From too much love of living,

From hope and fear set free,

We thank with brief thanksgiving

Whatever gods may be

That no life lives forever;

That dead men rise up never;

That even the weariest river

Winds somewhere safe to sea.

Today we can visualize our tireless old fighter safe at rest.”

During the celebrations which filled the last weeks of 1918, when, as the Clarion put it, “American victory over the German hordes was confirmed and the honor of Europe salvaged by our brave doughboys,” Mervin Wendell experienced his first premonition of death.

For some months he had not been in good health, for his efforts during the war years had been titanic. As War Bond chairman for northern Colorado, he had appeared on platforms in places as distant as Omaha and Salt Lake City. He wore a modified uniform of his own design, featuring leather puttees and a Teddy Roosevelt hat, and spoke on such subjects as “Our Daring Adventure at the Somme” and “We Are Strong Because We Are United.”

At the Wendell mansion on Eighth Avenue he and Maude entertained most of the dignitaries who visited Colorado—Secretary of War Baker, General Pershing’s relatives from Wyoming, General Barker of the British army, whose father had run the big cattle ranch at Horse Creek—and he had often sat up late talking with them about strategy and the ultimate triumph of Allied arms.

He retained his old-time gift of mimicry; on tour his accent was principally Oxonian. With his dashing uniform, most of his listeners considered him an officer in the British Royal Dragoons, of whom he spoke frequently and with a certain intimacy ever since he had spent a long evening with a colonel of that regiment reviewing tactics. He collected a great deal of money for the war effort, and Maude Wendell, as the gracious chairlady for the Red Cross, supervised the rolling of interminable lengths of bandage.

But his principal effort was reserved for the manipulation of his extensive land holdings, which now totaled more than fifty-five thousand acres of better-than-average land scattered about forty-three farms and ranches which he had acquired at panic prices. All his holdings in Line Camp were now sold and he had pioneered a new community to the north. It was named McKinley, “after our martyred leader,” he invariably explained with a quiver in his voice. He had seen McKinley once in Chicago and considered him our greatest President.

He had made a real killing on his McKinley operation, having learned from his experience at Line Camp not to sell too quickly but to hold on till the town became established and its future assured. He had spent most of 1917 hauling prospective buyers to the northern settlement, and since wheat was then at $2.29 a bushel, he had little trouble peddling really sizable acreages to farmers from the east.

His pamphlet on McKinley outdid anything he had previously offered, for the photographs and text were downright shameless. One group of pictures featured the steady progress of Farmer Earl Grebe, from Ottumwa, Iowa, who had come to Line Camp penniless in 1911 and who had recently picked up another half-section, making 1280 acres in all:

Notice the rural mansion in which Earl and his lovely wife Alice live … all paid for by $2.00 wheat, 36 bushels to the acre. The small building to the left is the sod hut in which the Grebes lived while they were getting started. Prudent custodians, they now use the “soddy,” our affectionate name for such memorials of the past, as a place to entertain admiring visitors from the east. The photographs on the opposite page show what Earl Grebe has grown on his farm, which is located less than twenty miles from the land you will be purchasing.

The wheat shown was from the Grebe farm, but the large melons, apples and sugar beets had all been photographed on irrigated land along the Platte.

In late 1918 Mervin Wendell was expended. Everything he had put his hand to had prospered and he was the richest man in Centennial or any town north to the Wyoming border. He now had only one concern: to live past his seventieth birthday. And he took every possible precaution to see that he did so.

His heart had weakened, so he canceled all speaking engagements, but he did appear on the platform at victory celebrations. He also drove up to McKinley when the new school was dedicated, and he showed up at his office in town occasionally, directing his son Philip, now a stable married man of forty, in the intricacies of real estate. For the rest, he guarded his health, halting smoking altogether and drinking only occasionally.

He was delighted when the New Year came and passed, for he considered this a major milestone. “I’d have hated dying in 1918, when so many other things were happening,” he told Maude, who seemed to grow younger with the passing years. She laughed at such a statement and assured him he would see 1920. “That’s a nice-sounding year,” he said. “I should like to welcome a new decade.”

It was not to be. During the second week of January he fell seriously ill, a complication of heart trouble and mild pneumonia. It was precisely the kind of terminal illness he would have chosen for himself, for it allowed him to lie in bed, unscarred and unafflicted by any loathsome disease. Each afternoon he held a kind of court in his bedroom, expatiating on all sorts of subjects.

“Those frail-hearted persons who fear we have overcultivated the plains will live to see ten farms where one is today. Mark my words, they’ll live to see three-dollar wheat …

“The nation has suffered enormously from the prattering of Woodrow Wilson. At the Ludlow troubles he should have sent in twice as many troops and shot down twice as many miners. Colorado would have been much the better for it …

“The theater will never die. Mark my words, it will never die. I remember when the great Edwin Booth came to Centennial in 1891. The Union Pacific deposited his red-and-gold private car where the grain silos stand now, and it rested there for three days while he regaled us with Hamlet, Macbeth and Richard III. The car contained two baths—complete bathtubs I mean—and a library that would have done justice to an emperor. The Union Pacific brought in tubs of oysters in ice and gave a public dinner for three dozen. I was invited, of course, being of the theater …

“I have the greatest respect for the rancher. He made Colorado what it is, a great free state. If I have been at odds with him from time to time, over land policy, it was only because he was endeavoring vainly to keep land from the people. The people, sir, that’s where the strength of a nation lies. But we all owe the rancher the respect Mr. Lamson at the bank accords him. He said to me not long ago, ‘Wendell,’ he said, ‘when I look out of my office door and see four men waiting for me, it’s easy to decide who to see first. The rancher, for he is nature’s nobleman. Then the irrigation farmer, for he is a long-time citizen and to be trusted, even if he is apt to be Russian. Then the dry-land farmer, because you never know where he came from nor how long he’s going to be around. And if the fourth man happens to be a Mexican, I tell him, “We already have a janitor.” ’ ”

On the evening of January 16 he grew quite weak, but he assured his family, “I feel confident I’ll make it,” and on the seventeenth he admitted a large number of well-wishers to his bedroom, regaling them with stories of when he had toured in the Dakotas with the lovely Maude De Lisle, who finally consented to be his wife and who had been his helpmeet during all these years. He went off into a flowery oration about the joys of conjugal bliss, during which his son left the room.

“It’s a passage from a play we gave in Minnesota,” Philip told his wife. “He’ll be doing the balcony scene from Romeo next,” and sure enough, toward five in the afternoon Mervin told the group how once in South Dakota he had looked up and had been so overcome by his wife’s beauty that he forgot his lines. He then recited the whole scene, Juliet’s lines as well as his own.

He died on the nineteenth, and all the Colorado newspapers carried obituaries recalling his unique contributions to the state. His funeral was a triumph, with dignitaries from varied walks of life paying tribute to his capacity for progress and his love of humanity. Many persons whom he had helped volunteered stories of his generosity, and the day was topped by the announcement of a delegation from McKinley that this new community wished to change its name to Wendell.

In Line Camp there was some feeling that the honor should be theirs, because the odd dual name was not liked by the residents, and a considerable movement got under way to effect a legal change before McKinley could do so, but in the end the northern community won out, and McKinley became Wendell, with the approval of the editorial writer of the Clarion:

It is proper that northern Colorado have a town named after its most illustrious son, for he did much to develop this section of the state. His vision in sponsoring the radical concepts of Dr. Thomas Dole Creevey when others insisted that dryland farming could never succeed came to fruition during the late unpleasantness when the region north of Centennial became the “breadbasket of the world,” in his happy phrase. On Tuesday next there will be a celebration in McKinley as the name is changed officially to Wendell, and all of us who profited from the leadership of this great man should pay him tribute by being in attendance. We are assured that Governor Gunter will be there to honor the man who served as his statewide chairman in a previous election.

Colorado’s retiring governor, Julius Gunter, did attend and so did the Grebes, for they of course believed that Mervin Wendell was largely responsible for their good fortune. He had met them at the train that first day in the fall of 1911 when they arrived to try their luck at dryland farming, and he had cooperated whenever they sought to buy more land. He had contributed a free plot for a library and another for a Sunday School.

The Grebes invited Vesta and Magnes Volkema to join them at the inauguration of the new town, but Vesta said, “That windbag? He stole the land he gave us for the library, and he stole the land he sold you, and the only reason he didn’t steal our homestead was that I was too goddamned smart for him. This crazy husband of mine came within one hour of selling us out.”

Alice said, “I thought you wanted to sell … and move to California.”

“Still do,” Vesta said. “But not for twenty-five cents an acre. And not to that oily son-of-a-bitch Wendell.”

Such language did not please Alice Grebe, who felt that hard work on the farm was coarsening Vesta, and at the ceremonies, when a mixed quartet sang “Whispering Hope” in honor of Mervin Wendell, she wept.

Potato Brumbaugh had had every intention of providing for Tranquilino Marquez and his family. He did give the Takemotos eighty acres of good irrigated land and would have done the same for Tranquilino if the Mexican had been at hand during his final days. Unfortunately, Tranquilino was chasing across northern Mexico with Pancho Villa and did not get back to Centennial until 1917, when Brumbaugh was long since dead.

Tranquilino returned to a miserable situation; there could be no other word for it. With Brumbaugh gone, he had no regular job at the farm and no settled place to live. He had to take his wife and two children and find such seasonal work as he could, which meant that his family had to live in one hovel or another. His wages were so low that he could save no money; when November 15 came, and the beet checks were distributed, he received so little that it was impossible to take his family to Denver, where there was at least a congenial Mexican community in whose warmth they could lose themselves during the bitter winter months.

Instead, each November, when they were kicked off the beet farm on which they had been working, they would take what money they had and move into one of the disgraceful shacks that had grown up at the northern extremity of Centennial. Little Mexico, the area was called contemptuously, as sad and filthy a collection of dwellings as had ever been allowed to exist in the west. Here the unwanted workers hid themselves during the winter. How they existed during blizzards no one could explain, for the walls were made of slats, with gaping cracks where the wood had warped, and the floors were of mud which froze when water seeped in from the edges. There were no health facilities, no paved roads, no schools, no amenities of any kind and no plans for any.

The farmers of Colorado, having come to depend on Mexican labor, considered it not only natural but right that these illiterate people should toil from March through November at rip-gut wages, then shift for themselves through the cold months, with inadequate food, inadequate heat, polluted water and festering social conditions. The merchants of Centennial, depending upon the Mexicans for the agricultural stability of the region and welcoming whatever surplus coins they had, saw nothing immoral in condemning this labor to a rural ghetto where they were expected to say nothing and make no demands. And if a Mexican sought to enter a barbershop, a restaurant or a store where fine clothes were sold, he might be chastised. Even the churches condoned this brutal system, for not even a mission was maintained. Protestant churches could perhaps be excused for this indifference, for as their elders said, “The Mexicans don’t belong to us,” but the attitude of the Catholics was less understandable, because the workers were members of that church. Of course, a so-called “Mexican Mass” was held each Sunday, but it convened at six in the morning, when upper-class Catholics would not have to mingle with Mexicans. Even this was restricted to domestic workers who served the better families, and had a mere beet worker wandered in, the priest would have been astounded, for in Centennial a field worker was considered little better than an animal.

They were an outcast tribe, with a strange language and even stranger customs. “They name their sons Jesus,” the children of Centennial giggled, and that alone was sufficient to disqualify them.

And it was not only the townspeople. Every rancher whose spread lay to the north had to pass Little Mexico on his way in to town. Every complacent ranch wife from Line Camp or Wendell had to see this ghetto, and no one cared.

It wasn’t that Little Mexico was ignored. The police were there a good deal, settling fights between residents, and Sheriff Bogardus considered it his major responsibility to keep the place in order during the winter so that field workers would be in good shape when spring planting commenced. In fact, a prime requisite for a Centennial law officer was that he be able to handle Mexicans and keep them from irritating their employers. The little settlement also came in for repetitious comment in the Clarion, where every reporter tried his hand at composing items intended to be amusing:

On Friday night as usual there were two stabbings in Little Mexico, but nobody died. Sheriff Bogardus arrested four participants but saw no reason to incarcerate them, since our courts are already clogged with problems emanating from that metropolis.

There was one man who might have served as spokesman for the Mexican community, an itinerant priest named Father Vigil—Veeheel—but unfortunately, he came from New Mexico, where he had been corrupted by the Penitente movement, that strange, John-the-Baptist-type of desert fanaticism in which devout members pierced their backs with cactus thorns to display their penitence, and when he sponsored such carryings-on, the respectable Christians of northern Colorado made it clear that they would not tolerate such behavior. There were proper ways to worship God, and penitential exhibitionism was not one of them.

It therefore fell upon Sheriff Bogardus to break up such demonstrations, because if the Mexicans coalesced around this inflammatory religion, next thing they would be forming a labor union, and the massacre of the coal miners at Ludlow had shown what could be expected then. So one of the most compelling cries that could be uttered in the police station was: “The goddamned Penitentes are out again!”

Then the sheriff and his deputies would leap into their cars and roar out to the fields north of Little Mexico, where ecstatic worshippers with thorns through their flesh were dancing and moaning and establishing relationships with God. Clubs would swing, and hoarse-voiced men would shout, “You can’t do that on Colorado property,” and sooner or later frail Father Vigil would move in to protest and some officer would belt him across the mouth and he would fall to earth, bleeding.

“Why can’t they worship like everyone else?” Sheriff Bogardus asked one Sunday after the Penitentes had given him a passel of trouble. “Why can’t they be Baptists or regular Catholics?”

It was curious that a state so advanced in all other directions should have been so permanently blind in its understanding of Mexicans. Colorado was where sensible labor relations were first worked out, where old-age pensions would be developed, where education was generously supported, where colleges proliferated and churches abounded. Colorado was a state where good ideas flourished, yet on this great basic question of human rights it remained purblind. It could never admit that for farmers to use labor for personal gain and then to dismiss that labor with no acceptance of responsibility was immoral. And any Anglo brave enough to raise the question ran the risk of having his teeth kicked in.

For more than half a century this condition prevailed. No church, no crusading newspaper, no band of women sought to correct this basic evil, and across Colorado, Anglo children who once had been raised to believe that Indians were not human were now raised to think that Mexicans were even less so. As one popular children’s book stated: “By the time Billy the Kid was twenty-one years old, he had killed one man for each year of his life, not counting Indians or Mexicans.”

It was to this kind of Little Mexico that Tranquilino Marquez moved permanently in late November 1921, with his wife, Serafina, his hotheaded son Triunfador and his lovely daughter Soledad, now thirteen years old. They found a shack of unbelievable decrepitude and filth, which they proceeded to clean up. Serafina performed miracles with scissors and needle; she would have done even better had a sewing machine been available. And Triunfador obtained, in a way that his father thought best not to inquire about, some lumber for shoring up the falling sides of the building. When they were through, the place could not have been called a house, for it offered practically no protection from either rain or wind, but it was a shelter, and there the family settled down.

They were not the kind of people to attract attention, so they had no reason to fear raids by Sheriff Bogardus, nor was Tranquilino disposed toward the Penitente movement, so there was no danger of his being clubbed by the deputies. The trouble lay with Triunfador, tall and sinewy, like his father; hard as iron, like his mother. He was now twenty and well instructed in the methods of sugar-beet cultivation. He was not able to read or write, but he had an unusual ingenuity and a determination to better himself.

Trouble started when he found an abandoned shack close to State 8, the rural highway leading from Centennial to Line Camp. Without seeking permission from the authorities, he took it over and installed a phonograph, three tables and some chairs. He made it a congenial place for the unemployed laborers to congregate and soon he was selling candy bars and soda pop.

It did not take the farmers of Centennial long to discover that in La Cantina, as it was called, lay the seeds of rebellion. “You let them damned Mexicans start congregating like that,” a Russian beet farmer warned Sheriff Bogardus, “and first thing you know, we got labor unions and all sorts of trouble.” When a second complaint was filed, Bogardus saw his duty.

Looming in the doorway, his pistols protruding from his holster, he announced, “This place is closed.” Saying no more, he withdrew, confident that no Mexican would defy such a clear-cut order.

Triunfador did not intend to close down, for he saw in La Cantina a nucleus around which a better way of life could be obtained for his people. “La Raza,” he said when speaking of his fellow Mexicans. The race, the whole Spanish race, both those from New Mexico, like Father Vigil, and the peons from Old Mexico, like his father. They must not live like animals, the members of La Raza, hibernating in their winter hovels like rattlesnakes. They must devise something better, something finer even than the back streets of Denver. He would not close.

“Goddamnit!” Sheriff Bogardus bellowed the next morning, after farmers had complained that “them damned Mexicans are still at it.” “I told you to close this joint. Now you get the hell out of here.” He started kicking the furniture around, and some men, who had already experienced his violence, left. But not Triunfador. Standing behind his improvised bar, he stared at the sheriff and said nothing.

“You!” Bogardus shouted. “I told you to get out of here.”

“This is my place,” Triunfador said, with heavy rising emphasis on the final word.

“This is my plAAAAce!” Bogardus mimicked. He glared at the young man who was defying him, and with a sudden reach of both hands, grabbed Triunfador, jerked him across the bar and threw him out the door and into the gutter.

