THE YEAR 1880 started bleak enough. There had been a lot of fall fires that left great stretches of prairie like black moiréed velvet. But even before the cow chips stopped smoking, the wind began to lift the soot and ashes in dark clouds and to tear at the bare knobs, blowing the grass to the roots, leaving it to stand on weak and wavering stilts. Then came December, with diphtheria sweeping through the settlements of the Platte valley. Often new cemeteries had to be started, so healthy and hardy had the people been. True, the settlers the last seven, eight years were mostly the young and the strong, or perhaps those with bad stomachs and weak chests, sent west to become strong, and usually did.
But by now there were many children too, either brought out as soon as a shelter was up or born here, and many of these, particularly the infants, were dying. At one time most of the school at Plum Creek was down, the women worn with the nursing and anxiety, the few doctors in the entire region helpless to make all the rounds, even if there were much they could do. But anybody with a saw and a hammer and nails could make a child’s coffin from a few rough cottonwood boards.
Theresa Cozad took her sons to Cincinnati for the Christmas season, leaving early to get them away from the diphtheria that was hitting their town too. With the epidemic and the bad storms the holiday season was a quiet one at Cozad. The few landseekers who arrived just before New Year found plenty of room at the brick hotel or half a dozen other places happy to take them in for a little cash money, much less cash money than Riggs at the hotel.
By early January the region had been swept by weeks of terrifying blizzards and what the hotel lacked in paying guests the streets made up in the unwelcome jamming by snow-caked Longhorns drifting down from the ranches north, some from clear up on the Loups. Theresa and the rest had just returned. Robert still awoke easily to any unusual movement or sound from the time when he was to stop Johnny walking in his sleep. The night of the drifting he heard curious scrapings along the buildings, and a dull pounding of hoofs. He ran out to see beyond the frosted windows. Men were plunging into the driving storm with overcoats thrown on, swinging brooms and clubs and yelling against the snow-whitened cattle gathering in vague shapes along the walls out of the blizzard wind, crowding, threatening to push them in, knocking windows to pieces with their unwieldy horns, or overturning smaller buildings entirely. And still the cattle came, driven with the wind, ice-caked, blinded, plunging into piling snowbanks in front of the hotel, struggling everywhere in the deep drifts, perhaps pushed down by those behind, more and more coming, running in until all the street was rising and falling in white backs, the hoofs a muffled rumble in the roar of the wind.
It was dangerous to be out in the daytime too, particularly for women and children. The Longhorns, wild from starvation, lurched at everything that might be feed, or, maddened by the approach of death, crashed through the crusted snow upon anything that moved, seeing it as the enemy that, by animal instinct, they knew was near.
One of the earlier storms of the winter caught several men out unprepared, men who never got back home. One of these was Elisha Clark, an old-time hunter and trapper. He had been a colonel in the war, and with his wife dead, he had returned to the free ways of his youth, following prime furs anywhere, going wherever there was game. Early in December he had camped with his wagon and two big greyhounds in the deep protection of the Powell Canyon region, in the breaks up around the Loup. A couple of weeks later a man hunting cedar for fuel saw him carrying an armful of hay from the stacks of Goodyear, a Cozad hay contractor who cut some up there too. It was a full three snow-drifted canyon miles from the stacks to Clark’s camp but nobody worried about that, not until the man’s greyhounds were found dead at Goodyear’s hay, frozen in the appalling cold of that winter. There was no sign of Clark but he was an old-timer—
The first of January more cedar haulers with bobsleds had found the trapper’s wagon and team. One of the horses was dead, still tied solidly to a tree. The animal had gnawed the bark from the trunk as high as he could reach and all the twigs and bushes around. The other horse had eaten off the limb to which he was tied and escaped.
But there was still no sign of the man, not even a windblown track in the deep snow. Although far below zero, the settlers rode out to search many miles of drifted breaks and canyons and didn’t find him. There was talk of a bullet in the back, as with the hunters up farther two, three winters ago, and the Missouri landseekers, all within reach of Print Olive and his gunmen. But now Olive was locked up at the pen in Lincoln. Of course his killers were still loose.
