CHAPTER XV

THE fall was a slow dying on the stem. There was no lush greenness to be powdered white by a sudden frost, no still, hot sun in the morning turning the ash along the bluffs to gold, the lone cottonwoods of the Niobrara meadows to yellow clouds. The blackbirds flocked southward without their long singing in the marshes that were only baked mud, and the creepers on the buffalo-berry brush above the cattails curled up brittle and gray without burning scarlet at all. In the fields the pumpkins were barely as large as a good man’s fist, and the corn stood sparse and whitish, the nubbins ready to pick long before the frost.

This year there was nothing left of the old influx of Indians to the potato fields. The heavy spud diggers leaned in rust against the sheds all the fall, while here and there a dusty man tore up the clodded earth with an old lister, his wife following to scratch out apronfuls of potatoes, like ruddy marbles, but better for the boiling kettle than nothing at all.

Even those who had watered a little patch from the windmill got only twenty cents a bushel for the finest of the potatoes, and no hurry about the digging, for the dry winter came late, and found no moisture to freeze in the baked earth.

The farmers looked back upon the gray year, with the early grass barely sprouting in the gullies, burnt fields empty, and the graineries of autumn scooped dry to keep the sheriff away. But perhaps it was just as well that there was no seed for another burning springtime that would bring no growing.

“Never rain again. Region going back to desert. Everybody have to move out,” they told each other, their farmer faces lean and furrowed, their bib overalls hanging loose. And in the Eastern papers articles signed with impressive names agreed.

But not the survivors of the nineties. They knew the rains would come again. All a man had to do was hang on.

Yes, they had to hang on now, as long as they could, for there was no going back East, where thousands already scratched the city dumps for their meals. There was no throwing their few traps together and pounding the ponies westward—to more cities with dumps combed by the hungry. The free-land region, the poor man’s heaven, was gone.

Many of the young fellows, even boys of ten and twelve, hit the road, with a girl now and then sneaking in among them, tramping, sleeping in boxcars, in flop houses and in jungles, eating as they could, not writing home at all, maybe, until they came dragging back like Babbie’s youngest, with a foot cut off by a slip under the wheels, or pretty fifteen-year-old Gertie Puddley, sent home from Denver by the Social Welfare, dying of a disease she picked up.

And still they left, sometimes telling their folks, sometimes anyhow, as the young have been leaving ever since nests began to get crowded.

But young Milt Green stayed. With no job, and living off the little garden truck he could grow on hated Slogum soil, he stayed, and at night and Sundays he read Ruedy’s books, and Moll’s, talking to the old woman by the hour, pretty well chair-fast now by her arthritis. And in him grew up the great anger of the young against the injustices of the world, particularly the obvious injustices of cold and hunger in a land of plenty. And as he strode his long legs through her book-lined living room, his high-nosed, narrow face angry, his bushy hair standing, Old Moll laughed a little.

“Ah,” she told him, “if you only had a little blockiness to that intellectual’s face—then I could hope we were n’t seeing the last of our great Mid-Western liberals. If you had something of the wide, eloquent mouth of Billy Bryan, or, better still, the stubbornness of the earth of old Fighting Bob, or the constancy, the eternal relentlessness, of the Nebraska sky in George Norris—”

“The earth-the sky! The sky knows no hunger, and the earth heals her wounds, but the time of man is short—” the boy cried bitterly.

Old Moll shook her cropped white head. “You see—there it is. You’re not a leader, you’re a poet, a very young poet.”

 

During the last six months Gulla Slogum had bought up fifteen thousand acres of land in Dumur and Slogum counties, not an acre within half the mortgage amount, and felt much better. She was eating anything she wanted again, until she quivered in fat She called Meda a whore to her face and sent for a dozen red pencils to make the old map on her wall a thicket of red x’s denoting Slogum ownership.