That afternoon he returned with a court order directing him to padlock the place, and when Triunfador, against his father’s admonition, ripped off the padlock, a passing farmer hurried in to the sheriff’s office to report, “Well, Sheriff, them Mexicans tore down your paper. We got trouble.”

Bogardus and three assistants speeded out State 8 and wheeled their vehicles to the door of La Cantina. “You son-of-a-bitch!” the sheriff bellowed. “Who in hell do you think you are, defying a court order?”

He ordered his deputies to haul the revolutionary off to jail. Next morning Triunfador was arraigned before the judge in Greeley, a man who owned a farm himself and recognized insurrection when he saw it. Leaning across the bench, he admonished Triunfador: “Young man, you’re a visitor in this country and you must obey our laws. You have no license to operate a house of amusement, no license to play music and certainly no license to sell either candy or soft drinks. Furthermore, you have no right to be on that property, and you have defied a court order. Sixty days.”

During his time in jail Triunfador did not know that he was being defended by a robust woman he had never met. Father Vigil, outraged at the sentence, did what he could to arouse public indignation, but he was ineffective, and one night in a shack at Little Mexico he confessed his impotence: “The judge won’t listen. The sheriff is a bully. The newspaper laughs at us. The priest is more useless than the Anglo ministers. Not even the professors in Greeley will attend. Doesn’t anyone in Colorado care?”

From the shadows a workman said, “Charlotte Lloyd. One day she brought my children clothes.”

“Mrs. Lloyd!” some of the others muttered, and next morning Father Vigil stood before the castle, knocking at the great oak door.

After a while a formidable woman greeted him, Charlotte Lloyd, almost seventy now but still straight as a soldier. As major stockholder in a famous ranch, she was a woman who accepted no nonsense, for she had proved that she could handle a man as easily as a horse. She had a weather-beaten face and a hearty laugh. “Come in,” she said abruptly, leading him into a large room from whose walls the heads of stuffed moose and buffalo stared down. “What nonsense are you up to?” Before he could answer, she asked, “Aren’t you the one who sticks darning needles into people?”

Father Vigil was confused, but he sensed that he was in the presence of someone who might help, so he persisted. “I come to you about injustice,” he said.

“World’s full of it,” Charlotte replied.

“The Mexicans.”

“Never had much use for ’em,” Charlotte said. “What’s happening to ’em now?”

He burst into an impassioned series of questions: “Is it fair to work our people all summer and then force them to sit like puppets in the dark all winter? Are we not entitled to a cantina where we can have music?”

“Everyone’s entitled to music.”

“Is it fair that we have nothing, nothing?”

“Doesn’t sound fair at all. Be specific.”

He was, and the more he said, the more furious Charlotte became. “This is outrageous,” she fumed, reaching for her hat.

With Father Vigil, she visited the Roman Catholic priest in Greeley, the editors, the licensing board in Denver, the sheriff, and wherever she went she asked one simple question: “Aren’t you ashamed of what you’ve been doing?”

When word of Charlotte Lloyd’s interference reached the beet farmers, there was consternation. “Father Vigil’s putting her up to this,” the farmers said. “He’s preaching revolution.” So the farmers started a backlash. “Charlotte Lloyd is nothing but a damned fool. Not a brain in her head. But this Father Vigil. He’s got to go.” Petitions were circulated, calling for the deportation of the priest to Mexico, and when the signatures were presented to the judge, he summoned Father Vigil to the bench; unfortunately for the cause of justice, Charlotte Lloyd came along, and a rather hectic legal scene ensued.

JUDGE: You know, Father Vigil, you’re only a guest in this country and Sheriff Bogardus has the power to send you back to Mexico if you don’t behave.

CHARLOTTE: He absolutely doesn’t.

JUDGE: Are you contradicting this court?

CHARLOTTE: Father Vigil’s a citizen of New Mexico. He’s an American.

JUDGE: He is?

CHARLOTTE: His ancestors have lived here for the past four hundred years. I chanced to look up the ancestors of Sheriff Bogardus and they came here in 1901. If anybody gets thrown out of this country, maybe it should be Sheriff Bogardus.

JUDGE: May I ask, Mrs. Lloyd, are you a citizen of this country?

CHARLOTTE: Give up my British passport? Are you crazy?

The judge leaned back. It was incomprehensible that Father Vigil, this unlovely man who stuck thorns in people, should have been an American longer than anyone else in his court that morning. Emig, Osterhaut, Miller—they had been serfs on the Volga at a time when the Vigils had already occupied New Mexico and southern Colorado for centuries. It was most confusing.

The judge denied every request Charlotte made, and Triunfador was ordered to close his cantina for good. When the decision was promulgated, Charlotte appeared to accept it with good grace, and she commiserated openly with Triunfador. The judge and sheriff, pleased with having fended off this difficult Englishwoman, started to terminate proceedings, whereupon Charlotte asked innocently, but in a loud voice, “By the way, Harry, who owns those shacks?”

A hasty recess was ordered, during which the judge explained in a whisper, “You know damned well, Charlotte, that Mervin Wendell built them. Now his son owns them, but it would be most embarrassing if this appeared in the paper. Philip does many good things in this community. Matter of fact, he’s promised us a new library.”

“Then I will expect him, this afternoon, to sell me for one hundred dollars the shack where Triunfador has his cantina, and I propose renting it to Triunfador for one dollar a year. I’m sure you and the sheriff can convince him to sell. Otherwise, I take my story to the Denver Post.”

“That’s blackmail,” the judge protested.

Charlotte smiled, and in this roundabout way Triunfador Marquez obtained his license to operate a cantina, which became, as the Anglo farmers had predicted, a center for Mexican agitation. Core of the place was the phonograph with its stack of records imported from Old Mexico. Could the beet farmers have heard the songs which emanated from this creaky machine, they would have been terrified, for they were the songs of revolution. One of the most popular was “La Adelita,” that heart-pulsing ballad of the woman bandoleras:

Oh, if Adelita ran off with another,

I would follow her by land and sea.

If by sea, in a ship of war.

If by land, in a military train.

Many of the songs spoke of the brave years when men caroused across the state of Chihuahua aboard the military trains. Tranquilino often sat in his son’s establishment, listening to ballads which told of this excursion or that:

I boarded the train in Chihuahua

Seeking the war of Pancho Villa

But there was that girl in Durango.

Ay, me! I am not a brave one, not me.

But the song which gave deepest gratification to the Mexicans was “The Corrido of Pancho Villa,” for in its verses the Mexicans won the war of 1916. They simply kicked hell out of the inept Americans under General Pershing:

On February twenty-third

President Wilson sent six thousand Americans

Into Mexico to hunt down Pancho Villa

Through all the hills and mountains.

The bouncy ballad, sung by a double quartet of male voices, told in many stanzas how Villa tantalized the Americans, leading them into one ambush after another until they had to retreat in ignominy, leaving Villa triumphant.

Valiente, valiente Pancho Villa!

Conquistador y sus Dorados!

It was some time before Tranquilino confessed that he had been one of the Dorados, the golden ones who had swept across Chihuahua and Sonora and Durango. When the ballads were playing on the phonograph he would close his eyes, and whenever the phrase “el tren militar” occurred, he would open them and smile at the men watching him, and they would nod out of respect, knowing that he had been on such trains and they had not.

Oh, brave Pancho Villa! How you fought!

How you drove the hated Yanqui from our land.

We adore you and your Golden Ones.

Oh, Pancho Villa, teach me how to fight.

Sheriff Bogardus kept a close watch on La Cantina and made arrests whenever singers grew raucous or someone threw a pop bottle onto the road. He suspected that the new amendment forbidding alcohol in the United States was being flouted, and numerous raids were made. Whenever news of a shipment reached him—for bootleggers driving down from Canada to deliver their goods to homes in Centennial sometimes dropped a few bottles off in Little Mexico—he ignored the sales in town and arrested Triunfador, and on Monday morning the Clarion would carry a sarcastic notice:

Triunfador Marquez, the would-be mayor of Little Mexico, was arrested again last Saturday night, dispensing bootleg alcohol of a deadly variety from his esteemed emporium. He is now in jail.

Those frequent arrests of his son caused Tranquilino much anxiety, for although he had been a considerable revolutionary in Old Mexico, in Little Mexico he had always been an exemplary citizen, and he often upbraided his son.

“Last time you were in jail,” he said to Triunfador, “Sheriff Bogardus, he came to see me and asked, ‘Why can’t Triunfador be a good Mexican? Work in summer and keep his nose clean in winter?’ ”

During his stays in jail Triunfador was frequently visited by Father Vigil, and to his surprise he found the Catholic priest to be a man of profound vision. He foresaw a day when Mexicans in states like Texas and Arizona would come into their own, finding a satisfactory level of life, neither high nor low but just. To prepare for that day he started teaching Triunfador how to read and gave him primary-school texts imported from Old Mexico. In them the prisoner learned about Mexican history and the traditions of his land. In more advanced books he studied how the dictator Porfirio Díaz had sold every worthy item in Mexico to the highest bidder, whether he be Mexican, Spaniard, Yanqui or German. He was delighted when he read of General Terrazas, dictator of Chihuahua, for his father had told him of how they had burned the Terrazas ranches, and he began to comprehend what it meant to be a Mexican.

He had no desire to return to the land of his birth; indeed, he barely remembered it now. It was like a bad dream, for he recalled something his father had told him: “On the trains you could tell which of us had worked in America del Norte, for we had shoes.” It was better in Colorado, infinitely better than in Chihuahua. He loved America and its relative freedom and the opportunities it gave people. He could even borrow money from the soda-pop distributor, and he had bought on credit the lumber for the extension to his cantina.

But some things that happened in America enraged him, like the incident in October 1923. That summer his father and mother had worked for a Russian named Grabhorn, and they had slaved extra-long hours at the beets. When the crop was harvested, Tranquilino had served as beet-fork man—“the widow-maker” this fork was called, for it pulled a man’s guts out, lifting thirty-two pounds of beets and tossing them high into the wagons—but he had justified the extra effort by explaining that when the check arrived on November 15, he would have additional money which he would give to Triunfador to help enlarge the cantina.

On the last day of October, Mr. Grabhorn made the telephone call. All the Anglo farmers knew how to do this—Immigration Service Denver Colorado. You didn’t have to give your name, either. You just whispered in the phone, “I’m a loyal American and it turns my stomach to see what’s happening to this country. At the Rudolf Grabhorn farm in Centennial seven miles east on Weld 17, two Mexicans are working without proper papers, Tranquilino Marquez and his wife Serafina. They ought to be sent back to Mexico, where they belong.”

So three or four days before the checks arrived, immigration officials swept down upon the Grabhorn farm, arrested Tranquilino and his wife, and shipped them back to Mexico. Grabhorn, of course, escaped paying their wages and pocketed the money they had so painfully earned. Come next March, he would hire a different family. As for Tranquilino, once he and his wife were thrown across the border at Ciudad Juarez, they were free to slip upstream a few miles, wade across the Rio Grande, and walk right back to Centennial, where they could hire themselves out to some other farmer.

This extraordinary procedure was condoned because neither Colorado nor national laws cared to face up to the problem. Colorado farmers were allowed to employ wetbacks, as they were called, without fear of punishment, but the wetback himself was illegal, and could suffer both punishment and deportation. Whenever the matter came before the legislature, it was quickly brushed aside on the grounds, “We need them.” They were needed, but they were not wanted, and it was for this reason that evil tricks like the one played on Tranquilino Marquez were allowed.

When Triunfador heard of how his parents had been abused, he stormed about his cell. “They were robbed! And the government helped!” He vowed he would gain revenge, but it was then that Father Vigil spoke most persuasively. “You must subdue your passions, my son. You must control them and bend them to your purpose. There is simply no good in raging or cursing or making threats. The whole judicial system is contrived against us, and there is no way we can fight back. What we can do …”

“Yes! What in hell can we do?”

“We can submit ourselves to the goodness of God.”

“I don’t believe in God.”

Father Vigil said quickly, “But you must believe in the compassion of the Lord Jesus Christ. When a powerful man submits himself to the love of that great soul, he gains power.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Gain control of yourself.”

Triunfador considered these words for several days. He knew very well what Father Vigil was proposing—that he, Triunfador Marquez, on the day of his release from jail forgive the sore injustice Rudolf Grabhorn had visited upon his family, forgive the persecutions of Sheriff Bogardus and submit himself to the discipline of Jesus Christ.

“I’ll do it,” he told the priest.

“I knew you would.”

He left the jail on Saturday afternoon, and that night he fasted. On Sunday morning he rose early and went to the fields north of Little Mexico, where a large crowd had gathered. There he stripped to the waist and allowed Father Vigil to insert cactus thorns beneath the sinews of his back while his sister Soledad stuck four into the skin about his temples. Bleeding from many places and shuddering with pain, he reached down and lifted a heavy cross, a replica of the one upon which Christ was crucified, and with it upon his bleeding back he started the long walk to his Golgotha.

He had covered only a short distance when a group of Anglo farmers rushed into town with the frightening news: “Those goddamned Mexicans are at it again. They got some horse’s ass lugging a cross up the hill.”

Sheriff Bogardus and his men hurried out of town and up State 8 to where the procession was winding up a hill much like the one Jesus had climbed in Jerusalem. With clubs swinging, they smashed their way into the heart of the crowd, where one deputy slugged Triunfador and dropped him to the ground. As he struck the earth, the thorns cut deeply into his forehead, bringing forth much blood, but he did not feel the pain.

“I am one,” he muttered to himself. He did not know what this meant, nor what its spiritual ramifications might be, but he sensed that from that stricken moment he was going to be a greater man than he had ever been before.

And he was. He attained that marvelous stability that some men achieve when they find a balance between heaven and earth. He held himself taller, and could look the sheriff in the eye, or the judge, or the Anglo ministers who belatedly were trying to do the right thing, and meet them as an equal. People in the district began to say, when a problem arose, “Ask Triunfador. He has a good head on his shoulders.”

When his father and mother made their way back from Old Mexico, he had a shack prepared for them, but before he would permit them to take work with any beet farmer, he sought advice. Waiting in the door of the cantina till he saw a new Dodge coupe coming down the road from the Venneford Ranch, he ran onto the highway and flagged it down. “Mr. Garrett,” he apologized to the driver. “I need your advice.”

“You in trouble again?” the Venneford’s manager asked.

“Not me, Mr. Garrett,” Triunfador said, “my father.” He reported what had happened last October with Rudolf Grabhorn, and Garrett said, “I can believe it. He’s a mean-hearted son-of-a-bitch.” When Triunfador asked what farmer could be trusted, Garrett said, “Klaus Emig. Honest as they come.” So that year the Marquez family not only worked for Emig, but got paid too.

One thing worried Triunfador—his sister Soledad. She was sixteen now and very beautiful, with black eyes and long braids. When he was occupied with other things she sometimes supervised the cantina, playing records for the customers, and men were beginning to grab at her, and he wondered what might happen to her. In a place like Little Mexico she could find herself in serious trouble.

And then, one hot July day while Triunfador was absent picking up some freight at the Centennial railway station, the Venneford Dodge pulled up before the cantina. This time it was not Beeley Garrett but a tall, good-looking younger man who walked into the café and introduced himself. “I’m Henry Garrett. Father wanted to know if the old couple took the job at Emig’s?”

“They did,” the slim girl behind the counter said suspiciously. “It’s hot. I need a cold drink.”

“We’re not bootleggers,” the girl snapped.

“I meant a Coke,” Garrett apologized. “Or something.” As he drank he listened to the phonograph. “That’s a saucy tune,” he said. “What is it?”

“ ‘Serian las Dos,’ ” she replied. “Just a popular song.”

Two Mexican girls were singing a series of lilting words, and apparently they were nonsense syllables, because when Garrett asked Soledad what they meant, she listened for a while, then shrugged her shoulders. “That stuff? Who can say?”

Garrett bent down to hear the words more clearly, for he knew a little Spanish, and when he looked up he saw Soledad smiling at him. “That part says, ‘Girls today no longer know how to eat tortillas. As soon as they marry a fellow they want white bread and butter.’ ” She laughed at the song, and in that moment Henry Garrett acknowledged how barren his life had been, how devoid of laughter, and he lingered to hear the music, the first Anglo ever to have entered the cantina as a customer.

In these years the Venneford Ranch continued as one of the best-run cattle operations in the west. Jim Lloyd, who knew as much about Herefords as any man then alive, gave overall supervision, but the day-to-day management was left to Beeley Garrett, who had a solid sense about ranching, and to his son, Henry Garrett, who was learning fast. The ranch didn’t earn as large dividends as the majority stockholders in Bristol might have wanted, but as Garrett assured them in each annual report, “The value of land continues to rise, and by holding on to your acres, you become richer every year. Also,” he added, “the herd is constantly improved and there continues to be a lively demand for Venneford bulls.”

Charlotte Lloyd spent most of her energy supervising the refurnishing of her plaything, the Venneford castle, and at one time astonished her neighbors by importing from France an enormous organ, which she installed in the circular room where she did her entertaining. Her parties, to which she invited guests from Denver and Cheyenne, recapitulated the grace of the old Cheyenne Club. She remained an Englishwoman, on a temporary visit to the west, likely to return home at any moment, and she followed carefully the education of her many nieces and nephews as they fumbled their way through the better English schools.