The county commissioners offered $50 reward for the body of Clark, but nobody came to collect, not until spring. Then a man out after stray horses saw a coyote run up a steep canyon wall ahead. Below was the body. Apparently Clark had gone for more hay and in the blizzard got into the wrong maze of breaks and ended at the head of a bare, steep, drift-choked box canyon, still half on his knees, the gun at his side, trying to crawl into a narrow cut for protection from the cold. A mile or so more and he would have been in sight of a ranch, if the storm had broken.
Many were a little relieved that the body was not found until spring. The women had been uneasy enough as it was whenever their men had to be out this winter. That a hunter, a plainsman like Clark, could die in a storm showed how justified their uneasiness had been.
Although Robert Cozad never seemed to tire of the story about the trapper Clark and his death, the boy’s father found other events of the winter more disturbing. One was the killing of Curly Grimes, whom he and many others along the Platte had known and liked. Curly, accused of robbery up toward the Black Hills, was captured by a couple of detectives and killed on the way to Cheyenne “attempting to escape,” as they called it. Even the Black Hills Pioneer agitated for an investigation and the jury found that Grimes was killed “without just cause or provocation” and recommended that the “officers” be tried for murder.
It reminded John Cozad of the fake deputy sheriff who appeared at the livery stable with the faro tramps, and of all the other killings the last two, three years, mobs and individuals taking the law into their own hands. He made up a large file of these. In addition to the Hallowell hanging at Plum Creek, the Mitchell and Ketchum burning, and the others laid to the Olive gang, there were at least a dozen more lynchings and unsolved shootings within the Platte region alone and lately several bodies found up around O’Neill. Now in addition to Grimes there was the man found dead on an island near Ogallala, in the Platte Fork, the hogs eating him. Murdered too, and not identified.
“No man’s life is safe anywhere around here,” John Cozad roared out, pounding the newspaper story with his fist. Perhaps he should run for the legislature, or a county office, as soon as they got enough votes in the west end of the county. But then he could have the county seat.
Perhaps a senatorship was still possible, with its prestige. There was still talk of moving the national capital to Fort Kearny, but the lynchings were a mighty black mark.
While most of the February excursion went back or hurried south for warmer climate, the March group would certainly do better. At last, hours late, the train stopped at Cozad but the passengers had to take the conductor’s word for it, so thick was the spring blizzard. E. D. Owens, the young well borer who came to the region a year ago, was scooping the growing drifts away to the train step to welcome his mother and. brothers and sisters. His cap and eyebrows were frosted white and he looked mighty rough in his worn old coat but mighty healthy, a sound, sturdy young man. He helped with the grips and, taking the arm of his mother, guided her toward the Riggs hotel, the rest close behind, all bowed into the driving snow. Behind them was the Cozad excursion, led by John J. himself, his beaver-collared coat thrown open to the whitening storm.
“Healthiest climate in the world,” he shouted against the wind. “I was a consumptive, you know–hunted all around for a cure, South America, California, everywhere.” He thrust his chest out, his face handsome in its ruddy color, ruddy enough so not even the darkness of his hair and goatee, the intense blackness of his eyes, could pale it today.
The hotel was suddenly packed, with cots set up in rows down the main room stretching through the entire building. At supper everybody gathered in the dining hall north of the brick hotel. It was a narrow, barny frame building, with a bare pine table twenty-five feet long down the center. There were large chairs near the head, and benches around the rest for the settlers, with men in working clothes toward the far end today, some in old muskrat caps with the ear flaps pushed up–the one concession to the indoors and dining.