Ward had done all he could to save some of these places. There was Old Man Pontey, with a broken hip, a thousand-dollar doctor bill, the whole year of 1928 in a cast and no way of catching up now. And Cliff Harvey, with nine children and the first case of hemorrhagic septicæmia in his stock, cleaning it out pretty thoroughly in a few weeks, from chickens to Percheron stud, before he knew about vaccination. Every dollar Ward could get his hands on or could borrow from Libby and Ruedy he used to stave off foreclosure on such places. But Gulla had seen to it thirty-five years ago that no Slogum would have enough in his own name to be independent of her. And so at last Ward was driven to the mother herself.

She liked that. This son who had run away from her once and then went sneaking out to a common Polish girl coming begging. Her droop-cornered mouth thin in satisfaction, she told him what she thought of these friends of his, like the Ponteys and the Harveys—no managers, always complaining, making excuses. Plain trash. But because she got to tell the son these things, and he did look so sick and unhappy, she put off the foreclosures a little, although she reminded him that Lew Jackson went busted doing business that way, and in good times.

But now Ward was back in the hospital. Once more Ruedy had taken him to the door, not alone, for this time they could n’t keep Libby from knowing, from going in with him. And when he could assert himself again, he let no one be sent away.

Almost every day men and women came to stand at the foot of his bed, work-bent, in wash-faded, patched old clothes, wordless except that at last they might get out an embarrassed: “We was a hopin’ you’d be up and around again soon—”

But now that they saw him there, on the white pillow, the last bit of wind color bleached from him, they knew that it must be true that the doctors found a whole cluster of little cancers in him, like chokecherries on a stem. And so they went away.

Now the homes of the old-timers went too, along with those of younger, more ambitious farmers who had gone in heavy for planting at the request of the government during the war, bought more land on tick under the promise of a stable wheat price, more machinery to harvest that wheat, and were only mildly angry when they were told in those prosperous times that an American-made binder was cheaper in Russia than in the United States, freight and all. Now, when their high-priced binders were rusting in the leaky sheds, the canvases rotten, some of them damned the dirty wheat-growing Reds while others damned the tariff that was long bleeding the farmer white.

But damning the Reds did n’t pay the mortgages, particularly when the little hope of a government loan vanished too, as soon as a man needed it bad, just as the government got out from under the wheat when it went to pot, and corn with it.

Yeh, to hell with the government To hell with Hoover and the Republican Party. Maybe Roosevelt and the Democrats would do something for the poor man.

But here and there one spoke from long disillusionment, damning the whole kit and caboodle of politicians. He’d seen ’em all, both kinds. What difference did it make whether the corn the colt followed into the corral was white or yellow? The bit and spur he got were the same bard steel.

Yeh, that was so. To hell with the bankers and the capitalists. They get you coming and going, Democrat or Republican.

But what’s a poor dog to do when the turpentine’s already got him where the hair ’s short?

 

Along in January, when two sundogs stood in the white, frosty sky and a light snow was beginning to run a little before the rising wind, Link Loder, in several pairs of patched, wash-faded old overalls and a threadbare mackinaw, rode over the frozen trails to Slogum House. At the porch he asked in a stiff, frightened voice for Gulla. Meda Barlow, already well trained in the Slogum way, left him standing outside and went into the gloom. Pounding his cold hands in their eared old husking mittens, the man waited ten minutes, fifteen. At last Gulla came to the door, a heavy gray bathrobe over her dress, making her a thing as shapeless and invulnerable as an old granite boulder.

What did he want? she inquired of him, through the rusty screen, not letting the freezing man in for a moment. Stammering with the urgency of his need, he tried to ten her. He would like a little more time on his mortgage. He hoped for a chance at one more crop. “I bin having a little bad luck, what with the hard times—Hail two years hand-running, and my wife sick this year, just like your boy Ward—”

But mention of Ward was no easy way to reach Old Gulla. She was tired of farmers with hard-luck stories.

“Well,” the man apologized, wiping the back of his mitten across his blue nose, “it do seem like we most always has bad luck. Trouble is, when we raises a crop we has to sell right off and the market goes to pot, and when it comes back the speculator’s got the stuff and gets the profit. Right now I got pretty good corn in the crib, two thousand bushels, but even at twelve cents—I was hop in’ maybe Roosevelt ’d do something for us come March—”

Gulla made no acknowledgment, and before her stoniness Link. Loder dropped his watery eyes to his mittens, with the extra thumbs so like frozen ears.