She delighted in having them visit her in Colorado, and nothing pleased her more than those days when she would bundle a flock of children into carts and drive north to Line Camp Four, where she had been so happy with two such different men, Oliver Seccombe and Jim Lloyd. “I first saw this lovely place in 1873,” she told the children. “It looked much as it does today, and I had a cart with two horses, just like the one you have.”

She was seventy-two years old, but her enthusiasms ran as high as they had been when she first saw these splendid plains and decided to make them her own. Only one irritation marred her supervision of the ranch. She and Jim Lloyd were beginning to argue about the Herefords, each in his own strong-minded way.

Charlotte saw these noble animals, which had after all been developed not far from her home in the west of England, as the finest exemplars of the animal kingdom, and she was proud of exhibiting them at stock shows around the nation. She therefore wanted them groomed and polished and fattened, in order for them to make the most spectacular appearance. She imported breeders from Herefordshire and instructed them to produce a more compact animal, tighter-boned and more appealing in the head.

These men did wonders. Taking the original Crown Vee Herefords, a rangy breed, they bred them into more handsome forms which won ribbons across the country. “A Crown Vee” became synonymous with the best, and Charlotte delighted in attending shows, dressed in fine tweeds, and having her photograph taken with this great bull or that champion steer. She was sometimes called “The Queen of the West,” and wherever she went, there was lively talk in which the values of the Hereford were defended against lesser breeds like the Angus and Shorthorn.

Jim Lloyd was not enthusiastic about displaying his Herefords in the hope of winning ribbons. He had begun to suspect that the whole stock-show routine was a presumption, which, if persisted in, would destroy the Hereford breed. He especially doubted the qualifications of the visiting English breeders, who in his opinion were leading the Herefords into every wrong direction.

“They’re breeding the animals too small,” he complained. “They’re so taken by the beauty of the head, they’re forgetting the strength of the body. I like my range animals big and brawny and tough and able to forage for themselves in bad winters. I don’t want a damn beauty queen, and I’m terrified of these blue ribbons because they encourage ranchers to do all the wrong things.” When he reflected on the matter he had to confess that what really irritated him was a trivial thing; the English breeders, who were doing a great job copping prizes, called their animals Her-ri-fuds in three fancy syllables instead of the honest Texan Hur-ferd. It galled him when a breeder exulted, “Our Herrifuds won another blue rosette at Kansas City.” What Jim wanted was some big, burly Hurferds tending to the breeding duties on the far reaches of the ranch.

He lost the argument. In October 1924 one of the English breeders heard from a friend near Bristol that the next in line of great bulls had been born, Emperor IX, and whoever got hold of him would probably dominate the breed for years, the way Anxiety IV and Confidence had done in their generations.

It seemed unlikely to Jim that a man could look at a bull calf four months old and make such a prediction, but he approved when Charlotte decided to buy the little fellow at the astronomical price of nine thousand dollars. And when Emperor IX came down the ramp after his long trip from England and stared left and right, like a real-life emperor occupying a defeated kingdom, he won the hearts of everyone.

He was a stunning animal, a prepotent bull with the precious capacity of stamping only his better qualities on his progeny. He spent half the year servicing cows brought to him from distant ranches, half in the show ring winning more blue ribbons than any other bull of the twentieth century. He became a gold mine for the Venneford Ranch, and as Charlotte pointed out repeatedly, “He’d never have earned a penny for us unless he’d established his credentials in the show ring. Every time he wins another ribbon, his fee goes up.”

But Jim was noticing something that others had missed. Emperor IX, splendid though he was, kept producing bulls which were slightly smaller than he, and it seemed to Jim that these bulls were in their turn producing wonderful-looking offspring, but just a fraction of an inch shorter than he thought they ought to be.

He brought this to the attention of the English breeders, but they dismissed him almost with contempt. “What we’re after is a shorter, more compact animal who’ll produce better beef. Emperor IX is exactly what we needed, and his performance excels anything we hoped for.”

The Emperor and his offspring continued to dominate the shows, continued to glean blue ribbons for their owners, and no one was happier with the results than Charlotte, for they justified her long faith in the ranch. She was certainly the premier stockwoman of America, and if Jim Lloyd had been interested in playing that game, he could have been one of the leading stockmen, but he withstood the lure of the show ring and never had his photograph taken with his winners. He preferred tending the everyday Herefords out on the range. “I’ve never seen anything prettier in my life than a line of white-faces walking over the brow of a hill at dusk as they come in for a drink.” He had hoped for a son who might share his instinct for range cattle, “the real ones that make the beef,” but his only child was a daughter who cared little for the ranch.

He had looked to Beeley Garrett for support, but Beeley was preoccupied with the financial problem of keeping a large ranch solvent; where the cattle were concerned, he surrendered to Charlotte. Henry Garrett, Beeley’s son, who would take over the ranch one day, was simply a businessman with little sense of cattle, so the protection of the one thing that made ranching viable, the animals, was left to Jim.

He decided to force a showdown with Charlotte and her English advisors, for he considered it criminal to take a splendid beast like the Hereford and consciously diminish the very characteristics which made him great … and do this merely to satisfy a few opinionated judges. As they gathered at the corral to look at the bulls, he asked, “Can’t you see we’re ruining the breed?”

“Emperor IX is the top Hereford in history,” Charlotte snapped. “Emperor IX is a runt. The day will come when scrupulous cattlemen will breed out of their herds every strain of that bull.”

“What nonsense are you talking?” Charlotte demanded. Turning to her breeders, she sought their support.

“The general judgment is that Emperor’s saving the breed … bringing it into conformity to modern necessities.”

Jim took a deep breath, not because he felt any need for courage but because he felt a sudden lack of air. “I despise watching nature altered to suit a passing fad. I don’t like seeing a breed I’ve loved …” He felt that loved might sound ridiculous in such context, but upon reflection, judged it to be the word he wanted. “I can’t stand by and watch a breed I’ve loved messed up. I think we should leave animals alone … and the land too …”

He paused to take another deep breath, for he was losing his temper. “I do feel most deeply, my dear Charlotte, that for this ranch, to send forth a generation of dwarfs …” He grabbed at the corral gate, failed to reach it and crumpled in a heap. From the earth he tried one last time to protest, but words did not come, and before they could carry him back to the castle, he was dead.

After the funeral, Emperor IX won blue ribbons at Denver, Kansas City and Houston, confirming his domination of the field. He came to represent the sleek conformation the judges had decided to sponsor, the compact look that new-type ranchers wanted for their herds. It was acknowledged that he was the bull of the future.

It seemed that with the death of Jim Lloyd, who had protected the land, luck left the region. The previous year, 1923, had been a disaster for dry-land farmers, for only six inches of rain had fallen, which meant that even the best fields produced only about two bushels of wheat an acre, not enough to pay for the plowing, and land-poor men like Earl Grebe now found they had barely enough money to pay their store bills.

In 1924 things were no better, for even though nine inches of rain did fall, the drought of the preceding year showed its effects, and the good fields produced slightly under four bushels an acre.

A sense of defeat spread through the area, for if such conditions continued, many farmers would be driven out of business. They would not produce enough to make interest payments on their mortgages, and banks would foreclose. For the lack of a few dollars of ready cash, a man stood to lose a farm worth many thousands. It was a crazy system, one devised by idiots and administered by bankers, but it was the way America was run, and the individual farmer could do nothing about it.

Now the dreadful word mortgage struck at the heart of the Grebe family. In the good years, when money was plentiful, they had bought a half-section from Mervin Wendell and had considered themselves clever in talking him into accepting a thousand-dollar mortgage at five percent per annum.

“It’s like finding money,” Earl had explained enthusiastically. With four hundred acres planted to wheat which sold at two dollars a bushel, the Grebes had a gold mine, and when the cash came in they had built what the brochure called “their mansion.” They had also paid off their mortgage, but as soon as this was done Mervin Wendell came by with the good news that he could sell them an adjoining 320 acres. He also extended them the courtesy of another thousand-dollar mortgage, but when the papers were drawn he did not restrict it to the land he had just sold; he applied the mortgage to the entire farm.

Now, in the bad years, they owed Mervin Wendell’s son Philip one thousand dollars at a time when there were simply no dollars in circulation, and certainly none coming their way. The interest was only fifty dollars a year; if they continued to pay that, nothing bad could happen to them; they did not have to reduce the principal. But pay the interest they must, even though the debt had been contracted when dollars were plentiful and was coming due when they were rare.

“It’s so unfair,” Alice Grebe told her family as they gathered to discuss the threat which hung over their home. “He switched the mortgage from the land, which we could give back if we had to, onto the house, which is our very life blood. Earl, you must do something about this.”

He visited Philip Wendell in his offices near the railroad station and explained the error. “Your father must have meant to put the mortgage on the land,” he said, but the new head of Wendell Ranches and Estates proved adamant, polite but adamant.

“I’m quite sure, Mr. Grebe, that my father never made such a careless mistake. Times being unfavorable, you look back upon the event in a way which best supports your interests. I’m sure rain is coming back to these parts, and all you have to do is pay off the mortgage, and this unpleasantness will be forgotten.”

That night Earl Grebe assembled his family and spoke to them in harsh, grave words. His wife Alice was thirty-five years old that autumn and seemed prepared for whatever trials might lie ahead. She was still a tense woman and her energy had not flagged. Their son Ethan, an intelligent boy who duplicated many of the virtues of Mrs. Wharton’s hero, was twelve years old and eager to work. Their daughter Victoria was a tall, quiet girl like her mother, but their son Tim, two years old, was a boisterous little fellow. He sat on his mother’s lap as the discussion began.

“He means to take this farm from us,” Grebe said. “I could see it in his eye. In everything he did.”

“Was he so harsh?” Alice asked.

“He’s already foreclosed on three farms, Alice, and he intends making us the fourth.”

“He wouldn’t transfer the mortgage to the land?”

“He looked me in the eye, never blinking, and said he was sure his father never made such a mistake.”

“We should have had a lawyer,” Alice said, biting her lip to keep from whimpering.

“I did not think you required a lawyer when dealing with an honest man.” He was sweating, and Alice said, “Victoria, make us some lemonade.”

“Sit still! There will be no more lemonade. This family is going to eat grass if necessary, but we’re going to accumulate that thousand dollars and pay him off. Our life depends on it. Alice, you start. Tell us right now how you can save money.”

“Oh, dear!” she said falteringly. For some time now she had been conducting her home as frugally as possible. She was about to say that no further savings could be effected, but then she saw her husband’s stern visage, the goodness of his character shining through, and she knew that she must do even more.

So she began to enumerate the little things that could be done: “We’ll buy no clothes for anyone. No toys for Christmas. No candy. We’ll eat a lot of mush, the way we did in the soddy. And we don’t need curtains or brooms or anything like that. I’d feel happier, Earl, if you gave me no money at all, because I do grow careless. You buy the things and handle the accounts.”

Each of the two older children stated what he or she would surrender, and when Earl’s turn came he said harshly, “I’ll sell the two bay horses …”

“Oh, no!” his wife protested. “They’re the heart of the farm.”

“I must sell them,” he said.

The prospect of Earl’s selling the two bays was more than Alice could face, and she broke into tears, dropping her head onto the table and shuddering as she had done years ago. Her shoulders contracted for some moments, and Earl said to Victoria, “Comfort her,” and he continued with his account of what expenditures he would eliminate. When he finished, his wife said weakly, “Earl, for God’s sake, don’t sell the horses. We don’t have to give at church. Victoria can …”

“We will all bear down, Alice. We will pay back this unjust debt. The fault is mine, but we must all share it.”

So the Grebes went onto a regimen so spartan that only their neighbors who were in similar straits could comprehend. They were encouraged by two unexpected events. Vesta and Magnes Volkema, who had never allowed a mortgage on anything they owned, came voluntarily, and Vesta said, “We have some savings. If that miserable bastard tries to sheriff you out for the mortgage money, we’ll pay your interest.”

“I’m glad to see you’re cutting back expenses, Earl,” Magnes said. “If we get any rain at all, you’ll get out from under.”

The other appreciated visitor was Dr. Thomas Dole Creevey. At his own expense he was visiting the dry-land areas hit hardest by the two-year drought, and he was not even close to surrender. At the school auditorium he said in his low, powerful voice, “Don’t lose heart! Don’t listen to the ranchers when they gloat ‘We told you so!’ Never in the history of this state have we had three bad years in a row. Men! Look at the statistics! In region after region across this nation two bad years have always been followed by five good ones. Look at the facts!”

He became his old evangelical self as he scribbled the reassuring figures on a board. Montana, two bad years followed by six good ones. North Dakota, two very bad years followed by five excellent ones. Utah, where they kept careful records, the same. “Five years from now,” he promised them, “I’ll be lecturing somewhere in Kansas, and I’ll write on the blackboard, ‘Colorado, two bad years in 1923–24, followed by five excellent ones.’ It’s the law of nature.”

He visited Earl Grebe’s farm, making numerous borings with the earth auger, and he proved that down deep a residue of moisture existed. “This soil is ready for snow, Earl. You have your surface well prepared to accept it. For God’s sake, when it comes, disk it at once and trap the moisture in here. You’ve a great farm, Earl, and you’ll see thirty-bushel wheat again. On that I give you my solemn promise.”

And two days after he left, snow came, and then more snow, and then more, until it was clear that the drought had ended. Vesta Volkema, who was becoming quite rowdy as she grew older, told the Grebes during a family dinner, “Our little bastard Creevey warned God to get off his ass and get some snow moving,” but before the two families started to eat, Alice Grebe asked if she might open the meal with grace, and the other five bowed their heads as she began, “Dear Lord, from the depths of our hearts we thank …” She could go no further, for she fell into a fit of weeping and Vesta had to take her from the room for a while.

The moisture came and the crops were saved, but in the late spring of 1925 something happened which went unnoticed by everyone in town except Walter Bellamy, who was now the town postmaster, the land commissioner’s office having had to close down. It was in May, on a cold, blustery day such as spring often brought to Colorado, and he was looking toward the mountains when he noticed an unusually heavy gust of wind sweep eastward across the prairie. It came from such a direction that its path lay along furrowed fields, with never a windbreak or a strip of unplowed land to temper its force, and as it moved, it began to catch up from the earth small grains of soil and collections of tumbleweeds and shreds of Russian thistle which had come in with the Turkey Red, and as it whipped through Line Camp, Bellamy thought that if such winds became frequent, especially during years with little snow, they might do real damage.

Increasingly apprehensive, Bellamy convened a meeting of the district farmers and invited an expert from the Agricultural College in Fort Collins to explain how they might protect their fields from either wind or rushing summer rains by plowing in a different pattern, but fifteen inches of rain had already fallen this year, with more expected, so no one paid much attention to what the professor said. Bellamy did insist, however, that the new tenant who was farming the land he had acquired east of Line Camp start to plow in the new way, and although they grumbled at “fancy-pants ideas of men who never farmed,” they did agree to plow along the contours, but since there was neither wind nor flood, they accomplished nothing, and in the fall of 1925 Bellamy saw to his disgust that they had reverted to long, straight furrows, uphill and down. Any force left in his argument vanished that October when his tenant won the plowing contest with a set of the straightest, evenest furrows a judge ever saw.

On December 31 Earl Grebe had the satisfaction of carrying seven hundred dollars in cash into the office of Philip Wendell. “That leaves only three hundred dollars on the mortgage,” he said with a certain grimness.

“I told you last year we’d get rain,” Wendell said evenly. “Next year looks just as good.”

“If it is, we’ll burn the mortgage.”

“I’m sure you will,” Philip said. “My father had great respect for you and Alice.”

Why the Grebes and families like them now fought to stay on the land was a mystery. They could see that Line Camp had reached its peak and was beginning to die. In 1924 the local newspaper had folded, and even in the good year of 1925 two major businesses closed down. The tall white grain elevator stood half empty and the railroad which was supposed to have reached the town went into bankruptcy without laying a yard of track.

Alice Grebe, who had done so much to make the town habitable, was among the first to realize it was doomed, and twice she begged her husband to pull up stakes now, sell out and move to California. But men like Grebe could not bring themselves to admit defeat. “Look, Alice!” he pleaded. “I own more than a thousand acres. We have this good house. When things turn around …”

Alice suspected they might never turn around. For reasons she could not have explained she saw that prairie towns such as Line Camp must become vacated ghosts populated only by gusts of wind, yet she was powerless to act. “We’ll make the best of it,” she said with little hope, for she saw that the Grebes and the Volkemas had, through vanity and hope, locked themselves onto a land that was dying and to a town that was vanishing. At the end of 1925 two more stores shut down, and the population fell below one hundred.

Imprisonment at Line Camp proved especially bitter to Vesta Volkema, who watched her vision of California vanish in dust. Once at the Grebes’ she came close to tears, confessing, “Magnes was right that time when he wanted to sell our damned acres for twenty-five cents each. Hell, we’d have been better off if we’d given them away.”

“You still could,” Alice said excitedly. “We all could. Just give them away and get out.”

“No,” Magnes said. “You get trapped on the land. It reaches out and holds you.”

Then, as though to test the courage of the immigrants, the years 1926 and 1927 turned even more brutal, and farm income dropped so low that sometimes it seemed as if the Grebes would starve on the rich land they owned. For two long years they went to not one picture show in Greeley, nor to any church supper, for they were too poor to contribute a covered dish. They were paupers, worse off than the meanest family in Little Mexico, and Alice sometimes wondered if the providential years they had known when they first broke the sod would ever return.