The Cozad family sat at the head of the table, napkins in silver rings at their places, the plates white bone china instead of the tinware farther down. As always John Cozad came in a little late, hurrying, his black frock coat well brushed, a heavy gold chain around his neck and across his chest to the watch pocket. At one side sat Theresa, handsome in dark blue worsted that set off the pinkish glow of her cheeks. Across from her were the two sons. Johnny, handling much of the desk work of his father’s land dealings, always liked to size up any new prospects, particularly those who came through the storm today. He favored the Gatewoods in appearance more than the Cozads, but his features were more delicate, his bones thinner and longer than his grandfather’s or his Uncle Traber’s. Beside him sat young Robert, still much like his father, perhaps more than was casually visible. The short chin of the boy was hidden by the skillfully lengthening effect of the goatee in the father, but who could tell what of the father was hidden in the son?
The Cozads made an imposing picture in the light of the wall-bracket lamps flickering a little in the wind that crept in here too, a picture imposing enough for a white-pillared Southern mansion in the Virginia of Theresa Gatewood’s girlhood. But that was unbelievably far from the unfinished pine-board dining hall at the edge of the winter wilderness and from the guests, for no matter how nearly broke the excursionists might be, how actually penniless, they ate at this table with the Cozads. Tonight there were some really ragged settlers too, and a couple of section hands and some cowboys caught in town when the blizzard struck.
After the first talk had quieted a little, young Owens called attention to his relatives. “I want to introduce you to Mr. Cozad, the builder and owner of our city—”
Later he whispered to his young brother out of the corner of his mouth. “He’s a king of faro and poker—”
The boy looked toward the head of the table with new interest, and considered the son they called Robert, about his own age–one of the sons of the gamblin’ man. He glanced in pride at his mother. Why this was better than seeing President Grant that time, a few years back.
The Owens boy was still excited about the Cozads when his father arrived, bringing the carload of stock, farm implements and household goods with which the family was starting life in this new land, a land whose earth the well-drilling son had found fertile and very deep.
Robert Cozad received a new stock of notebooks for his diary from his Uncle Traber, and a bottle of clear red ink to go with the blue he had for illuminating the letters of the page heads. He wanted to make some in his diary look a little like those of his mother’s Bible. He wished he had a pinch of gold leaf, which he needed badly to put with the red and blue. But gold leaf was very expensive, a traveling photographer told him. Joseph Brander, portraitist, as he wished to be called, confided in Robert that he was really an artist. He traveled around making money to buy time for his own painting. He had reached Cozad late one evening and drew up between a couple of houses on the main street, his wagon a little darkroom with folding steps that dropped down to accommodate the ladies. Inside it was fitted up with a romantic backdrop and a fringed chair for taking and developing studio portrait photographs.
Robert hung around the photographer all he dared and in return for this he drummed up a little trade–getting his grandmother and as many of the rest of the Gatewoods, the Clay-pools, and the Schooleys and anyone else with the money to sit for their portraits. In addition Mr. Brander let Robert ask about painting.
“Here, where you can look at your father, and yourself, in the bright sunlight, you would naturally approach portrait painting by thinking about the eyes. That’s what I see when I look at you outdoors, or even here,” the man said, holding out the hand mirror that he carried along for the ladies, who liked a final touch to the hair before sitting.
Robert took the glass and saw himself with the bright lamp shining into his face. “Why, my eyes are glittery as a mouse’s,” he exclaimed, a little uneasy.
“A very big mouse, and without the fear that a small creature has in a world of great monsters–cats, dogs, people.”
Young Robert laid the mirror down and glanced at all the sample photographs pinned up inside the wagon–pictures of actresses and suchlike, with curls at their necks, black stuff on their eyes, and their dresses cut very low, as he had seen on actresses in Cincinnati. He knew there were other women too who walked around dressed like that out among people in the places where his father went, and in towns like Deadwood and Virginia City, as he had found thumbing through Harper’s Weekly.
But perhaps with a special way of seeing people now, and with his father’s eyes, and his own too, to remind him, he might begin to make pictures of people from that point of view. Or was aspect the right word? From that aspect? Anyway, it was a new discovery, an exciting one, and he wished that he had known it last winter, when he saw the Richter girl with the dark blue eyes at the skating party at Willow Island. He often thought of riding up there, but what could he say to get to go. And everybody would just laugh.