“I come in the same year’s you folks—” he began vaguely, trying to appeal to the woman some way.

But Gulla Slogum had no softening. “I know—long enough to have something if you’re ever going to get it. Over forty-five years and yet you got a mortgage overdue.”

“Well, if you feel that way, guess there ain’t nothing me and the wife can do but just sign the place over to you—”

But Gulla would not take it so. Public sheriff sale, see what it was worth.

“God, ma’am,” the man begged, “ain’t nobody but you got money to buy. It ’ll mean I got to work for you for years to make up the deficit—”

There was no moving the woman and so Link. Loder rode away, his shoulders hunched forward, the old plough horse shambling along through the snow-filled, icy ruts of the trail.

The day of the sale Gulla had the land bought in at three dollars an acre, money that would be turned over to her on the mortgage and still leave a deficit of three dollars an acre on the place Lincoln Loder could have sold for sixty-five an acre seven years ago. It was well improved, a fine ten-acre grove on the old timber claim, windbreak for the house and the yard, with the three quarters of smooth, rich land sloping gently toward the south. Here Link had batched in the late eighties, brought his bride from York State. They just got a start when the hard times of the nineties came, and the bank closed on a thousand dollars they hoped to put into a little more land. Then the boy died. Somehow Link never got ahead much after that until the big prairie fire, back before the war. Now it was all gone, his livestock too, and his corn, mortgaged for taxes and interest and doctor bills, and still owing fifteen hundred dollars, and he and the old woman tramps on the road in a few days.

But Lincoln Loder never had to leave the place. The morning after the sale a neighbor found his wife in bed in her outing-flannel gown with a load of buckshot in her chest and the man hanging from a crosspiece in the bam.

 

René brought the word to Spring Branch Canyon. Now once more it was too much, and so, forgetting his car. Ruedy started over the grass-grown, snow-filled old path toward Slogum House.

At the top of the ridge he stopped, a weary, unhappy old man who wanted more than anything now just to sit by the fire and watch the snowbirds whirl by like gray leaves in the wind before a storm. But there was work to be done down there in that weather-beaten old house, with its crow’s nest tipping from forty years of northwest wind. One of these days the refuge of at least a dozen murderers would come down. But it outlasted most of them. Maxon dead in the asylum, Dun Calley shot in a hold-up in Texas, Butch gone too.

In the yard Ruedy looked up at the shaky old windmill wheel that always squeaked for oil since Dodie died in the shed, faithfully at work to the last minute. There were better mills long ago, metal, running in oil. The wooden wheel was old and cranky as Link Loder had been old.

Gripping the neck of his coat close to him, Ruedy hurried in to find Gulla.

But it was as he had known it would be. She insisted, with little impediment in her tongue, that she was within her rights. The money was hers; Link Loder had borrowed it, used it, did n’t pay it back when due. Now the land was legally hers. The murder and suicide were only the foolish acts of weaklings, no-’counts. It would not stop her, not for a minute. She would have all that was hers.

“There will be trouble one of these days, like down in the eastern part of the state, and other places. Mobs are forming to stop these foreclosures. It will make trouble—”

“Trouble!—So did the high-farking sisters of yours make trouble years ago, years of trouble for all of us,” she told him, striking out with her best weapon.

And seeing how useless it was, he hurried back to Spring Branch with the wind in his back, pushing him along. He stopped at his house to fill his pipe, but before he lit it he started over the hill toward René’s. Together they drove to the little place of Leo Platt, home from the legislature for a few days.

Yes, he knew about farmers holding up sheriff sales in the eastern part of the state, he said, rubbing his strong hands together unhappily. But that was where there were leaders. Here they were like pot-gut skim-milk calves, following the bucket when they knew it was empty, bawling around the feed corral even when the gate’s shut tight against them, and not one of the lot with the bottom to try the rottenness of the planks. Down in Kansas they shot a judge, and here they let Old Gulla take over twenty thousand acres, Slogum purchases just as sure as church-house stealing.