Yet even during these painful years her love for her husband increased, and she bore him two more children, a third son and a second daughter, and the burden of providing them with a reasonable start in life fell solely upon her. She went days without food to ensure their getting the nourishment they required. She dressed them well, too, making over the clothes which had been worn by their brothers and sisters. She did much sewing, often working until her eyes were heavy, and she spent hours playing with the youngest three in the old soddy, telling them of former days and of how the family had worked together.

Her only consolation was the church, and it was a powerful support. Sometimes when the minister brought in a speaker from the college at Greeley, and Earl was too dead-tired to attend, she would walk by herself along the back path to Line Camp, and ask pertinent questions, and then return home alone, carrying only a small flashlight. Occasionally Mr. Bellamy arranged meetings, like the one in which an actress from Denver reported on the New York plays, and on the very special one, The Great God Brown, in which she had played a role. By popular demand, she recited some of the scenes from that play, a bright, lovely young woman, and Alice thought how proper it would be if Mr. Bellamy were to marry such a girl.

And then in 1928 everything conspired to help the Grebes: there was ample rain, much snow and a warm spring. Earl made an astonishing forty bushels to the acre, and it sold at $1.32 a bushel. The mortgage was paid off and every Grebe child received a new outfit, with Ethan, now sixteen, getting his first long trousers.

One evening that autumn, the Volkemas and the Larsens came over to dinner, and after the meat was taken away but before the dessert was brought in by Victoria, Earl Grebe cleared his throat, rose and asked his wife to produce the bottle of champagne. When the glasses were filled he asked Ethan to bring in a bucket, and when it was placed before him on the table, he brought from his pocket the mortgage paper and a box of matches.

“The Grebe family has been through a dangerous time,” Earl said. “We might have lost our farm except for the support our neighbors gave us, but all that’s past.” Striking a match, he held the flame to the bottom edge of the mortgage, and everyone at the table watched with fascination as the dangerous paper burned.

When it was ashes, Alice Grebe lifted her glass and said, “From here on out … only good times … for all of us.”

Early spring on the great plains is the most hellish season known in the United States. Wet snow falls and for days the thermometer growls at the freezing point, now down, now up. No blossoms grace the roadside and such birds as do brave the weather huddle in the grass, their feathers ruffled, for April and May can often be fifteen or twenty degrees colder than February and March.

It was a miserable time, and the woman from Utah who wrote the song about springtime in the Rockies obviously lived on the western slope. Only the red-winged blackbird gives the period any distinction; even the hawks try to avoid the cold. There is much truth in the saying, “Colorado has only three seasons—July, August and winter.”

In 1931 in Colorado a new misery was added. During the last week in March a strong wind began blowing from the northwest, and it continued for five days. There had been winds before, but this one was ominous, for it kept low, hugging the earth, as if it intended to suck from the soil what little moisture had been deposited by the inadequate snows that year. Walter Bellamy, studying the direction and force of the wind, predicted, “If this keeps up another week, it’ll be like losing seven inches of rainfall.”

It did keep up. What was worse, it started a howling sound which echoed across the empty plains. It was low and mournful, like the wailing of a wounded coyote, and it persisted day and night. The decibel strength was never high; it was not a roaring wind that deafened, but it had a penetrating quality that set the nerves on edge, so that at some unexpected moment a farmer, or more often his wife, would suddenly shout, “Damn the wind! Doesn’t it ever let up?”

In June the howling subsided, and residents of the lonely homes across the prairie looked back with wry amusement at the way they had responded to it. “It really set my nerves jangling,” Jenny Larsen confessed. “Wasn’t it strange, the way it kept up, day after day?” Alice Grebe, to whom this question was directed, said nothing, for there had been days in May when she thought she might go out of her senses, and she was afraid.

The men spent June in drilling their augers into the soil to calculate just how much damage the wind had done, and their conclusions were pessimistic. “If we don’t get one more good gully-washer,” Magnes Volkema predicted, “we’re going to be in real trouble.”

None came. Instead, in late June the wind returned, this time with terrible consequences.

Alice Grebe was working in the yard, trying to ignore the whistling when she happened to look west toward the mountains, and there, coming directly at her, was a monstrous cloud forty thousand feet high and so wide it filled the sky.

“Earl!” she cried, but he was in the far fields turning a mulch in case rains came.

As she watched the onslaught, she felt happy on the one hand, for the rain would drench the fields, but on the other, she was afraid, for the winds might be violent. “Don’t let it do much damage,” she prayed.

Her prayer was unnecessary, for this was not a damaging storm. There was no rain, no wrecking winds, but it did bring something Alice Grebe had never seen before: a universe of swirling dust, a blackness that blotted out the sun, a choking, all-pervading silt that would seep through every wall and window.

When the mighty duststorm, silent and terrifying, first engulfed her, she thought she would choke. Spitting dust from her dry lips, she ran indoors to protect her children, and found them coughing. She sat with them for two hours, two of the strangest hours she had ever spent, for although it was midday, the sky was dark as night, and a weird gloom covered the earth.

Then the storm passed, leaving piles of dust everywhere, and after a while Earl returned to the house, spitting and stamping his feet. “That was a wild one!” he said as he entered the kitchen.

“What was it?” Alice asked in real perplexity.

“Just a duststorm.”

“It was terrifying. Like a tornado with no wind.”

“There wasn’t much wind, was there?”

That night the neighbors gathered to discuss this phenomenon, and Walter Bellamy drove out to meet with them. “We may be in for some real trouble,” he said. “I received a newspaper from Montana yesterday. They’ve had a succession of such storms.”

“Oh, dear, no!” Alice cried involuntarily.

“Now, Alice,” her husband said. “If it’s not hail and it’s not a tornado, I guess we can survive.”

That became questionable when the next towering storm rolled in, vast black clouds of dust sweeping even the redwings and the hawks from the sky. It was a paralyzing storm—no wind, no moaning, no rainfall, just the terrible presence of dust seeping into every crevice, irritating every membrane.

“I cannot tolerate this,” Alice whispered to herself, but she refrained from showing her fear lest she frighten the children.

“What’s happening, Mommy?” her five-year-old daughter asked as dust invaded the kitchen.

“It’s a storm, dear, and storms pass.”

This one took five hours to go by, and when it was over, the citizens of Line Camp were shocked at its consequences, for in outdoor areas as much as nine inches of dust had accumulated against walls and fences, and in the houses a film of dust perhaps an eighth of an inch thick had seeped in through walls and closed windows.

Nothing had escaped. Vesta Volkema said, “I opened my refrigerator door and there was dust on everything.”

That summer there were nine such storms at Line Camp. Never had the residents experienced such dreadful occurrences, and men began each day by looking westward. At dawn the sky would be clear. At eleven there would be a faint shadow below the mountains. By three in the afternoon the great, silent, towering form would creep through the sky, bringing the dust of Wyoming across the land, picking up the dust of Colorado and carrying it into Kansas.

It was toward the end of this year that a macabre story started circulating: if a man murders his wife during a duststorm, there will be no jury trial, because his act will be understandable.

Many farm women did find it impossible to live with the dust, and several in the Line Camp and Wendell area had to be carted off to mental institutions, for it was no easy thing to sit alone in some remote cabin and listen to the soft moaning of the wind and feel the choking dust come creeping at you, covering your shoes and your stockings and lying ever so lightly on your apron and choking your nose, and all this happening in broad daylight, except that it seemed like gloomy night.

“Save me! Save me!” the Lindenmeier woman had screamed as she ran four miles across the prairie. Like a wild woman she burst into Vesta Volkema’s kitchen, and Magnes had to tie her down and haul her in to Greeley.

In every respect the year was a disaster. Even Earl Grebe, acknowledged as the best farmer in the district, could make no more than six bushels to the acre, and he had to sell it at thirty-three cents the bushel, about half the lowest previous price in this century.

“At that price, I’m giving it away,” he told his family, but before they could comment, he added, “What else can we do? We can’t eat it all.”

In 1933 no farmer in the district harvested a single bushel of wheat, and the same applied in 1934. In farmhouse after farmhouse there was not a penny of income during these two years, and some came close to starving. Farmers killed their livestock for lack of fodder to give them, and then found no market for the meat because no one had money to buy it.

And the duststorms kept returning, one after another, in high, billowing grandeur, sweeping the world before them. Dust became a constant presence that choked and strangled. Children wore masks over their noses as they went to school, and many farm wives wore caps night and day to keep the dust from their hair.

But even in the third year of the dreadful affliction, farmers whose lives were being slowly blown away were able to make grisly jokes. Visitors to Magnes Volkema’s farm were astonished to find his plow resting upside down on top of his barn. “It’s the only way I can earn any money,” he explained. “As the fields blow out of Colorado, I plow them for their new owners in Kansas.”

Vesta said, “What little money we do get we spend on cinnamon.” This seemed so preposterous that the people to whom she said this stepped back to study her. “We mix it with the dust and make believe we’re eating cinnamon toast.”

At the store in Line Camp they told of the chickens who thought that what was covering them was snow and froze to death. Another farmer saw a hawk flying into the storm with a red-winged blackbird going ahead to brush the dust out of his eyes. When it came time for one farmer to pay his mortgage, he complained, “I don’t know where to go. The paper is in Philip Wendell’s safe in Centennial, but my farm’s in Nebraska.”

This problem of mortgages, however, was not amusing. For the lack of forty dollars to cover interest, many a farmer lost land worth thousands, and the government seemed powerless to prevent such tragedy. Nineteen farms in Line Camp were foreclosed by Philip Wendell; sixteen others were sold by the sheriff to pay back taxes, sometimes amounting to only a few dollars. By legal trickery, often of the most venal sort, some of the hardest-working men and women of America had their land stolen from them. Of the nineteen farms foreclosed by Wendell, the average price he had to pay per acre was sixteen cents.

In most respects 1934 was the year of hell. The wheat crop was zero. At the Grebe farm, that rich and wide land which had supported its people so well, a family of six children and two adults had to live on sixteen dollars a month, and there were many days when they ate only one meal. The younger children lacked milk and vitamins. The older children were in the midst of their education, and it was cut out from under them; sometimes their mother would cry herself to sleep as she contemplated the ruin of their bright young lives.

But she grieved most for her second son, Timmy, twelve years old and at that age when a boy entering adolescence discovered so many things he wanted to do. And there was not a penny he could have … nothing … nothing. “Oh, God!” she wept one wintry day as she watched him swinging off to school. “How can this nation allow such things to happen?”

And then, in the fall of the year, Mr. Bellamy, tall and thin as ever, heard some good news. Calling together all the deprived young boys of the area, he told them about an exciting development in Denver: “In the January stock show there’s to be a new event: ‘Catch It and You Can Keep It.’ ”

“What’s that?” Timmy Grebe asked.

“It’s not for sissies,” Bellamy warned. “Twenty boys … just like you … you’ll go into the big arena with thousands of people watching. And all you’ll have is a halter attached to a ten-foot rope. A bugle will sound, and they’ll release ten calves. And you boys, if you’re lucky enough to make the trip, will chase those calves, and wrestle them to the ground, and the boy who fixes his halter around a calf’s head and leads it away unaided will win that calf.”

“He will?” Timmy asked.

“He’ll bring the calf home, and feed it, and next winter he’ll take it back to the stock show, and if it wins the judging, it’ll be auctioned, and the money, lots of it, will be his to keep.”

Eleven boys sat silent, dreaming of such an event, but Mr. Bellamy dampened their ardor somewhat by saying, “So the big problem is, where can we borrow some calves to practice with?”

The local families had none, but one of the boys had a logical suggestion. “Mrs. Lloyd helps people,” and all agreed to ask her for the use of some of her calves.

Six of the boys piled into Mr. Bellamy’s car and drove to Venneford, where Mrs. Lloyd met them formally in the room with the moose heads. “To what do I owe this pleasure?”

It had been agreed that Timmy Grebe would make the presentation, so he coughed, sat forward in his chair and explained about the calves. “A splendid idea!” the severe old woman said, and forthwith she summoned Henry Garrett and told him to deliver four sturdy calves to the Grebe farm. “Boys should be active,” she told her visitors as she served them sandwiches and cinnamon buns. As she watched them wolf the food she thought, My God, are they really so hungry?

With the four Crown Vee calves Bellamy taught his boys how to tackle the frisky animals, wrestle them to the ground and slap the halter over their noses. It was difficult work, and since a boy had to have a certain weight in order to keep the calf down, it began to look as if Timmy Grebe, a year younger than the others, might be too light. “He might better wait till next year,” Bellamy told Alice Grebe, but she pleaded that he be allowed to try.

“You can’t imagine what this has done for him, Mr. Bellamy.”

“I can guess. Well, if he wants to try …”

The next night Timmy did not appear for family dinner, but his parents could guess where he was. They had seen him heading for the Volkema farm, and knew that he would be in a stall, wrestling with a young steer twice the weight of the calves that would be used.

Crash! The steer slammed him against the boards, but up he rose to try again.

Slam! The steer flashed his hindquarters, sending Timmy spinning around the wall, but he regained his feet, hitched up his pants and tried again.

The steer butted the twelve-year-old into a corner. With his right hand in the animal’s face, Timmy backed him away.

Then, with a flying tackle, Timmy wrapped himself around the steer’s head and neck, and for a wild two minutes boy and Hereford rolled and slammed around the stall. They made so much noise that Vesta Volkema came out with a lantern to see what was happening, and when she saw Timmy bleeding from several wood burns, and the astonished steer shaking its head wildly, trying to throw the boy clear, she started to laugh and jabbed the Hereford with a pitchfork, causing it to back into a corner, where the boy could safely let go.

“Get home with you!” she said, after satisfying herself that no bones had been broken.

He walked home through the November evening as content as he had ever been. Above, in the clear sky, he saw Orion, battle-bound between the Dog Star and the Bull, and as he watched, he heard geese from Canada flying south, signaling to one another as their multiple Vs wandered back and forth. When he entered the kitchen, dark spots and bruises about his face, he told his mother, “Maybe I won’t catch me a calf, but I sure ain’t gonna be scared.”

In January, Mr. Bellamy selected Timmy and the Larsen boy for the contest, and drove them to Denver in his own car. The city was magnificent, with official buildings decorated with red, green and orange lights, and stockmen clustering about the Albany Hotel, and the famous rodeo champions from states as distant as Texas and Oregon strutting through the lobbies.

There was nothing in America quite like Denver’s National Western Stock Show, for here the quality of the west’s prime industry was determined. It had a daily rodeo, of course, but it also had hardnosed judgings of Herefords and Black Angus, and how a man’s bull did in such contests affected the success or failure of his ranch. Men would borrow their wives’ curling irons to dress their animals and use shoe polish to make hoofs glisten. Morning, afternoon and night there were shows, and races and exhibitions and judging and baking contests, but that year the thing most people wanted to see was the Catch It, Keep It contest.

As the twenty boys waited in the dark bowels of the arena, like gladiators of Rome about to face the animals, a long-time rodeo hero saw little Timmy and talked with him. “You’re the youngest and the lightest, aren’t you? I’ll bet I know what you have in mind. Run like hell for one of the smallest calves. But that’s not a good idea, because all those older boys will dive for the little calves too. And they’ll knock you galley west. So when the whistle blows, dash down there and grab the biggest, because the other kids will leave him alone.” He stared at Timmy. “You ain’t scared, are you?”

“I ain’t scared.”

“Then grab for the biggest.”

Timmy listened carefully, and it was fortunate he did, for as the rodeo hand had predicted, everyone made a jump at the smaller calves, and big boys muscled the younger away. Timmy, in the meantime, had made a flying leap at a rowdy Hereford, and to his delight, bore the surprised animal right to the ground. How much smaller the calf was than the steer he had practiced with in the Volkema barn—this was going to be easy!

But it wasn’t. No Hereford calf was ever easy to push around, not even for a grown man, and as Timmy lay with the calf’s head locked in his arms, he found to his dismay that whereas he could keep the Hereford pinned down, it required all his weight to do so, and he had no possible chance of applying the halter. Oh, Jesus! he prayed. Let me hold him.

But he felt himself growing weaker and the white-faced calf growing stronger. The other nine calves had been led away and now everyone in the auditorium focused on the gallant fight between the little boy and the rambunctious calf.

“Hold on, kid!” the crowd began to roar, and the rodeo hand slipped along the barrier and shouted, “Throw your leg over his neck! Kid! Throw your leg!”

With a titanic effort Timmy tried to get his left leg across the calf’s neck, but the sturdy Hereford was too strong. Slowly, slowly the struggling animal began to break free. Oh, Jesus! the boy pleaded. Don’t let him get away. I need him!

But the inexorable weight of the calf was too much, and to the groans of thousands of adults, Timmy felt the calf break loose and scamper free. He lay in the dust while a bigger boy tackled the rebellious white-face and led him off.

“Tough luck, kid!” a man shouted as Timmy stood up, dusted himself off and started the long walk to the exit, without a calf.

He went into a corner of the waiting area and bit his lip to keep from crying. He stuck his little jaw in the air and kicked at the wooden siding. I wasn’t scared, he told himself, but in this he found no consolation. He’d had a calf, but it had escaped.