In a week or so the artist-photographer hitched up and moved on. Robert had looked after the disappearing square back of the little darkroom on wheels as long as he could see it.
“A boozefighter,” Sam Schooley said sourly as he came along the new piece of board sidewalk, cottonwood, but fine in wet weather.
Others were mad at Joseph Brander too. He sold stereoscopic views and the Cozad boys and John Robert had each bought some to be passed around the family, views that complemented each other, the photographer had said. And it seemed that they would, from the titles. But “Elephants in Indian Jungle” and “Elephants in Central Africa” turned out to be the very same pictures. The American Indian views they bought were an even greater disappointment. Johnny’s “Red Cloud, Sioux Indian and Wife,” John Robert’s “Crazy Horse and Squaw,” and Robert’s “A Pawnee Chieftain and Daughter” were all three exactly the same photograph to the last hair and bead, just pasted above different captions.
“A common cheat and blackleg!” people said.
Robert finally had to admit that they were right but it seemed to him that perhaps Mr. Brander was really an artist, anyway. No matter how hard he tried to be angry, Robert found himself looking at people, even horses, in this new way, starting with the eyes, but now seeing much more besides. Even Tabby blinking in the spring sun in Mrs. Gatewood’s store window had a new fire, although she sat on the same pile of folded overalls, carefully away from the papers of pins and needles, and the scissors and crochet hooks. He caught a sort of inner burning in the eyes of his father, and a cool remoteness in the far-focused ones of the older, the hardworking cowboys stopping by, or perhaps a wavering and a weeping if they were real old-timers and had faced too many years of wind. He noticed a sudden gleam rise sometimes in the faded eyes of his grandmother. But when he looked at his mother what he saw was the line of her throat to the poised chin, and from her nape to the top of her soft upswept hair, and with this came a sudden wateriness in his breast.
As the geese came back and the grass started the Cozad sons with their cousin and perhaps the new Owens boy or someone else their age took long rides on Saturdays, sometimes clear off north to the cedar breaks and the Powell Canyon region where Clark froze to death last winter. Sometimes they went to an old Pawnee village site, looking for arrow and spearheads and the many beads in the anthills. Once they found a broken grinding stone, worn deep by generations of corn-grinding women and girls.
On these expeditions the boys usually carried their lunches in their saddlebags or a frying pan, a little jar of lard, and some salt to cook the young cottontails or prairie chickens they shot with the 22 rifle in Johnny’s scabbard. But they didn’t talk about their guns around their mother because they made her uneasy. “I cannot approve of your carrying weapons, not with your father’s temper and only the frail judgment of youth–” she once told them. “Oh, I couldn’t bear it if you got into trouble—”
No one reminded her of what she knew, the need of selfprotection here now. The boys had nodded their sober understanding of her concern. Old Matthews had tried to teach them well. “Never draw a gun unless you mean to use it.”
But otherwise they were high-spirited as young antelope as soon as they were out of sight of town, trying tricks like reaching down and snapping off dried sunflower heads on a gallop, or picking up a handkerchief. They put their horses over washouts, if they could make the sensible creatures try it, or rode hard through prairie-dog towns, the horses dodging the holes this way and that, the boys barely staying with the saddles. Perhaps Johnny whooped off into a sudden race with John Robert, leaving the brother and his plump Darby far behind. Nor was Darby as tough or wild as the other horses, particularly Jerry Gibson’s buckskin Indian pony that some said was stolen from the Sioux and traded down to the Platte by old Doc Middleton’s gang.
But these fine days were getting rarer. The Cozad sons had to grow up under the responsibility of more and more of the bridgework and the haying to oversee. Often the two stayed at the bridge overnight, to guard against the theft of tools or of mischief against the equipment, even the pile driver itself. There were rumors, too, that somebody planned to blast the bridge out by the roots with giant powder or the new explosive, dynamite.