Maybe there would be a pay day, René volunteered without conviction.

“Yes,” young Milt said to them all. “A pay day, when the sparrows rot in the same sun as the eagle, only leaving no dream of terror behind him, and the Indian making no magic whistles of his bones—”

“But the same gun can bring them both down,” Platt reasoned “All you need is bigger shot”

Ruedy looked sadly out of his isolation among these friends. “My wife, she is a sick woman; she is not herself—” he apologized in his loyalty, and liking him, they said no more.

But when he was gone they talked, Platt over his pipe, wondering at Ruedy, at his taking in the victims of the Slogum system, at his quiet opposition that Gulla never could break.

“Maybe because he is so quiet,” Milt suggested. “Like the little cedar on a rock, its roots finally splitting it wide open—”

Yes, but what they couldn’t understand was Old Gulla herself. She did n’t need this land; did n’t spend what she had. Look at the old lumber pile she lived in, that old Slogum lumber pile.

Might it be the need of asserting her self-importance, the poor-boy-who-was-spurned sort of thing, a little like Astor and Vanderbilt and Rockefeller?

Platt and René looked at each other. But what could be done?

Milt rose in anger. “Done, done!” he shouted. “Do what any good cowman does with a hooky old heifer that horns all the rest from the feed she can’t eat herself. He saws her horns off, shuts her up tight, or ships her to market.”

“At least you’re getting down to the ground now,” Leo Platt teased, for all the seriousness of the situation. “But you can’t ship Gulla Slogum to market—”

Slowly a sheepish grin spread over Milt’s thin face. “Maybe not, but we can keep her out of other people’s stack yards.”

Yes, René nodded. If they could do that—And so they fell to planning, Milt with the fire and ideas, René with the patience and the caution. Maybe Roosevelt would do something when he came in in March.

Platt sucked at his pipe. And the county papers carrying pages of sheriff sales for this week and next. No, the time to act was now, and a little trouble would help force the hand of the legislature and hurry the new President—if he intended to do anything.

“But breaking the law—” the moderate René still objected.

“Breaking the law!” young Milt cried out. “The law is only for those powerful enough to enforce it. It was legal for the bank to close on Bill Humphry’s last cent—that he’s worked years to get together to pay his mortgage off, and now it’s legal for Gulla to dig up the papers and sell him out—”

 

The next morning Leo Platt took René and Milt Green up on Sundance Table and, although it was cold, they got half a dozen of the younger men together at the Humphry barn, with some of the old-timers who had been bulldozed by the Slogums for many years. At first they were strange and wooden, feeling each other out, afraid, partly of Legislator Platt among them. Finally everybody talked freely enough, all except Milt, who felt awkward and young among these shaggy-browed, wire-tough men who had seen plenty of hard times before, but not like this, not with such concentration of power right among them.

Yes, they were saying, there was something mighty rotten when a good farmer and his wife and children worked a lifetime only to lose their land in a depression that was none of their making, lost their homes to a damned buzzard waiting on the fence. Something stinking rotten.

And when they scattered with the evening it was settled that they were to gather quietly for the sale, bring everybody interested. No guns, no knucks, but be there. The men nodded, their faces blue-red with cold, shivering in their patched overalls, a few in old sheepskin coats that were bought at war prices and mended and patched and worn again until now they were nothing more than bare old leather, bald as the sheep’s own range on the wool side. That night Platt started back to the capital, driving his old car all night to get there. He spent one day in the legislative halls, talking to the lawmakers: small-town lawyers mostly, and insurance men, with politicians from the larger places, all worried, and all afraid of their financial backers. That night he resigned, knowing it meant the loss of his home on the Niobrara, with the mortgage in Gulla’s hands. But others were facing these things with wives and families.

 

Lickens got word of the farmer meeting planned for the Humphry sale to Slogum House, asking Gulla, Hab, and Cash to be there. Cash would be enough for those rabbity, slack-pants farmers, Cash with their trusty men, Hab thought.