“If you want to cry,” a voice said, “let her go.” It was the rodeo hand, and he sat with Timmy and told of the many times he had been knocked against the wall and lost the prize.

They were sitting there when a roar went up from the arena. The rodeo man, fearing that one of his friends had been hurt by a Brahma bull, ran to the entrance, stood there for a while, then walked back to where Timmy sat, still biting his lip.

“It’s you, kid,” the rider said. “It’s you they want.”

“Me?”

“Yep. Get yourse’f out there.” And he led Timmy back to the arena, where another roar rose from the crowd, while he stood bewildered, still holding back tears.

Then he heard the loudspeaker booming and felt the searchlights playing in his eyes. “Because you put up such a terrific fight, Timmy Grebe, Charlotte Lloyd of the Crown Vee Hereford ranch wants to award you a calf, anyway.” A wild cheer rose from the crowd as a spunky white-face was led in. “Take him home, Timmy. You earned him.”

As the little boy led the calf across the arena thousands of people cheered, and when he got to the exit the rodeo man was waiting to congratulate him. “I’m going to call him Rodeo,” Timmy said.

Timmy’s victory gave the trouble-stricken community of Line Camp something to talk about, but it brought no money into the Grebe household. Salvation was to come from a most unexpected quarter. The driver of the school bus was stricken with a hernia; he had been holding down three jobs to feed his family. Ethan Grebe was given the job temporarily; it paid almost nothing, but it did pay cash, and with this the family could buy more food.

It hurt Alice and Earl to have to take from their son money which should have gone for a college education, but as Earl told Alice, “The times are so mixed up, we have to adjust to everything. One of these days we’ll be growing wheat again.”

But not that year. The duststorms continued, and Timmy had to build a special lean-to in order to protect Rodeo from being smothered. Fences were especially vulnerable. The terrible force would send a horde of tumbleweeds across a field; they would be imprisoned by some fence, and when the next storm hit, the weeds would catch so much dust that the fences would vanish and cattle would roam for a score of miles.

What affected Alice Grebe the most was the constant noise—the awful moaning of the wind as it swept across the prairies. On some days its high intensity drove her to a frenzy, and Vesta proposed that she be sent to Denver, to get her off the prairie before she had a breakdown. Earl would have wanted to do this but the Grebes had no money. They literally had no money beyond the few dollars that Ethan brought in, and during the summer recess they did not even have that.

And then Alice did reach the breaking point. It was a very dry August day, with the earth parched and breaking, when she heard her youngest daughter, Betsy, making a curious sound. She ran into the yard, not able to guess what might be happening, and saw to her horror that a huge rattlesnake had come down from the buttes seeking water. He was only a few feet from the child, a monstrous snake almost six feet long and very thick, with an evil-looking head and a black tongue which kept probing the area ahead. His skin was scarred and dark, and his rattlers were rough. As Alice watched, he moved toward the baby.

She would never be able to explain how she found the courage, but she grabbed a hoe and thrust herself in the space between her child and the rattler. With awkward chopping strokes, she hacked away at the huge serpent, driving it back and cutting it whenever it tried to attack her. With a fury she had never known before, she fought the snake for some minutes, countering its thrusts with savage swipes of the hoe, then, after one swift strike of the venomous head, which almost caught her on the leg, she cut it in two and watched in horror while the halves writhed, as if each had a life of its own, as if together they might yet attack both her and the child.

She stood leaning on the hoe, unable to move. She could hear the prattle of her child behind her, but she could not take her eyes off the dead snake. She was still standing there like a statue when Earl came in from the fields.

“What’re you doing, Alice?” he asked as he approached her.

She could not answer … just stood there. And then he looked down and saw the severed snake, as hideous in death as it had been in life.

“Oh, my darling!” he whispered, lifting her like an infant into his arms.

He put her to bed, and that night Vesta Volkema said, after she had tended her, “Earl, I’m going to take her to my place. She’s at the end of her rope.”

“What will I do about the children?” he asked.

“What will we do about anything, goddamnit!” she shouted. “Your wife is destroying herself. You look after the children.”

They were not left alone. The next day Victoria called out from the window, “Car coming!” and up the lane came a large black auto driven by an elderly woman whom the girls did not recognize. When it jolted to a halt, the woman climbed out, dragging two baskets. “I’m Charlotte Lloyd,” she said. “Police told me my friend Timmy Grebe was here without a mother.”

“We have a mother,” Timmy said.

“Of course you do,” Charlotte said quickly. “But she’s gone away for a while, hasn’t she?” Before the boy could answer, she embraced him and said, “You’re champion bull-dogger, aren’t you?” and from one of her baskets she produced a large plate of brown sticky buns.

She acted as if she were a member of the family, taking from her baskets things the children had not seen for years. Among her goodies was a tin of canned oysters, which the youngsters were afraid to try. “Got to try everything,” she said, showing them how to place the strange food on crusts of bread. For three weeks she visited the farm daily, tending the children and entertaining them with stories of strange places she had seen.

She was eighty-three years old that summer, but as lively as when she had first crossed Nebraska on the shooting expedition with the grand duke. She was still interested in the land and chided Earl Grebe for plowing the way he did. “You have a man right here in Line Camp who knows the answers,” she said.

“Who?”

“Walter Bellamy. Heard him give a fine talk in Centennial last winter.”

“He couldn’t plow a straight line,” Grebe protested.

“Exactly, that’s his virtue,” she said, and she arranged for Bellamy to come to the farm and invited the Volkemas and others to listen as the postmaster explained again what the error had been.

“From the mountains to the border of Nebraska—you have one unbroken sweep of plowed land. The wind gets started as it comes down off the hills and begins to pick up the harrowed soil. It gets bigger and stronger and all the time it picks up more of our soil, until half the state is in the air.”

“What should we do?” Magnes asked.

“Tie the soil down. You’ve got to tie it down.”

“How?”

“Never plow in a straight line. Never plow with the fall of the land. Plow across it. Never plow all the land. Leave strips of grass, and for God’s sake, burn your harrow. Leave the soil in clumps too big for the wind to lift.”

The farmers began to see that he was right, that if an endless corridor of plowed and harrowed land lay in the path of the wind, it could roll that land up, mile after mile, and carry it away like a thief. But if the topsoil were tied down, one way or another, the wind could blow over it as before, and accumulate nothing.

“This land will come back,” Charlotte insisted. With her own money she arranged for a symposium to be held in Line Camp, and in her black car, with the Grebe children to accompany her, she drove in to Centennial to pick up the featured speaker. The farmers who had emigrated from Ottumwa were astonished to see him, for it was Thomas Dole Creevey, now an old man who had lived to see the desolation he had fathered. Few men would have had the courage to come back to the scenes which had disproved their cherished theories, but he did. He wanted to see for himself what had gone wrong; he wanted to identify the corrective steps to be taken by those who followed.

He was not so fat now, but his ill-fitting clothes were even more unkempt. He stood before the men he had misled and told them, “I gave you ten principles, and only one was erroneous, the seventh. ‘Plow at least ten inches deep. Then disk. Then harrow.’ All wrong. What I didn’t foresee were the great winds. In every other respect my theories were correct, and future years will see these plains teeming with wheat.”

“What should we do now?” Earl Grebe asked.

“Pray for rain. Throw away your harrows. Never have an endless chain of plowed fields that the wind can get at.”

“How deep should we plow?”

“Three inches, maybe four. But keep the ground covered.”

“Is your farm at Goodland producing?”

“It’s blown away,” Creevey said. “When the rains return, it will return.” He said that in spite of everything that had struck the plains, he still believed in those great words which God had delivered to man during their first meeting in Eden: “Replenish the earth and subdue it.” He concluded, “To do this we must study the earth more than we have. We must be more careful to attune ourselves to its eternities. If at periods it produces great winds, we must learn how to live with them.” He assured his listeners that the plains were not intended to be a desert and would again be rippling with wheat.

Charlotte Lloyd drove him back to the station in Centennial, where he boarded the train to meet with other drought-stricken farmers. On the way back to Line Camp, when her black car climbed to the top of a hill from which she could see the seared plains that had once been a part of the Venneford Ranch, she felt a great dizziness, so that the plains and sky became one, and she lifted her foot from the gas pedal, allowing the car to drift slowly off the road and into the parched fields, where she was found next morning, her hands still gripping the wheel.

The unabated optimism of Dr. Creevey did little to help the men whose farms were being sold for taxes, and Philip Wendell was picking up some terrific bargains at forced sales. Farms were going for a dollar an acre … fifty cents an acre … and in some cases, for a used car that would enable the owner to reach California.

At the Grebe farm there was one bright note. In November, Alice returned much improved. Vesta Volkema’s salty attitudes had teased her back to reality, and with Ethan driving the school bus again, at least a little money was coming to the family. In fact, Earl said that things were beginning to look up.

Then, in March, a blizzard swept across the prairie and snow piled the roads; what was worse, a gale bearing no snow howled down from the mountains. Farmers shouted to their wives, “Ground blizzard!” This meant that what snow had fallen would now whip across the open plains, engulfing anything it encountered.

Ethan Grebe had already started on his afternoon drive north delivering children to Wendell when the blizzard struck, and there was no logical way for him to escape it. He thought of turning and trying to run back to Line Camp, but the road was too treacherous for that. He therefore plunged ahead, satisfied that he had enough gasoline to keep the children warm even if he were forced to pull up for an hour or two.

But then the winds whipped a fearful burden of snow across the prairie and within minutes the windward side of the bus was banked with snow. The wheels were unable to move.

Ethan kept the motor running for three hours, trusting that farmers at either Line Camp or Wendell would launch rescue parties. He led the children in singing and made them huddle together. As the gasoline gauge dropped and night fell, it became obvious that pretty soon the bus would be completely buried in snow, with no possible way of keeping the children warm.

Biting his lower lip, he looked at the nineteen frightened faces and made his decision. “I know where we are,” he said slowly. “Three miles to the Rumson farm. They’ll bring help. Now, Harry, what are you going to do while I’m gone?”

“Mind the door,” he said.

“That’s right. No one must leave. Now you wait here.”

And he was off into the heart of the ground blizzard. Nineteen children were in his care and he must do everything within his power to save them, whether it seemed a reasonable act or not. He had not been out in the storm more than three minutes before he realized that this blizzard was overpowering. It was not abating, and the winds roared at him with such force that he could barely move, but on he plodded. He walked three awful miles, and by the time he reached the Rumson gate he was so near death that he could not force it open, but with his last strength he created a banging, and a dog heard him and barked, and the children were saved.

President Roosevelt himself sent a message to the Grebes, praising them for having reared such a son, and Alice treasured it, but often when she read it she wondered why the government did nothing to help the farmers that produced such young men. “They don’t grow by accident, you know,” she told Mr. Bellamy.

In the months following Charlotte Lloyd’s death, decisions had to be reached concerning the Venneford Ranch. The majority owners in Bristol were suffering from the world-wide depression as much as anyone else, and they had no surplus funds to sink into a distant venture which had never paid substantial dividends. They had watched their ranch shrink from five and a half million acres to something like ninety thousand, and with every shrinkage their American managers had assured them, “With a tighter operation we can begin to show real profits,” but such profits had never been forthcoming.

In 1887 it had been the great blizzard and in 1893 the nationwide panic and in 1923–24 the first drought. In 1925 they had written to Beeley Garrett, who was managing for them:

It seems that the western cattle business is always going to prosper next year, if only conditions remain stable, but stable conditions have not been known since the industry began. Every messenger we have sent from Bristol to Venneford has returned with gallant tales of how exciting the life is on the range, and what a great bull Emperor IX is, and we have concluded that this immense industry is run for the pleasure of cowboys and bulls, and to the disregard of investors.

Now, in this summer of 1935, they were fed up. They wanted to sell their remaining holdings and were offering them at a bargain. Charlotte Lloyd had been the principal stockholder in America, so it was natural that her heirs should be offered first chance to buy, but here a problem arose. She and Jim had had only one child, a daughter Nancy, who had married the grandson of Major Maxwell Mercy, the congressman. Nancy and Paul made a dashing couple, but they had been somewhat reckless, like old Pasquinel, from whom Paul was descended, and in attempting to fly over the Rockies in a small plane, they crashed near Blue Valley and were killed.

They left behind a frail daughter named Ruth, who was cared for by her grandmother, Charlotte, and it looked for a while as if the awkward girl might never marry, for her nervous mannerisms discouraged men. However, the year before Charlotte died, she took the Garrett boy aside one day and told him bluntly, “If you ever expect to manage this ranch, young Henry Garrett, you’d be well advised to marry that girl,” and he did. To show her approval, Charlotte had given the young couple a wedding present: her shares in the ranch. In her will she gave them the money to buy the stock still owned in Bristol, and when it was delivered to the castle, Beeley Garrett said, “For the first time in Venneford history this ranch is controlled by Americans, who should have controlled it from the beginning.”

Beeley continued as ranch manager, but the pressures of drought and wind and depression were telling on him, and he often indicated that he wished to retire from management and move to Florida. In this he was supported by his wife, Pale Star Zendt, five-eighths Indian and as lovely as all the women of her family. She had grown to dislike northern winters, and Beeley told her, “We’ll stick it out a few more years. Maybe in that time Henry and Ruth will become more solidly united than they seem now. You can’t run a ranch with a wobbly couple at the head.”

In the fall of 1935 Beeley faced a difficult decision. With cattle prices the lowest he had ever seen them, he had to make up his mind whether to ship a load of steers to Chicago in the blind hope that he might earn even a dollar a head profit on them, but his chances were not bright. His accountant submitted the disheartening figures:

The best Herefords America has ever produced are selling in Chicago for $14 a head. Our figures show that we spend $11 a head to grow them. This means a profit of $3 each, which is not bad for these times. But for us to ship the animals to Chicago costs us $6.10 a head, so that for every Hereford we sell, we lose $3.10. And the more we sell, the more we lose.

Garrett could not believe that this preposterous situation could long continue. He remembered good years like 1919, when even a mediocre Hereford brought $58.75. In a relatively bad year like 1929 he had sold his steers at $55.35. The precipitous drop of the 1930s was unconscionable, and the nation must be going crazy if it thought that cattlemen could continue to market their beasts while losing money on each head. To sell choice steak at twenty-three cents a pound was ridiculous, and he felt certain that prices to the rancher would soon rise.

He therefore decided to take the gamble and send two hundred prime head to Chicago, hoping that by the time they reached the slaughterhouse the price would be up to $30.00, where it ought to be. He talked some of his neighbors into taking the same risk, and a cattle train was put together with animals from as far away as Fort Collins and the ranches south of Cheyenne.

As soon as word leaked through the district that a cattle train was being assembled, the participating stockmen were besieged with offers of assistance from young men in the area. Beeley Garrett, with his headquarters not far from Centennial, where the train was forming, was especially vulnerable. From dawn till midnight awkward young men came knocking at his door, cowboy hats in hand: “Hear tell you’re sendin’ some cattle east. I’d sure like to help.”

“Your name.”

“Chester—Otto Emig’s grandson.”

“I knew your grandfather. Have you tried the Roggen people? Otto had good relations with them.”

“Nothin’ out there. They sent me here.”

“I’ll take your name, Chester. You’re a fine young man and maybe we could use you.”

One after another the young cowboys came to the door, begging for a job that paid nothing and for which they had to pack their own food. Of course, they would get a chance to visit Chicago, but what allured them was that after the cattle were delivered, each cowboy received a free ride home on a Pullman.

But it was not this enticement that drove Dr. Walter Gregg, a young professor at the college in Greeley, to apply for a job. “It’s imperative that I get to Chicago,” he pleaded with Garrett. “To attend a professional meeting.”

“Is it that important?”

“It’s crucial. They’ve asked me to read a paper. It could make all the difference … in my career, that is.”

“If it’s that important, why not take the train?”

“We’ve absolutely no money.”

“I’d like to help, Dr. Gregg, but the idea of a college professor … riding a cattle train …”

“Please,” the man begged. “The leaders in my field will be there. My whole future depends on this.”

“I’ll take your name, Professor. You may hear from me.”

On the day when the decision had to be made, Beeley was visited by an unlikely candidate, Jake Calendar’s son Cisco, a thin, taciturn young man with yellowish hair. He was probably the best cowboy among the applicants, but he had a surly attitude which irritated Garrett.

“Hear you’re lookin’ for a couple of hands to ride the cattle cars,” he said in a mumbling sort of way.

“It’s the other way around, young man. A lot of people have been here applying for the job.”

“Add me to the list,” he said insolently, not bothering to take the cigarette from his mouth. Beeley felt an almost uncontrollable urge to punch him, but he refrained because Calendar had about him an air of absolute authenticity. He was obviously someone who loved the range and knew animals. He was a challenge, and for reasons Beeley could not have explained, he felt drawn toward the youth. Perhaps it was because Calendar represented the real west, a throwback to the great days.

“Tell you what,” Garrett said on the spur of the moment. “I’ll take you. Now you run over to the college and find Professor Gregg and tell him the train’s leaving tonight at six.”

“Ain’t got a car,” Calendar said.

“Use the pickup.”

He watched as the young man slouched over to the Ford, banged open the door and jiggled the gearshift. In a moment the pickup roared, the wheels spun in gravel and the cowboy was off to the college.

At the train Professor Gregg was so profuse in his thanks that Garrett felt ashamed. What a rotten time, he said to himself. College professor with no money to travel.