As the animosity against John Cozad grew, the threats against his dream, the bridge, also increased. “A lot of those men were glad enough to let me bring them out here, find free land for them because they were dead broke, and then needed help to put bread into the mouths of their families when the grasshoppers cleaned out everything. Now they have crops, a little work elsewhere, and so they think they can afford to call me a bastard, a jackleg gambler, an overbearing s. of a b.”
Anyway there was no use taking chances, both Schooley and Traber Gatewood argued. The bridge must make real progress this year and should be completed no later than the next summer. Robert saw the concern in their faces as they said this, and so he worked up the plans on paper. He sketched a map of the location and of the bridge, then made side elevations to show how the finished work was to look. He drew these carefully, to scale, and shaded the completed portions, half-shaded those in progress, and left the projected sections in bare outline. He wrote a detailed description to go with the map and the elevations and then took the whole folio out to the bridge to check it. Some of the earlier sod fills were solid in grass by now, with willows blowing along the sides, their roots to hold the earth. Some later work had the young planting and the surfaces down; several stretches, still to be widened and raised, stood naked and bare in rain-washed earth. The last sections were not yet started, the final spans to leap the stream.
It was curious how much clearer it all became, with the plans and the sketches here in his hands, how much more just drawing them had made him see. It was not only the bridge that became more solid, with more meaning. The boy lifted his dark head and looked off across the river and then back to the town and the far, far blue line of bluffs across the north. Suddenly it was all new–always there, of course, but he had never really seen it or comprehended it until today. All the valley here, the people and all, were no longer just a sort of accidental accumulation, like the leavings on a flood plain of the Platte. Even with so many of them strangers and rolling angry, suspicious eyes, suddenly they were all a part of a pattern, a part of a community as his father had always seen it, a body of people and ground and sky, with the earth as thirsting as the people felt when the rains did not come.
Spring had warmed the gentle prairie around Cozad if not the river, rising fast and cold from the snow water rolling down out of the far mountains. The first swim the Cozad boys dared take froze their naked marrow but it was very exciting. They tried standing on the bridge over the first gap between the sod sections and looked down into the gray current boiling up so high that it had to fold in upon itself to squeeze through the narrow space. One after another the winter-skinned swimmers dove in, were caught in the tow and shot through the gap, to come out sputtering in the spreading water far below, breathless, purple with cold and pounded sore. But it was a sort of test among themselves and each one had to pretend he was eager for another dive into the roaring, freezing water and then yet another, until the grandfather appeared to stand with his hands cupped to his mouth.
“Come in! There’s work to do!”
There was a great deal of work, with John Cozad away again, signing hay contracts up at Denver, Leadville, and elsewhere if the deal was good enough. In the meantime he was open to a little faro, but only with men of quality and aplomb. He hoped he would never get involved with another young fool like that Todd of Cincinnati. The wild young fellow had lost his money because he wanted to lose it, and then years later broke a man’s jaw for it in the street, the jaw of a man now with a reputation as a community builder. Young Todd should have been grateful he hadn’t fallen under the rougher mercies of a Devol, King O’Dell, or Canada Bill. They would have cleaned him out. But in those days Todd certainly would not have looked at Canada. He was a snob and no man whose come-on was a rube outfit would have attracted him, no matter how easy the rube might promise to be. Others made that mistake with Canada Bill but not Todd in those days. He liked to lose his money to a man “who looked like a genuine senator or an English lord.”
With so much work upon them when their father was gone and their mother suggesting that they put in five hours a day in reading, studying, and thought, Robert had little time for his drawing and writing, or even the diary, and that only at night. It was true that Johnny’s handwriting needed improvement and Robert’s spelling was abominable but beyond that neither believed, secretly, that he needed improvement. Yet one did not say this to Theresa Cozad or at least Robert knew he could not. Johnny, as the elder son and therefore more privileged with the mother, might, but this, too, Robert realized, one did not put into words.