“Trusty men—” Gulla snarled from her sagging mouth. “There ain’t any.”

“Then we ’ll take what we can get and we ’ll make them trusty,” Cash said arrogantly, his hands in his pockets, the roll of red meat around the back of his neck swelling over his shirt collar. “How many we got up that way who can’t get another place because they got no advance lease money? We ’ll take them. Let that damn reneging Platt do his worst—”

The day of the Humphry sheriff sale started with a warm, spring-smelling morning, the last of the winter’s dirty snow about gone. Ruedy did n’t go up. Instead he walked the bare paths of his canyon and twice he went to look from the crest of the hogback over Oxbow Flat and away to the gray haze of Sundance Table. And each time he was astonished that everything could seem so peaceful and empty on this day. Even the old millwheel below him hung silent, motionless in the still air, seeming lonesome, somehow, without the leaky old supply tank that had stood beside it for thirty years but went down in a storm last summer. Several times he was tempted to go down to Slogum House to telephone, but there was no one to call and nothing he could ask, not even of Libby, for although Platt took her to Dumur, she would be with Ward at the hospital, only a block from the courthouse, to divert him, keep him from knowing.

Toward evening, when gray clouds began to scatter over the sky from a low bank in the north, the father saw Hab drive into the yard and Meda run out in a red dress to open the garage doors. It was bad to see a pretty young thing like that at Slogum House again, and made Old Ruedy’s feet very heavy in his overshoes as he plodded back down the slope to Spring Branch Canyon.

Just before dusk René came driving like a wild man up the sidling, curving trail. He jerked to a stop and came into Ruedy’s house, feeling around for a chair as though there were only darkness in the well-lighted room, and finally sat, heavy and silent within the shelter of his thickening body. At last Ruedy could hold in no longer.

“Did they let the place sell?”

René looked up, blinking over his clutched fingers. “Sell?” he asked, dully. Then he shook his heavy head. “Oh, no—”

It took Ruedy quite a while to coax the rest from him. Yes, quite a lot of the men were there. They pushed the sheriff into the courthouse and just sort of held the door against him until the time for the sale was past. That was all.

Ruedy wondered at the simplicity of this. Was there no trouble at all, no fight? Yet he could not ask. All he could do was wait, his hands about his pipe, sit and wait.

Finally René got up, began to walk heavily up and down the room, up and down, his overshoes soft each time he reached the old bay rug before the fireplace, turning slowly, like a blind old mare, his arms folded behind his broad back.

“God—” he said at last. “You can’t think how it feels to kill a man—”

Ruedy’s head jerked up, his mouth flying foolishly open to say something, but René had already slumped into a chair, his fingers spread over his face. And after a while the old man got up and made him a cup of coffee, urging him to drink.

At last René began to talk.

It had been pretty bad at the sale, with those fellows from up on the table standing around with their big hands hanging down, their faces black-mad, threatening as June hall clouds. Many of them had lost everything, most of the rest were in line for the same thing. And Cash had a lot of his hay shovelers and tough ranch loafers around him and quite a few renters too. Scared to death of the Slogum outfit, most of these were, and making out like they’d not rather join the rioters, when anybody could see which side they belonged on.

It might have been a big fight only the sheriff was easy to handle, looking sour on the Slogums coming over into Dumur County after they had pulled away, friendly to Platt and Milt and the others who held him prisoner, joshing with them, passing his plug tobacco around. Out in the crowd there was a little pushing and name calling, and a black eye or two, mostly just a lot of noise without words or anything, a low sort of rumble that got up to a roaring one time when Cash tried to push his way up the courthouse steps with a short automatic and some of his hired help.

But René got his shoulder against him, just stood there in the push, not giving much, and Cash waved the gun, yelling, “Git out of my way, you goddamn gelding—” And so he just kicked Cash hard as he could in his soft belly with his knee. He grunted and fell backward over the railing into the window hole of the basement, his gun flying out of his hand into the crowd, the Slogum men just standing.