He was not surprised to see that Dr. Gregg carried a large suitcase, but he was certainly astonished to find that Calendar was lugging along a paper bag with one clean shirt and a razor, plus a large guitar. He had never thought of the Calendars, those outcasts of the prairie, as musical.

Professor Gregg, of the sociology department, and Cisco Calendar, aspirant guitarist, were able to board the cattle train because of the 36-Hour Law. This required any cattlemen shipping livestock a considerable distance to provide attendants to water and exercise the animals if the total trip exceeded thirty-six hours.

This law had been forced through legislatures by animal-protection societies whose agents submitted reports of what had happened in the horrendous days of 1910 through 1928. Then cattlemen would shove huge numbers of animals into unventilated cars and ship them off to Chicago. If all went well, the cattle train reached the stockyards within thirty-six hours, which was about the maximum time cattle could survive without water. But if for any reason the train had to be sidetracked, it might lay over unattended for two or three days in blazing sun or cold wind, and the cattle, with no water and no chance to move, would die by the score.

In accordance with the 36-Hour Law, Dr. Gregg and Cisco Calendar would ride the caboose and during a normal trip might never see the animals they were supposed to be tending. The railroad had every incentive to get the train into Chicago on time, and the evil old habit of sidetracking without regard to the welfare of the animals was forbidden. Of course, if an unavoidable delay occurred, then Gregg and Calendar would become important, for they would have to unload the animals, see that they moved about and provide them with water.

“Nineteen trips out of twenty, nothin’ happens,” the brakemen assured the two guardians. “Sit back and enjoy the ride.”

There were nine men in the large caboose, with sleeping bunks for five. There were four regulars in the train crew and five volunteers like Calendar. It was around this somber young man that the others gathered, for when he unlimbered his guitar and started singing, everyone listened.

He had a reedy voice that spoke of western campfires, and he knew all the songs the old-time cowboys had sung—“Aura Lee,” “Buffalo Gal,” “Old Blue,” “Old Paint”—and the two new songs which were so popular on the radio, “The Last Roundup” and “Wagon Wheels.” But the songs that captivated the men were two that scarcely seemed to be songs at all; they were fragments of human experience, deep and moving.

The first told of a wrangler who allowed that there wasn’t a horse alive he couldn’t ride. So the boss offered him a ten-spot to try his luck with a strawberry roan, a mean-looking cayuse with a battered frame:

“He’s got spavined old legs and small pigeon toes,

And a pair of pig eyes and a long Roman nose,

He’s got little pin ears, they’re all split at the tips,

In the middle he’s lean but wide at the hips …”

The wonder of this song was its intimate knowledge of men and horses, the way it spoke lovingly of actual life on the range, and Cisco brought out all the inner essence of the relationships. This was a real cowboy trying his luck with a real horse, and in the end it was the horse that won.

“When my stirrups I lose and also my hat,

And I starts pullin’ leather as blind as a bat,

And he makes one more jump, he is headed up high

Leaves me settin’ on air way up in the sky.”

“I think that must be the best western song I ever heard,” Professor Gregg said; he was interested in the west and intended one day to write about it. He asked Cisco to sing the words again and wrote down passages in a notebook. “It carries its own credentials, a song like that,” he said, and Cisco had no idea what he was talking about.

The trainmen wanted Cisco to sing their favorite, “Red River Valley,” and when he struck the first chords they leaned back in approval. It was a sentimental song, the lament of a cowboy who had known for a short time a girl who must leave the valley. It was hard to know how a young fellow like Calendar could comprehend the longing that an older man felt about a woman, but he made the song his. Again, he was not a singer but a man who had worked in the valleys and who had met an attractive woman, perhaps the only one he had ever known:

“Come and sit by my side, if you love me.

Do not hasten to bid me adieu.

Just remember the Red River Valley

And the cowboy who loved you so true.”

No one spoke. Each listener was silently comparing the song against his own experience, and no additional comment was necessary.

After a while Dr. Gregg said, “You ought to sing professionally.”

“I aim to.”

“You ought to see what you can do in Chicago.”

“I aim to.”

“I’m really very excited about your potential,” the professor said. “Your voice has an exceptional quality … an authenticity.” To these words Calendar made no reply whatever, so the professor continued: “To be truly successful, Cisco, you have to visualize what it is you want to convey. You’ll be singing to people who’ve never seen a campfire. You ought to get yourself a Stetson … Texas-style boots … a red bandanna.”

“I got no money for such,” Cisco said.

“I know a place in Chicago, they might give it on credit,” Gregg said. “In art you’ve got to give yourself every advantage.”

The train braked to a halt and voices outside the caboose shouted, “This goddamn train is infested with hobos.” And the crew piled out with baseball bats and started knocking drifters from beneath the cars, and Gregg looked out the window and saw one man run past with blood streaming down his face, and for a moment the running man looked up in an appeal for help, but Gregg was powerless.

When the train resumed its trek eastward he could not eat. The four crewmen who ran the caboose were not evil men, but when they had gone after the hobos they had swung their bats with actual glee, as if knocking helpless men over the head were sport. It was sickening.

Calendar was the only one who understood what had happened to Gregg, and he went to him with half a sandwich, but the professor still could not eat. “What’s the matter?” Cisco asked. “You never see a man clubbed before?” He took Gregg’s hand and passed it over his head so the professor could feel the knobs.

“These are hateful times,” Gregg said.

“We’ve had worse,” Calendar replied, and he resumed singing.

In the thirty-fourth hour the train pulled into the stockyards, and Dr. Gregg for the first time saw for himself just how hateful the times really were, for when the Venneford Herefords were unloaded and auctioned next day, he found that the handsome animals fetched only $13.87 each.

When word of the sale got back to Centennial, and the various ranchers discovered that they had literally given their animals away, earning no profit whatever for their years of labor—the baling of hay, the wintry rides, the watch over pregnant cows, the dusty roundups—a sullen grief settled over the community. Men grew stubborn and swore revenge against a system that had defrauded them so sorely.

Then came the wintry day in November 1935 when the Grebe family had to admit they could no longer hold on to their farm. It was true that they had paid off their mortgage, but they owed an accumulation of back taxes; the bank was dunning them to repay a small loan they had been forced to make in order to buy food; and the garage would no longer give them gasoline on credit. The debts were trivial—less than a thousand dollars—but paying them was impossible, totally impossible. Earl Grebe did not have one dollar, and with no gasoline for his tractor, he would be unable to produce crops even if the duststorms did abate.

On some days the family ate so little that their survival was a mystery, and if Vesta Volkema had not brought them food, the Grebes would have suffered grievously. But this generosity created its own problem, and one evening when Alice saw her neighbor coming across the prairie, she burst into tears and protested to her husband, “Oh, Earl! It’s so terribly unfair. Vesta’s able to help us because she stole her land and saved her money. We bought ours honestly and used up all our funds.”

Her husband would not tolerate such an accusation against the good-hearted Vesta. “She’s the one person in this world we can trust,” he said. “If these dreadful things are happening to us, it must be God’s will.” And when Vesta reached the kitchen she found the Grebes and their children kneeling in prayer.

The family was prepared, therefore, when Sheriff Bogardus rode up to nail the notice to their front door: “Sheriff’s Sale for Taxes.”

“What will it bring?” Grebe asked.

“If the auctioneer has a good day … if people come out … farms like this have been bringing … maybe fifteen hundred dollars.”

“Jesus!” Grebe cried. “After I pay the debts, it leaves me almost nothing.”

“That’s the way it is, these days,” Bogardus said.

Surprisingly, it was Alice Grebe who showed fortitude in this crisis. She had stayed indoors when the sheriff delivered his message, but she knew what was happening. The land her husband had cultivated with such care was lost. The soddy in which they had known so much love was gone. The new house with its bright curtains would be no more. The animals would be sold and the implements for which they had saved so strenuously. What was worse, the children would be forced to leave the only home they had known. They would gather their things and leave this place …

“Oh, God!” she whispered to herself before Earl entered the kitchen. “What will happen to that good man?” She felt that she could adjust to this defeat, but what would such a catastrophe do to him?

She moved to the sink, pretending that she was doing dishes, so that she could appear composed when he came into the room, for she was determined to give him support, but when he walked into the kitchen his feet dragged across the linoleum, the slogging drift of a man totally defeated.

She threw herself into his arms and collapsed in tears. “We’ve worked so hard,” she sobbed. “We’ve never wasted money.” She kissed him tenderly and led him to a chair. She poured him a cup of coffee and said gently, “I wonder if I dare take the sign down before the children see it?”

“No,” he said firmly. “It’s the law. We owe the money and there’s no way out.”

“How can a nation support a law which takes away a man’s farm? Especially when it’s the nation that’s gone wrong, not us?”

“The bank has to be paid.”

“But it’s the banks that refuse to circulate their money.” She was not argumentative, merely bewildered by this savage turn.

When the children came home and saw the notice they started to cry, and she felt it her responsibility to shield them from as much pain as possible. “We’ll live somewhere else,” she said brightly as she prepared toast and cocoa. From the bare shelf she took down her last jar of jam and they had a mournful picnic, after which she suggested that they all walk down to the Volkemas’ to discuss what must be done.

“Put on your scarfs,” she said. “We don’t want to freeze.” At this unfortunate word, Victoria remembered Ethan and started to cry, but her mother caught her by the hand and said, “Now, Vicky. Watch the children and we’ll go across the fields.” But as they went past the barn Timmy broke away and ran to where Rodeo was fattening and he flung his arms about the handsome Hereford and stayed there till his mother dragged him away.

“I won’t give up Rodeo,” he mumbled.

“There’s no need to,” she said quietly. “We’ll find a way.”

What a sad procession they formed as they walked across the beautiful low hills that separated them from the Volkemas’: Earl in front walking with slow tread; Alice behind; then Victoria and the two girls; then Larry and in the rear Timmy, looking back now and then toward his steer. Winter hawks accompanied them in the blue sky and to the north they saw a small herd of antelope.

When they reached the Volkemas’, they broke the news abruptly. “We’re being sheriffed,” Alice said matter-of-factly, and Vesta broke into tears.

Not Magnes. He wanted to fight, to destroy something. He started cursing, and when his wife shushed him, he ignored her and cried, “I know the man we need. Jake Calendar.”

“You stay away from Jake,” his wife warned.

“If anybody has the courage to stand up to these bastards, Jake does.”

“I don’t want to go to jail,” Grebe protested. “Losin’ the farm’s bad enough.”

“It’s got to be stopped!” Magnes shouted. Grebe tried to quieten him, but his sense of outrage was so great that no reasoning had effect. “I’m gonna see Jake Calendar, and I’m gonna see him right now,” the infuriated man said, and he was gone.

Vesta prepared a meal for her distraught neighbors and tried to console the children. She saw that the family failure was having its severest impact on Timmy, and tried to divert his attention with idle talk about Rodeo. “He’s doin’ good,” he said, but there the conversation ended, for Victoria asked, “If we get thrown off the farm, Timmy, what’ll you do with Rodeo?” and he ran from the house to keep from bursting into tears.

On the day of the sale Sheriff Bogardus and three deputies arrived to maintain order. In the Dakotas ugly things had been happening at these forced sales, and Bogardus was determined that this one, unfortunate though it might be, must go off smoothly. As he toured the premises and stared at each of the sullen farmers, seeking to intimidate them, he told his followers, “It’s gonna be all right. I think we can handle whatever they may have in mind.”

“Un-unh!” one of his assistants groaned. “You spoke too soon.”

And everyone turned to watch as a shifty-eyed man in his late fifties sauntered into the yard to look over the equipment Earl Grebe had put together over the years. He was accompanied by two young men as lean and surly as he, and the trio paid no attention as the crowd whispered, “It’s the Calendars. Everything’s okay.”

“Hiya, Jake!” Sheriff Bogardus said with unnecessary effusiveness. “Fine day for the sale.”

“Best,” Jake said, continuing his slow inspection.

“Hiya, Cisco. How was Chicago?”

“Okay,” the younger of the boys said as he kicked the tire of the tractor.

News of the sale had been widely circulated, and buyers had come in from Kansas and Nebraska, for here was a chance to get nearly thirteen hundred acres of first-class farmland, with a prospect of making real money when rain returned to the plains.

The auctioneer was a tested man, Mike Garmisch of Fort Collins. He had an ingratiating way of pulling a crowd together and chivvying them into bidding a little more than they had intended. “It’s a fine day for a fine farm,” he said for openers, and after a few jokes that stayed well clear of the day’s tragedy—dispossessing a man for the lack of a few dollars—he got down to the business of the sale.

“We have here a good house, a very strong barn and one thousand, two hundred and eighty acres of prime, rolling drylands. Friends, you give this land one year of proper rain, it’s gonna be a gold mine—a gold mine, I said.”

He invited any bid above one thousand dollars, and a real estate man from Kimball, Nebraska, offered fifteen hundred. By slow steps this rose to three thousand, two hundred. Then an investor from Kansas bid three thousand, four hundred, and the bidding stopped.

“Three thousand, four hundred once …”

At this point Jake Calendar and his sons elbowed their way through the crowd toward the successful Kansas bidder, and as they moved, slowly, like rattlesnakes, Sheriff Bogardus caught sight of a little boy throwing a ball against the barn. Choosing this as an excuse to avoid a showdown with the Calendars, he said in a loud voice, “We can’t have that boy disrupting our sale,” and he motioned to his three deputies, who silently filed out behind him to halt this misdemeanor.

When the lawmen were gone, Jake Calendar zeroed in on the Kansas bidder and grabbed him by the throat. “Did you make that last bid?” Calendar asked in a grim whisper.

“Yes.”

Holding the man in his left hand, Jake produced a huge pistol. Thrusting it against the Kansan’s temple, he issued his ultimatum: “If you don’t withdraw that bid, I’m gonna blow your fuckin’ head off.”

The visitor paled and looked about for the sheriff. Unable to locate him, he tried to find the deputies, but they were gone too. There was only that monstrous pistol touching his head.

“I understand you want to reconsider your bid,” Calendar said softly.

“I do. Oh, indeed I do.”

“He wants permission to reconsider,” Calendar announced to the crowd. “Floyd, Cisco, step over there and help the auctioneer.”

The two young Calendars, pistols drawn, elbowed their way to the podium, where they stood glaring at Mike Garmisch, who said in a quivering voice, “Gentlemen, I’m advised that the bidder from Kansas was under some kind of misapprehension. Is that right?”

“Indeed it is!” the Kansan said eagerly. “I understood that the farm implements were included in this part of the sale.”

“They certainly are not. It states that on the notice.”

“In that case I withdraw my bid.”

“Gentlemen, we want to run the fairest sale possible, and if this good man thinks he has in any way …” The two Calendar boys nudged him and he stopped the palaver.

“The gentleman from Kansas withdraws his bid. Does the gentleman from Kimball, Nebraska, wish to stand by his?” One flourish of Jake Calendar’s horse pistol satisfied the investor from Kimball that he, too, had misunderstood the terms of sale.

“Gentlemen, the only fair thing will be to start over,” Garmisch said, his throat very dry. “Do I hear a bid?”

“Five dollars,” Vesta Volkema said in a clear voice.

“Five once, five twice, five three times—sold! To Mrs. Volkema for five dollars.” The words came in one gasp.

When Sheriff Bogardus and his deputies heard the gavel fall, they left the law-breaking boy and wandered back into the sales area. A representative of the bank rushed up to Bogardus, complaining that the bank had been defrauded of its money.

“In a sense that’s right,” Bogardus agreed. “You’re entitled to the total proceeds of the sale, after taxes.”

“But since the farm only brought—what was it?—five dollars.” The sheriff shrugged his shoulders. He had no intention of bucking forty angry farmers, most of them with concealed guns, not when they were led by the Calendars.

“Where the hell were you?” Auctioneer Garmisch asked the sheriff, for he, too, had been bilked of his fee.

“Enforcing the law,” the sheriff said, pointing to the miscreant boy with the ball.

Difficult as these years were, they were not devoid of the rowdy humor that had always characterized western life.

In 1935 Denver society was bedazzled by the visit of Lord Codrington, announced as the scion of a family who had long been associated with Colorado ranching. He was a charming man, from Oxford he said, whose gracious manners won him entry to the very topmost levels of Denver society, where he courted several marriageable heiresses and lent both amusement and dignity to the better clubs. He ran up some bills, but not many, ordered suits at various tailors patronized by his hosts, but not an excessive number, and in the end was discovered to be a complete fraud, a Cockney sailor off the Cunard Line who had mastered his accent studying Ronald Colman movies while his ship plied the Atlantic.

His downfall was a six-day wonder, with the cream of Denver society made to look like asses in the local press. The photographs, taken earlier by bored cameramen dragooned into covering for the society page, now made front page, top and center: “Mrs. Charles Bannister, leader of Denver society, presenting Lord Codrington to the Delmar Linners at the March Fete.”

And then the affair took a typical Colorado twist. No one in Denver would bring suit against Lord Codrington. As Mrs. Bannister said, in an interview which brought chuckles and a sense of restored propriety: “Who did he hurt? He was utterly delightful and provided everyone with a sense of joy during a rather bleak period in our lives. He did me no harm.”

Her husband, Charles Bannister, said pretty much the same: “I’m certainly not going to bring charges against a man who bilked me out of three suits. I pay a lot more than that these days without getting half the entertainment.”

