come.

Abbie could not get over the loss of her little son. Always she saw him in shadowy outline among the others. All her life she was to say, “Now he would be seven,” “To-day he would be twelve,” “He could have voted to-day for the first time.” Yes, Abbie Deal was a born mother,—one of those women who love the touch of baby flesh, who cuddle little children to them, who, when their own babies have grown, catch up some other woman’s child to fondle.

On the day in June in which Abbie did her first full day’s work, the grasshoppers lifted their wings and flew to other fields,—as complete and unified a departure as their coming had been.

There was no small grain that summer, but a half-hearted corn crop seemed on the way. Settlers by the score were returning east. Scarcely a day passed which did not see some forlorn group go by the house. Many of the covered wagons carried statements painted on their wagons, which would have been humorous if they had not been so tragic. “Going back to Pa and Ma,” was one. Another held a huge caricature of a grasshopper strangling a man with its forelegs and antennæ, and the laconic words, “He wins.”