There was a lot of yelling: “Now you got him!”, “Kill the Slogum bastard!” and such talk, but René just let Cash pick himself up and climb out and go away.

No, Hab was n’t there at all, or René did n’t see him. Jim Sula from down in the hills came early, and stood around. He’s a hard man to handle when he’s mad, everybody says, and his wife was with him. Maybe Hab saw them and pulled out.

Ruedy nodded. Yes, it would have been so if Hab had gone there at all.

Well, when sale time was over they turned the sheriff loose and he took Leo Platt and the Green boy over to the jail because they had to do something about it, promising René they would be out to-morrow morning, sure. So he picked up a earful of the farmers who’d walked in and scattered them out to their places. Twice Cash caught up with them, taking his renters home too, going sixty miles an hour in his red car. And each time he slowed up alongside and called René names, not names for other people—names that would make him the joke of the country for the rest of his life.

Ruedy squeezed his knuckles until they cracked. “They ought to kill a man like that—”

René began to walk again, but at last he came back to his chair and started to talk, not to Ruedy but to the room, to the rising wind in the chimney, to all the outdoors that was his.

When his car was empty René had started home. As he neared the Niobrara bluffs he could see the red car coming hard after him, and so he drove faster too, right up to the SLOW—SOUND HORN sign at the river hill. About halfway down, on the curve where the drop into the river valley is shut off by a row of white posts, the county repair outfit left a lot of long, brown tiling along the road to be used when the ground was well thawed. Ruedy nodded. He had seen it there.

Outside somewhere a coyote howled, and the fire popped. But René had to go on.

 

Somehow one of the tiles on the river hill had got rubbed down, off the pile, probably by cattle, far enough so that the end was across the inside wheel track. René had to stop, even with the roar of the heavy car behind him already in his ears. In a minute Cash would be down upon him, with his shaming and his abuse. So René dragged the upper end of the long tile around behind his car, to make Cash stop long enough so he could get away, past the bridge.

But Cash did n’t slow up at all for the warning signal at the river hill. With his engine roaring he came down the grade hard after René. At the curve there was a crash, a tearing of trees and banging of metal, and then in a little bit an explosion that shook rocks loose from the bluffs and sent them rolling down into the brush below.

Leaving his car beside the road at the bridge, René plodded back to the curve. The tile was smashed, pieces thrown at least forty feet against the row of white posts that edged the steep drop into the timber below. Two of the posts were broken clear off and down among the ash trees a car was burning in a scattered gasoline fire. René scrambled down, pulled Cash out, but he was already burnt so the skin came off in his hands. Burnt, cooked skin.

 

Stiffly Ruedy moved himself. So, it had come to this end at last. And now?

René did not know. He had telephoned to Dumur and the coroner and the sheriff came out. He stayed, and just kept saying that he did n’t know anything about it except that he had seen the tile and driven around it, hurrying to get out of the the way, because he could hear a car coming fast, roaring. So they let him go until tomorrow at the inquest.

“What will be done there?” Ruedy wondered.

“What can they do to me?” René asked of him, and the old man was silent.

The next morning René went up the Niobrara road in a snowstorm. Two dozen men stood around, their coat collars up, not saying much, waiting for Hab Slogum to come. At last they saw that he would not be there. Some wondered. Perhaps the talk going around was true, perhaps the Slogums of Slogum House were a bunch of buzzards far too long in the nest, ready to tear the entrails from anyone injured among them.

By the time the jury began to function they were all shivering, with the new snow melting down the backs of their necks. There were plenty of witnesses who saw the driving of Cash on the way home. The sheriff and the coroner told of the broken tile, pointed to the wrecked car below the curve in the trees. The death of Cash Slogum was pronounced accidental.

ANOTHER LIFE SNUFFED OUT BY RECKLESS DRIVING was the headline in the Dumur Duster.

 

Gulla took it quietly enough. So these Slogum sons of hers could n’t even manage to live as long as their mother. And she had n’t forgotten the day she brought Ward back from Wyoming she found Cash drunk as a hog with Butch in the girls’ private parlor, or that he even got her accused of killing old Tit-Ear by that fly-up-the-crick of a Eulie, probably rotten in some whorehouse long ago, where she belonged.