When the police bustled the errant lord out of town, with a warning never to appear within the precincts again, at least two dozen leaders of Denver society appeared to bid him farewell as he stepped aboard the train which would whisk him to Chicago and deportation. Three young women ignored the flashing bulbs to kiss him goodbye, and Delmar Linner, father of one of the girls and a leading banker, told reporters, “He looks a damned sight better in that suit than I ever did.”

At about this time Centennial became the butt of a prank by a group of high school students, who had been complaining about poor food served in the cafeteria. They erected over its portals a sign which infuriated some, evoked hilarity in others. Unfortunately, all the perpetrators were offspring of Republican families and a regrettable political overtone was cast over the affair, where none was intended. The sign read:

ALFERD PACKER MEMORIAL CAFETERIA

And when the teachers saw it, all hell broke loose, the local Democratic leader claiming that to erect such a sign on a building paid for by taxpayers was an insult to Franklin D. Roosevelt, not a favorite figure in the area. The leader of the Republicans had the wit to snap back, “Nonsense! That sign has no national significance whatever. It merely recognizes, and belatedly at that, a thoughtful citizen of Colorado who performed a public service for which we should all be grateful.” And so the confrontation raged, until some children from Democratic families tore the sign down.

Alferd Packer had been a mountain guide, as mixed up as the spelling of his first name, and late in 1873 for a grubstake he volunteered to lead a hunting party of twenty into the western mountains. When a blizzard struck he got lost with five of the members. The party was snowbound for three months. They ran out of food, so Packer, as the man responsible for the leadership and survival of the group, began eating his fellow sportsmen.

When the spring thaws came Alferd Packer returned, picking his teeth and showing no signs of ordeal, but later the skeletons of his companions were found, each skull showing signs of having been smacked with the sharp edge of an ax.

The macabre episode might have passed unnoticed into history as one more macabre affair along the Continental Divide, except for the memorable charge made by the judge when he sentenced Packer. Whether the judge actually said these words cannot now be proved, but they have passed into the folklore of the state, providing Colorado with its one indisputable folk hero. Said the judge, “Alferd Packer, you voracious, man-eating son-of-a-bitch. They was only seven Democrats in Hinsdale County, and you ate five of them.”

This affair made Packer the patron saint of the Republican party, and small wallet cards were printed up bearing his well-fed, handsome, bearded face accompanied by the legend: “I admire the example set by the great Alferd Packer and wish to be a member of his club. In proof of my fidelity to his sterling principles, I agree to eliminate five Roosevelt Democrats.” It must be pointed out that Packer escaped punishment, for a clever Republican attorney proved that whereas the supposed crime had been committed while Colorado was a territory, the case had been tried under the criminal laws of the new state, and any fair-minded man would have to agree that that was unfair.

Contributions to public hilarity were also made by the Mexican community. In 1920 Pancho Villa, having made a fool of General Pershing, was about to launch a similar campaign against the Mexican government. They bought him off with a spacious ranch in Durango, where he ruled like a feudal lord, even resuming his less provocative original name, Doroteo Arrango.

However, many citizens remembered not his victories over the Americans but his brutal assassinations of Mexicans, and one hot afternoon, July 20, 1923, as he was driving in his new Dodge, he was ambushed by seven ancient enemies. When colored postcards of his disemboweled body were placed on sale, little white arrows pointed to forty-seven bullet wounds.

Villa was buried in his favorite city of Chihuahua, but one night in 1926 persons who had suffered at his hands invaded the cemetery, dug up his coffin and made off with the skeleton. The official history reports the grisly denouement: “Being carried off his skull to New Mexico, vile opportunists there continue to sell it six or seven times each year to rapacious norteamericanos.”

Two of his skulls landed in Denver, brought there by tourists, and controversy arose as to which had once been the real Pancho Villa. Skull One was large and round and looked as if it might once have belonged to the legendary bandit. Skull Two, however, had been sold for twice the amount of Skull One, and therefore had to command respect. Furthermore, it had been sold by a woman who offered written affidavits proving that she was the one legal widow of Pancho Villa and was selling the skull only to help educate Pancho’s children, whereupon the owner of Skull One produced a newspaper clipping from Old Mexico: “There are no fewer than twenty-seven women with papers proving each to be the only true wife of Pancho Villa, and of these, sixteen have skulls to sell.”

Once more the argument was resolved in a manner which did credit to Colorado. The Anglo owners of the skulls agreed to put the decision in the hands of men from the area who had fought in Villa’s army. They were brought to Denver to compare the skulls, and Centennial was proud when their own Tranquilino Marquez boarded the train to serve on the jury. The old soldiers looked at the two skulls, and in few minds was there any doubt that the bigger and rounder skull—that would be Skull One—conformed to the remembered physiognomy of their martyred leader, but there was that nagging problem raised by the fact that Skull Two had cost more and had come with a written documentation.

A judgment worthy of Solomon was handed down: “Skull One is undoubtedly that of Pancho Villa, the mature man. But Skull Two, somewhat smaller, is also his, at the age of sixteen.”

After the disastrous sale of his cattle in Chicago, Beeley Garrett had put his foot down: “Your mother and I have no intention of spending another winter in this God-forsaken climate. Come October, we’ll go to Florida for good, but before we go, we do wish you’d get things straightened out with Ruth.”

“They’re all right,” his son said evasively.

“Don’t be a damned fool, Henry. What you and Ruth have can barely be called a marriage.”

“It’ll work out,” Henry insisted. On this topic he was reticent, and he was much relieved when his parents actually packed their car.

For some years he had been making major decisions regarding the ranch, and under his tutelage Venneford bulls had strengthened their reputation as the blue-ribbon bulls of the west. Purists noted that each generation was a fraction of an inch shorter than the preceding, and they suspected that the dwarfism which Jim Lloyd had feared was operating, but Venneford publicity masked this deficiency, and the great Crown Vee bulls with their ponderous stride and drooping horns continued to bring top price at the auctions.

When Beeley and Pale Star climbed into their Cadillac for the long drive south, Ruth was not present to bid them goodbye. She was feeling poorly, and Beeley said, “I’ll give you two years, Henry. Get your marriage squared away or I’ll have to take the ranch back. It’s too valuable to let you ruin it.”

When his parents were gone, Henry had ample time to survey his situation, and the more he considered Ruth and her peculiar behavior, the more worried he became. Shortly after their marriage she had begun to act strangely, and before long she was another of those nervous, self-condemning, withdrawn women who haunted western ranches.

Beeley had said of her, “She ought to leave Venneford and live out there on the drylands for a year. Let her see what some women endure without complaining.”

“A week in one of those tipis would drive her truly crazy,” Pale Star had said. She considered her daughter-in-law’s behavior disgraceful. “You’ve been very patient with her,” she had told Henry. “Don’t let her ruin your life.”

Now, alone, Henry wondered if he had in some way failed Ruth when her parents were killed in the plane crash. If so, there were no amends he could make. When he considered his wife’s withdrawal, her complaining, her inability to pursue any interest, and especially her lack of affection toward either him or their children, he was bewildered.

It was in this mood that he started making regular halts at La Cantina on his way home from Centennial. In fact, he was finding much ranch business to do in town, and often instead of sending one of the cowboys to fetch a bucket of red paint to touch up the barns, he would ride in himself, then park his Dodge at La Cantina while he had a cold drink.

He never indicated that it was Soledad Marquez that he was stopping by to see, but when he entered the smoky, noisy room he always cast one swift, encompassing glance to ascertain the situation. If she was present, he sat and stared at her. If she was not there, the men could see that his shoulders sagged a little.

She had known, of course, from the first moment, that he was attracted to her, and this gave her enormous satisfaction. It was like the time when the family spent the winter in Denver and a singer up from Old Mexico had taken her on his knee and sung to her. It had signified nothing, really, yet she treasured the remembrance.

She knew that Henry Garrett was married, had children and was a Protestant, so there could be nothing in this for her. She also knew that her brother Triunfador watched her closely and had openly threatened to send her back to Mexico if she gave the gringo any encouragement. But in spite of these impediments she caught herself listening for the sound of the Dodge coming from Venneford as it carried Garrett into town on one or another of his missions.

Without betraying emotion, she listened as the car sped south, knowing that on its return it would not go by so swiftly, but would halt. Smiling to herself, she would clean the tables or make some refritos, and after a while she would retreat to her room, in the new section of the building, where she would comb her hair and tend her ribbons.

For half a year this desultory exchange continued; only once had the two touched hands, that day when he started to change records at the machine and she had reached for the needle. The effect had been electrifying, like the touch of disparate wires in the box which ignites the distant explosion.

One surprisingly warm day in January 1936 Henry drove into town, and when she heard the reassuring signal of his car, Soledad reacted in a new way. When he returned later and stopped for a drink, his first swift glance told him that she was not there. He drank his Coke, listened to the “Ballad of Pancho Villa,” whose words he was beginning to know, and waited till the Mexicans threw General Pershing out. Disappointed at Soledad’s absence, he climbed back into his car and drove north.

He had gone only a short distance when he saw Soledad standing boldly beside the road. Braking to a stop, he clicked open the door and she jumped in. With one wild sweep of her arms she embraced him, and whispered, “Over there. Down the road.”

They drove westward along a trail that led to a broken dam which had once impounded the waters of Beaver Creek. When the car stopped, facing a swamplike area crowded with birds, she threw her arms about him again and kissed him passionately. They sat there a long time, indulging their hopeless affection for each other and watching the red-winged blackbirds as they alighted deftly on the tips of long-dead rushes. They spoke of conditions as they were, without magnification or vain hope, and they acknowledged how dangerous a game they had entered into.

“My brother might kill you,” she said. “They are required to do that in Mexico, you know.”

“I’m not afraid of your brother,” he said. And then came the question which so tantalizes men in love with girls they cannot marry: “How is it you’re not already married?”

“I’ve been waiting,” she said, offering no further explanation.

They contrived to meet in strange places, and once when Ruth Mercy Garrett was in Denver, Henry actually spirited Soledad into the Venneford castle, where in one of the towers they pretended no longer. In a flood of passion they undressed and lay on an ancient buffalo robe brought there by Oliver Seccombe.

They made love for two hours, and when they crept out of the castle, praying that no one had seen them, their lives were tangled and lost. Now, when Garrett entered the cantina, he made no attempt to hide his savage disappointment if she was not there. They drifted into playing certain records, particularly “Serian las Dos,” about the girls who no longer were content to eat tortillas.

In this accidental manner Henry Garrett became the first Anglo in Centennial to discover that the Mexicans had their own sweet, stable patterns of society, and that in some strange way they tended to find a happiness with nature that the Anglos missed. There were not many men in the region as totally stable as Triunfador Marquez, not many young women who vibrated to the whole of life the way his sister Soledad did. Off to a wretched corner by themselves, living in hovels, these quiet people arranged a world that gave them dignity and a kind of rude repose. In places like Denver, Santa Fe, San Antonio and Centennial they evolved a placid, self-sustaining pattern of life, creating values of peace and joy which in years to come the Anglos would seek and not find.

A marvelous symbiosis of English and Spanish culture might have evolved in these decades if it had been encouraged or even permitted to flourish, but there was almost no Anglo who could even comprehend that such a thing was possible, so the two races lived apart in deepening suspicion.

Still rejected by white Catholics, the Mexicans turned inevitably to exotic religions, and Henry Garrett would never forget the wintry Sunday afternoon when the Children of God in the Mountains outraged the honest citizens of Centennial by appearing with a brass band in the public square to conduct religious worship.

Soledad Marquez was there in a long white dress decorated with cheap red roses purchased from the J. C. Penney store. She was exquisite, there was no other word for it, Henry thought, a slim vision of a strange way of life. She marched arm in arm with two other girls almost as pretty as she, and they were followed by other trios of men and women, and as they swirled their way in a great circle around the square, the band played and they chanted the hymn that best summarized their hopes: “Con Cristo en el Mundo Otra Vez.”

The hymn had a compelling rhythm and many verses, all telling of how life would be when Christ returned to the earth the next time:

“There will be justice then,

And bread for all.

And I shall have a new dress,

And my sister shall have shoes.”

It would be such a different world when Jesus came back and looked at the injustices under which his children labored. Then his brown-skinned Mexicans would stand free of their oppressors, and there was even a crude verse about the beet workers:

“With Christ in the world a second time

There will be no short-handled hoes,

There will be no telephone in the night,

‘Send Gomez back and steal his pay.’ ”

Fortunately, the Anglos who watched the rhythmic procession did not understand the words, but they nevertheless sent for the sheriff, and he watched for just long enough to convince any sensible man that if these Mexicans kept this up much longer, there was bound to be trouble.

“All right, all right!” he said amiably as he moved down the line, pulling people away. “We don’t conduct religious services in the street in this town. That’s what we have churches for.”

He wanted no trouble, certainly not on a Sunday, and he did nothing to cause any. He merely tugged and pulled at the marchers, breaking up their pattern while three of his men hustled the band onto a truck.

He had started in the middle of the procession and now the leaders were coming past him. “You there,” he called as he grabbed at the girl on Soledad’s right. “You nuts stop this.”

He yanked the girl away, and this left Soledad alone, facing Henry Garrett. To the established rhythm of the hymn she sang:

“With Jesus in the world a second time,

Oh, things will be so different!”

He never saw her again. That night her brother bundled her into a car and sent her out of Colorado.

When Garrett stopped at the cantina, looking for her, Triunfador told him bluntly, “You’d better not come in here any more, Mr. Garrett. This is for Mexicans.”

“Where’s Soledad?”

“It was you who forced her to leave.”

“Where … is … she?”

“Mr. Garrett, go home to your wife. She’s crazy. But she’s an Anglo.”

“I love your sister.”

“Well, she’s gone. And what can we do about it, either of us?”

January 1936 was a time of great excitement for Timmy Grebe. His steer Rodeo had filled out handsomely and both he and Mr. Bellamy, who was coaching him, felt that the beautiful big Hereford might even have a chance to win top prize among the steers at the Denver show.

“It would mean a great deal to your parents, I needn’t tell you,” Mr. Bellamy said as he helped Timmy groom the steer. “The big restaurants in Denver like the publicity. They buy the prize steers and pay over a hundred dollars for them. To get their names in the papers … so that cattlemen will eat at their table, knowing the steaks will be good.”

Better than Mr. Bellamy, Timmy Grebe appreciated what the prize money would mean to his family. There never had been a year worse than this one. The whole world had gone wrong, Timmy thought, and he listened with dismay whenever his family gathered to discuss what might be done.

For his father he felt the deep shame that only a son could when he watched a man he loved unable to do anything right. “The banks certainly won’t lend us money,” Earl said, “not after that sale.” They were grateful to Calendar, a man they scarcely knew, for having given them a second chance. “But we still have no money to operate,” Grebe said to his family. “What in decency can we do?”

For his mother Timmy felt only a deep burning compassion. It caught at his guts to see her working so hard, to see her gaunt thinness and the lack of joy in her deep-sunk eyes. Oh, dearest God, he prayed each night. Let me win so that I can give her the money.

Once he left his bed around two in the morning and went to his mother, and he lay beside her for some time, telling her that he was going to do something for her, but he felt her trembling the way she used to do, and he crept back to his own bed bewildered, for she had said not a word to him.

The week before the Denver show he cut school altogether and stayed at home, polishing the hoofs of his steer, grooming him and trimming his hair. The animal looked so handsome, his white face gleaming against his red body, that on the last afternoon Timmy grabbed him around the neck and whispered, “Last year I didn’t do much, but I sure wasn’t scared. You aren’t scared, are you?” Rodeo chomped away, his big bland face and wide eyes indicating that he had never known fear.

Mr. Bellamy arranged for a local farmer to truck Rodeo down to Denver, and Timmy said that he would ride inside with the steer, to be sure that Rodeo did not bump against the sides, and he ran home to fetch blankets to place against the wood. When he got there he found his mother in the kitchen, rummaging among the cutlery, and he barely had time to shout, “I feel it, Mom. I’m going to win.” She looked at him in a blank way he had never seen before and said in a hollow voice, “We are past the stage of winning.” He wanted to talk with her, but the truck was waiting.

It was an exciting ride in to Denver on that cold January day. Rodeo shifted his feet to maintain balance while Timmy watched the blankets to be sure his steer did not bruise himself. The driver stopped at a diner in Brighton and asked Timmy if he’d like a Coke. When they went inside, the man announced to other stockmen who had gathered there, “I’m hauling the champion into Denver, that’s what I’m doing.”

One of the men said, “Aren’t you the kid that got the special calf last year?” and for the first time in his life Timmy had that rare joy of being remembered for something he had done, and he nodded quietly.

“I’d like to see what you’ve done with that steer,” the man said, and Timmy led them all to the rear of the truck, where they inspected Rodeo, and several said, “You know, you just might have the champion there,” and Timmy climbed back in beside his Hereford.

Judging the steers would take place at ten the next morning, and at five Timmy was in the stall with Rodeo. He gave the big steer a bath, then shampooed his coat and washed away the suds. He dried him with a pair of towels, then combed and curried for an hour. He had wax for the hoofs and a small pair of scissors to cut away stray hairs. When the bell rang at five to ten, Rodeo was in the handsomest condition possible, and when Timmy led him into the ring, the beautiful Hereford moved with weighty grace, plumping his powerful feet in stately rhythm. Several stockmen’s wives, who knew a good steer when they saw one, applauded.