Yet even with the work of the bridge and the studying, the sons found time for a little play and some critical appraisal of their surroundings. When John Cozad was away the meals Riggs served at the hotel fell off noticeably. Robert, always a little fussier about his food when his father was gone, grumbled about the meals, particularly after the swift June rise in the Platte stopped the work on the bridge and gave him time for impatience. After a few days of idleness he announced he was going to board with his grandmother.
“But our meals here are included in Mr. Riggs’ rent on the hotel,” Theresa told him. “At your grandmother’s you must pay, and out of your own pocket.”
Robert felt himself pulling into one of the sulks his father never tolerated. He wanted to say that his mother would never treat Johnny like this. But it was true that his brother would put up with the Riggs table so long as the mother did, no matter how bad it became, and so Robert paid his own board bill without protest.
Along with the normal spring flood a violent rain and windstorm hit the Platte country, driving the river even higher and blowing the pile driver over. Nothing was damaged, but the tower and the flatboat had to be pulled back upright by a long string of teams and a stout block and tackle borrowed from the railroad. Work soon started again on the north side and as the foreman, Sam Schooley, pointed out, the rains did promise crops and hay. There was a hail too, with stones big as hen’s eggs falling here and there. Coming straight down, they bounced around very foolishly and unless a window was hit or a lamb or fleeing hen there was little damage. Robert ran out with the new nine-foot bull whip that Mr. Gibson had made for him and tried his aim on the hail before the rain started. A few people watched the boy with amusement from doors and windows. But not everyone. Ed Win-chell, the new grocery and drygoodsman, had heard some of the stories about John Cozad and the bull whip that he took to people who offended him.
“Like father, like son,” Ed said as John Handley ran in out of the storm, just beating the rain coming from the west in glistening white sheets.
When John Cozad came home he ordered Riggs and his whole kit and caboodle out into the street. The man went promising revenge. Next day he opened a little hotel across the street in the old house where Goodyear, the hay contractor, used to live.
Now at last the Cozads had a little more room. They took all one end of the hotel, their sleeping quarters on the second floor, the downstairs cut into a parlor, a business office for John Cozad and Johnny, and a small den for Robert, big enough for his printing press, his desk, and his paints and papers. Now they all took their meals with Mrs. Gatewood.
It had been a very bad spring for poison ivy, as wet years could be. Many around the bridge began to itch and the bathers too, particularly those who liked to stretch out on the bank to dry off and get a little sunning. Robert’s poisoning had spread until he was feverish and sick. The doctor finally gave him sweet spirits of niter, to be diluted with equal parts of water. “It’s being used for almost everything nowadays,” the town’s new doctor said, grinning a little. “But I guess in your trouble it’s really indicated.”
The niter helped and by his fifteenth birthday Robert was healing and beginning to peel. It was a time for celebration anyway–the end of knickerbockers and a beginning of grown-up resolutions. Most of these were thrust upon him by his family, his relatives, and Mr. Schooley, but the one Robert really hoped to keep was his own, out of the memory of the dead-beat photographer, Mr. Brander, who could make so many invisible things take form before Robert’s eyes.
“Don’t let yourself be stopped by foolish little ways and mistakes that set people’s backs up against you,” he had said. “Go along with their little notions and then you can make a real stand for something important. That’s why I cultivated good manners—”
It was true about Mr. Brander’s manners, and too bad that he had turned out a petty cheat, selling mislabeled stereo views for the miserable pennies of boys. Suddenly Robert realized that the man who had told him to look for the eyes, always the eyes, was unable to keep his own resolution not to be stopped by foolish little mistakes, and that he would probably never reach his goal–never be an artist.
So he, Robert Henry Cozad, made his resolution about the small things and intended to keep it. For his family he would try to do better in manners and speech and dress. He would even try to get up earlier. Perhaps he could hold himself to these if he wrote them in his diary as a sort of commitment, but it all ended up in a scrawl because he had to run to escape his birthday licks. Johnny did overtake him and in their wrestling Robert suddenly discovered something wonderful –that finally, after years of trying, he had a good chance of throwing his brother. He felt so good about this, even after their grandmother stopped them, that he went to the office to make a proper capital entry for the new year. On this birthday he had $15.25 in his pocket. That was more than some homeseekers had when they came, many without even the $14 filing fee–grown men with families.