As Gulla got around less, had more time for old thoughts, she wondered often about Butch, whether he was dead or alive. If dead, it was not by the hand of a Slogum. No Slogum could kill a Haber.

And Hab, driving fast toward Lower Slogum, was thinking about Butch too. He was the son-of-a-bitch who got them into this mess with René. And now both he and Cash were gone, and René was still carrying the stag-handled knife.

Gulla got through the funeral well enough, leaning on her cane with a cold remoteness upon her spreading, purplish face. Fanny tried to get her to wear a veil, to cover her up a little from the stares. But since when had Regula Haber needed to hide? So she stood at the grave at Dumur with her face open for everyone to see—that and the thick barrel of stiff black silk in which the old woman was protected as in a fortress from all those who came to stand away, not one any closer than necessary to hear what Annette’s preacher friend could possibly say for this son of Slogum House. And beside her stood the eldest son, his eyes alert, his hand on the revolver inside his overcoat, and as the preacher’s last word dropped like a spatter of dirty, wet snow upon the coffin, Hab slipped away to his car and was gone.

Not until they were on the way home did Gulla discover that the land sale had been held up. She broke into the thundering wrath, roaring out upon them all their shame as cowards—yellow-bellied cowards. Where were they all, the men her money paid for? And Hab and Cash, these men who called themselves her sons? Just as though she had already forgotten the open hole in the earth, and the bare coffin.

Oh, she knew what they were up to, Cash, tearing over the country at seventy miles an hour, burning up gas and tires. And that Hab, a chasing young girls, slobbering all over himself in his itch for a hard, round titty. He’d get paid, you see if he did n’t! They’d all get paid, keeping it from her that they were letting that farm trash cheat her out of her land.

And what part did that Leo Platt have in it? She knew those Sundance Tablers—not gumption enough in the lot to take their pants down! Platt, that’s who it was, and him not even able to stay in the legislature after he’d fooled the people into voting for him. If it had n’t been for that Libby she would have had the lawless rascal out of the way like all the others.

Now at last the daughter thought it was enough. With her thumb in her mother’s shoulder Libby bore down until the woman whimpered in pain.

“You know why you did n’t bother Platt,” she told Old Gulla. “You did n’t want to feed the buzzards; that’s why.”

“Libby, Libby,” Ruedy tried to reason. “Your mother’s sick—”

“Sick—sick!” Gulla roared, despite her awkward tongue. “Turn around, back—to Dumur,” she screamed, her face deep-purpling. “I’ll have the lot of you arrested for cheating me, a helpless old woman!”

Once more Libby brought her down with her thumb. “Turn around! Don’t you even know that you don’t live in Dumur County any more, but in your own befouled Slogum nest?”

 

At last they got her home, and about an hour after supper, she was struck by a dizzy spell, tried to get herself to bed, and fell face down in the hall. Libby hurried to her, but she could n’t lift more than a shoulder of the mammoth old woman. Annette and Cellie came, and seeing the mother they ran out, calling, through the house, calling for help.

Louie and the two other hands came down the stairs, took her to her bed, and stood away from her in a little row, looking curiously upon this still, silent woman who had been the Old Gulla of Slogum House so long. Out at the telephone Cellie was ringing and ringing, for the doctor, for Fanny, for Hab, who had gone to the lower ranch. In this excitement Libby hustled Louie out of the kitchen door for Ruedy.

They all came, except Fanny. She was playing at the church, would be out next day. She refused to consider any spell Gulla had serious.

And she was right In a week the mother was up again, her broad, flat feet slower behind her cane, a little extra thickness to her tongue. For a few days she moved about considerably subdued, watching her diet and the violence of her speech, remaining calm as none had ever seen her.

Twice Lickens came down to see her. Carefully Gulla and Hab and the lawyer went over the list of mortgages to find a man who was obviously a dead-beat, one so disliked by all his fellows that they would do nothing for him. But there seemed none like this.