The judging required almost half an hour, for other boys had done an equally good job with their calves, and some of their steers were heavier than Timmy’s, but none were of such perfect conformation, and in the end the judges agreed unanimously that Rodeo was champion. If Timmy had not cried in defeat last year, he certainly was not going to do so in victory. Clenching his teeth, he stood quietly, holding the halter in his left hand, but when the official photographs were taken and the noise was over, he could no longer contain himself, and with a cry of joy he threw his arms about Rodeo’s placid neck. It was this photograph, taken accidentally by a lingering newsman, that would soon flash around the world, a compelling shot of triumph and heartbreak.

Timmy wished that his parents had a phone, because he wanted to inform them immediately of his victory. Even more, he longed to tell his mother that he would be bringing her at least one hundred dollars—that is, if the auction went as expected.

It did. When Timmy led Rodeo into the auction ring the man in charge took the loudspeaker and said, “Gentlemen, most of you were here last year when this boy Timmy Grebe put up a great fight in the Catch It, Keep It contest. He failed, but he was awarded a calf anyway, and that judgment has been justified, for here he comes with the best steer in his class.” Then he dropped his voice and added, “I don’t need to tell you that he is the brother of Ethan Grebe, our heroic bus driver.”

The audience cheered and Mr. Bellamy, who had come down for the sale, smiled proudly. The bidding was lively, a contest between the Albany Hotel, the cattlemen’s headquarters, and the Brown Palace, the place where rich people went for their steaks. In the end it was the Brown Palace that won with a bid of $145. After the auctioneer’s modest fee, Timmy would take $140 back to his family.

He rode home with Mr. Bellamy, and when they reached Brighton he insisted upon stopping at the diner where they’d had Cokes the day before. Loungers were delighted to greet the champion. When he reached Line Camp he told Mr. Bellamy, “I’ll walk home. I could never have won without your assistance.” He liked big words but had been afraid to use them before this night, but now he was a champion, taking real money home to his mother.

Mr. Bellamy understood that on this night the boy wanted to be by himself, so he drove him to the point where the path started and watched with satisfaction as young Timmy started walking north over the prairie.

There was a moon, and the night was gentle. In all directions the great plains stretched silently and for the first time Timmy understood why his father had loved this land, this cruel yet compelling emptiness. It commanded attention, and there were still ways to control it. When the rains came back this would be mighty again, and he and his father would wrestle with it, for it was the noblest part of earth.

When he reached the slight rise from which the farmhouse first became visible, he was disturbed that no light was showing, because when one of the children was out, the Grebes always kept a lamp burning. But he remembered that his mother had been distraught that morning—the wind and the dust and the loneliness had finally worn her down—so it was not surprising if she had forgotten, but as he neared the house he saw the gate standing open, and this was something his father never allowed.

He became frightened and started to run and when he came upon the hideous scene he screamed. He just stood in the yard, screaming, and no one there to hear, and he continued screaming for timeless minutes, a boy torn out of his mind.

Then he started running again, mumbling and sobbing and striking himself with his fists, and he came at last to the Volkemas’, and Magnes heard him first, thinking him to be a coyote howling in the night, but then Vesta heard him and she lit a lamp and cried, “I do think it’s a boy down there. It’s Timmy,” and she opened the window and heard his terrible wailing cry, “Oh, oh! They’re all dead.”

“What must have happened,” said Sheriff Bogardus after the bodies had been hauled away, “when Timmy seen her in the kitchen as he was driving off to the stock show, she was hunting for a butcher knife. Well, she found it, and I judge she killed her daughter Victoria first. Cut her head nearly off. Then she went for the two other girls, Eleanore and Betsy. The boy Larry must have seen some of this, because he started to run away, but she caught him in the yard and stabbed him many times. That musta been the first body that Earl saw when he came in from the fields, and when he went inside and saw the three girls and his wife still with the butcher knife … because it was in her hands when we found her … Well, he went sort of wild too, and he grabbed a shotgun and held it pretty close to her head and fired. Then he went back to the yard, picked up his son and laid him where we found him, then put the muzzle in his own mouth and pulled the trigger.”

There were pictures of the bodies, of course, decently covered with sheets, and they were accompanied by that chance shot of Timmy Grebe embracing his prize Hereford. To the easterner this display was a gripping contradiction: a little boy triumphing at the moment when his family was being slaughtered. But to the westerner, who had known the great winds and seeping dust, it was a self-portrait. The bad years were ending, but they had exacted a terrible cost.

Timmy went to live in the stone house with Mr. Bellamy. The Grebe place was sold to Philip Wendell, who was buying up any farmland that was being vacated by discouraged homesteaders, and he paid the going price: three thousand dollars for 1,280 acres plus the house, with the soddy thrown in.

Wendell had a clear vision of what lay ahead for this region and the courage to back his judgment with such money as his father had accumulated. He saw that in spite of the recent disasters, Dr. Creevey had been right. These apparent drylands could grow wheat, enormous quantities of it in any year when the normal thirteen inches of rain fell.

“You don’t plow this land deep,” Wendell told the farmers he employed to work his fields, “and for certain, when you do plow, you never, never harrow. We don’t want fields that look like billiard tables. We don’t want those long, straight rows. Nobody who works for me will ever again compete in those silly plowing contests. On our land we’re going to plow along the contours. And we are certainly going to leave strips of unplowed grass, big wide strips in every field to slow down the wind.”

He saw now that the Line Camp families could have survived the great drought of 1930–36 if only they could have prevented their fields from blowing away. “They might’ve had one or two years on skimpy rations, but they could’ve survived. Look at the Volkemas. Never borrowed money. Spent every cent they earned for more land. Now they have four thousand acres and they’re in great shape.” He had tried to buy the Volkema farm, and Magnes had been willing to sell, but Vesta had snapped, “If we wouldn’t sell to your crooked father in bad years, why should we sell to you when times are good?” and he had countered, “I thought you wanted to leave for California,” and Magnes had said, “California’s the land beyond the rainbow, and we haven’t had many rainbows here.”

Philip Wendell worked on one abiding principle: the rain would come back. The Grebe farm, for example, would once more produce thirty bushels to the acre. Maybe not in 1937, but in 1938 for sure. He therefore scraped together extra money to engage in one great gamble, after which he would quit and move to Florida, the way other rich people in the state were doing.

He now controlled some sixty thousand acres, most of it inherited from his father, and if two rainy years came side by side, he would plant so much wheat that the people in these parts would be stunned. He didn’t mean three hundred acres. He was thinking of thirty thousand this year, and thirty thousand the next, on land that had lain fallow.

This strategy was based on fact and intuition. It was a fact that high winds could be controlled. It was a fact that hail struck only one year in five. It was a fact that rain must return. Where his brilliance lay was in his intuition that before long the world was going to want wheat, lots of it, and that prices would have to rise to two dollars a bushel.

Figure it out, he argued with himself. If I risk thirty thousand acres and grow thirty bushels to the acre, I’m looking at nine hundred thousand bushels of wheat. And if something big happens to drive wheat up to two dollars, we’re talking about a million and a half dollars. Those people in Denver can’t even imagine such figures.

What was the “big thing” he hoped for? He never specified, but he sensed that with Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Josef Stalin and that idiot Roosevelt making fools of themselves, something was bound to happen. What it would prove to be he could not guess, but he knew that in any crisis, people needed wheat, and he would be in a position to supply it.

In the fall of 1937 he planted an incredible number of acres in wheat, being careful to keep his fields scattered and never to use the same plowman more than once. He did not want anyone to discover the great risk he was taking, for he had found that bankers and their associates liked to knock a man in the head when he was too far extended. When the seed was in the ground, he started to pray.

He told his wife, “If God will give us just twenty inches of snow, we’ll make it.” He studied the weather, watched every cloud, and by the first of April, concluded that the gamble had failed. The rainfall was below average and he was not going to make much more than nine bushels to the acre. Yet he was not discouraged, for the price of a bushel of wheat rose to a gratifying ninety-one cents and at the end of the spring harvest he said to his wife, “We got by. We may not have made much, but at least we didn’t lose.” She was relieved, for the pressures upon them had been great, and she supposed that with his lucky break he would quit the gamble. But not at all.

In the fall of 1938 he planted not thirty thousand acres, but forty. If moisture failed him this year, he might go bankrupt, and again he prayed for snow. Even the slightest flurry consoled him and when a real blizzard blew in for three hours, piling the snow deep, he ran into the midst of it, relishing the wet flakes as they struck his face.

He became almost maniacal, doing ridiculous things in the hope that they might bring rain or snow. He burned automobile tires, believing that their smoke activated clouds, and he hired an airplane to scatter grains of sand from a high altitude. Ironically, a good sixteen inches of rain did fall before the end of the growing season.

Near to collapse, he fell onto the davenport in the front room of his mansion in Centennial one day in March and told his wife, “I couldn’t stand the anxiety of another year like this. I’ve had dizzy spells. I’m a living corpse.”

“You promised this’d be the last year,” she said.

“You don’t need to remind me,” he told her. “I’d never go through this again.”

And as soon as the crop was harvested and sold, at a modest profit, he started making plans to unload his land and quit the wheat business altogether. He talked with a variety of buyers and found a banker in Denver who wanted to speculate in dry-land farming. As the gentleman explained, “I think that with enough land, I can get not only a wheat crop but substantial payments from the government—soil bank, contour plowing, things like that.”

In a way Wendell felt regrets at not being in on the killing which he knew had to come. “We’ll live to see three-dollar wheat,” he told his wife, but she replied, “No backing down,” and he assured her, “Not me. I’m willing to let someone else make the profit.”

He would be far from destitute. Take that farm he had picked up from the Grebe boy after the tragedy. He had paid three thousand for it and a banker from Chicago was offering twenty. Not all of his deals had worked so well, but he would quit Centennial with more than a million dollars, which wasn’t bad for a boy who had reached town with a traveling theatrical group.

He spent July and August working out the details of the transactions which would move his property into the hands of others. No specific deals were concluded, because the men he was negotiating with were on vacation, but come September the arrangements would be terminated quickly.

“We’re out from under,” he told his wife with real relief during the last week of August. “I feel years younger, and we should have a great time in Florida. Morgan’s going to love the beach, and I’m told the University of Florida is almost as good as Colorado.” His son was eleven at the time and excited at the prospect of living in a tropical climate.

And then, on Thursday night, the last day of August 1939, rain began to fall, and when Philip Wendell went to bed he told his wife, “Just our damned luck! I’m selling the farms tomorrow, and tonight it rains.” From their bedroom window he looked at the rain, a real downpour that would fill the fields prior to the fall planting. “Well,” he said, “our bad luck is somebody else’s good luck. In my bones I know this is the beginning of a wet cycle. Somebody’s going to make the millions, and I wish it were us.”

“Philip, go to sleep.”

He couldn’t. All night he tossed uneasily, brooding about the fortune he was throwing away, the retreat he was making just when the drylands were about to come into their own. It wasn’t fair. His parents had committed murder to gain a foothold in this town and with a sure nose his father had sought out the good lands. Old Mervin Wendell had sensed the destiny of this region and now his son was throwing away the advantage.

For some reason he could not later explain, Philip Wendell rose from his bed while the rain was still falling and dawn was not yet at hand. He went downstairs to review the sales papers he would be signing tomorrow, to assure himself that he had gotten top dollar for each of the parcels, and when he turned on the radio he heard the electrifying news from Europe:

At dawn this morning, Friday, September 1, Adolf Hitler marched into Poland. Protected on the flanks by the treaty signed recently with Soviet Russia, the Germans are on their way to Warsaw. Polish forces are reported to be fighting gallantly, but …

The first thing Wendell thought, recalling the many Russians he had done business with, was, Sooner or later, he’ll have to fight Russia.

From this intuition he never wavered, and on it he began to construct the probable course of events: the stalemate, the American involvement, Japan up to something in the Pacific, the confusion which must entangle all nations.

“This could go on for years!” he muttered, pacing up and down, listening to the reassuring rain. “America’s got to stumble in. And everybody will want wheat. The rain and the war! It’s what I knew would happen.”

Without consulting his wife, he began calling real estate men in the region, rousing them from bed and offering to buy whatever dryland farms they had on their lists. “I’ll bring the check before nine o’clock,” he told them. “I know that’s early, but I want to close the deal.” When one of the agents said, “I have some fine irrigated farms, Philip,” he snapped, “They’re for men afraid to gamble. Real men fight the drylands.”

His wife, hearing his raised voice, came down in her nightgown to find her husband telephoning, one after another, the men who had been planning to buy his farms: “Deal’s off, Garrett. I’ve decided to hold on to the land.” Pause. “Yes. I know we shook hands, but we signed no papers. The deal’s off. Going to farm it myself.”

“What are you doing?” his wife asked in dismay. Morgan, having been awakened by the noise, came sleepy-eyed into the room and asked, “What’s happening, Daddy?”

“The world’s changed,” Philip said. “Overnight, everything’s changed.” He flicked on the radio, and they heard the solemn announcements from London, and Morgan said in awed tones, “Golly, it’s a real war!”

His mother, now able to view this day’s events from her husband’s perspective, took his hand and whispered, “If the war lasts long enough, we could become …”

She was not allowed to finish her sentence, because Philip was speaking to his son. “The earth gives you nothing, Morgan. It simply sits there and waits. It neither loves you nor hates you, but it does cooperate with men who are not afraid. Your grandfather bought nineteen farms and made eighteen of them pay because he understood land, and so do I, and so must you. Dust, drought, war … they’re nothing. It’s the land that counts, and starting today, you’re to learn everything there is to know about it. Because this time the land is going to make us rich … very rich.”

CAUTION TO US EDITORS: This table, compiled for me by Walter Bellamy, shows what happened to agriculture at Line Camp in selected years. It is unique in that his crucial figures for rainfall refer not to the calendar year, like other tables, but to the actual growing season. Thus “1923 … 6″ ” means that the winter wheat which was harvested in the spring of 1923 had enjoyed during its entire year from May 1922 through April 1923 only six inches of moisture from rain and snow combined. These figures apply only to Line Camp. In a town like Centennial near the South Platte, moisture and yield per acre could have been much different.

Denver. You might want to do a nostalgic take-out on Denver as the mecca of the Mexican beet worker during the depression years. A good deal of animosity developed in this period, with Denverites claiming that the rural areas used the beet workers all summer, then threw them onto the Denver taxpayer during the winter. The problem was aggravated by the fact that many Mexicans preferred the congenial society that was possible in Denver, with specialized restaurants, cantinas, dances. But even if he did get to Denver, the lot of the Mexican was not idyllic, for he was penned into a narrow district between Jews on the one side, Italians on the other. The causeway near the railroad station was known as “the longest bridge in the world, runs from Mexico to Israel.” Fights between the groups were constant. Even so, many older Mexicans now living in rural Colorado think back upon those winters in Denver as the happiest in their lives.

Depression. I have been reluctant to use this word in my report, because in Colorado the phenomenon had a contradictory application. On the plains where duststorms struck, this period was one of the bleakest in American history and not even dramatic exaggeration could convey the anguish of some of the stories from that period. On the other hand, in the high country back of the Rockies there remain to this day people who ask, “What depression? We had no dust, no drought. We could always butcher a beef or go out and kill an elk or a deer. We saw no hobos, no unemployed. We didn’t buy new cars, but no one starved. We never saw anyone selling apples, and with us there were no sheriff sales.” On large spreads like the Venneford Ranch, cowboys often had to go without wages, but they kept their bunks, their horses, their jobs and some very good food. It was places like Line Camp that had the heart kicked out of them. I have photographs of nine communities like it that are now ghost towns, of more than a hundred isolated farms whose once-proud houses are falling into ruin. My photographs of the deserted churches, white and stark against the sky, are almost too painful to look at. On the plains there was a depression, and the visible consequences terrify the beholder even today.

Scandal. You may feel obligated to cover the one occasion in which Centennial achieved nationwide publicity, all of it bad. In the spring of 1948 the Patriotic Order of the Women of the West, Centennial chapter, announced an All-American Citizenship award for high school seniors. By every criterion the prize had to be awarded to an outstanding athlete-scholar-leader, Jesus Melendez, but when his name appeared in the Clarion as the nominee, a Mrs. Wentworth Carver, president of the statewide P.O.W.W., stated flatly, “The true American ideals of this great nation were generated by those gallant forebears of English stock who settled our eastern seaboard, and it was not the intention of our society to bestow its medal upon some Mexican immigrant who is probably in our state illegally to begin with.” Well, as you may remember, the whole nation got into the act, heaping ridicule on Mrs. Carver, but national scorn was not needed to reverse the damage she had done. Philip Wendell, an extreme conservative, excoriated her statement and Walter Bellamy pointed out to a reporter from the Chicago Tribune, “The Melendez family has lived in Colorado much longer than Mrs. Carver’s family has lived in the United States. Besides, his older brother Fidel gave his life for this nation at Anzio.” The most telling blow, however, came from the schoolchildren of Centennial. Acting on their own, they passed a resolution drafted by one of the Takemoto girls: “If Jesus is denied the prize, it must not be awarded at all, because no one else in this school is half as worthy of it as him.”