But that $15.25 wasn’t all. He was a creditor too. His father and Grandmother Julia and Johnny all owed him money-making almost $21 with the cash from his pocket. Later he found it came to $21 even; he had made a mistake in addition. Apparently he needed to work on his arithmetic too, as well as his spelling, because that would be another small fault that could set people’s backs up.
Still, he was happy about the $21–that meant he could afford to go in with John Robert on that $1.75 croquet set in Dr. Ogden’s drugstore window. Together they prepared the croquet ground and started to play. First Robert beat his cousin and then Johnny and Lewy Owens too. Their horses were all faster than his Darby, but he swung a truer mallet, at least for now.
The next morning the Cozad boys rode out to the bridge early to look at the flood that had stopped the work, and perhaps to help their father and Mr. Swepston. They found the two men dragging up brush, shouting that the high water had cut a dangerous hole through the first fill-in, between the bank and the first line of pilings, and that the ground was caving away, the whole fill going if it wasn’t stopped.
Johnny grabbed some boards and a hammer and ran for the hole. While Robert gathered up more lumber, his brother kicked out of his clothes and dragged one board after another into the swift, churning water and dove down near the hole with it, carrying the hammer and nails in his teeth. He got several boards and planks worked out across the bottom, fastened in place as solidly as he could manage–enough to shut out half of the water at least. But the increased surge and pressure against the boards broke the lower ones. It happened while Johnny was under the water and the sudden suck of the current caught him, dragged him halfway into the hole, thrust him hard against a plank that still held, his legs swept out underneath it, his head and shoulders forced over the top. He was caught there, bent double against the stout plank, the flood pouring over him, holding him far under.
Horrified, John Cozad and Swepston saw it happen, but they were helpless while Johnny struggled for his life out of sight below them, caught so that not even his most desperate struggles cleared the top of his head from the gray torrent washing over him.
When it seemed he must die right there in less than ten seconds more, be held over the plank until he was tom in two by the flood, Johnny made one last mighty effort to throw himself back and down. He managed to shift the thrust of the water against him just a little, enough to increase the power of it against his thighs, his legs, forcing them ahead. Suddenly he was jerked down and under the plank, the power of the flood knocking his head against one piling after another, turning him end over end and finally sweeping him through the hole and out, to whirl along like some pale log until he was drifted into shallower water and turned slowly into an eddy full of floating brush and trash and one naked body.
By now Robert and the men running along the bank could get to him, drag him out. They emptied the water from his lungs and slowly he became conscious. They got him home, worn out, battered, with his head throbbing, but the doctor was away, so they put him to bed. By night the headache was much worse, he retched and then shook as with the ague, and retched again. Theresa sent Robert to the doctor’s office for a pint of whisky and made a stiff Southern toddy. Then she piled the comforters over him and after a while he slept.
Robert sat beside his brother, up at every change of breathing, any stirring out of the troubled dreams. But after a while he dozed off to be awakened by his parents.
“Go to bed, Son,” Theresa said. “It was a hard day for you too.”
Within a week Johnny was up and able to go to the doctor to talk over his injuries and the chills that made the father uneasy, with so much consumption in the family. It would pass, the doctor thought, but now Theresa, very distraught, finally dared say what was in her heart.
“Take us away,” she begged of her husband. “Isn’t it enough now? With all the enemies you have here, you may well be killed any day. And a hundred dangers besides. I know we will never get our money back if we leave, but we almost lost our son! ”
Now for the first time John J. Cozad rose against his wife in the anger that he had turned upon so many men since he was twelve. Theresa stood still, the tilt of her head the same as for any polite reply or discussion, and before this poise, this quietness, the black eyes of the man softened and turned away.
But his determination was firm. “We stay; the rains have just begun,” he said.