prompt:
Chapter: Ivar was sitting at a cobbler's bench in the barn, mending harness
by the light of a lantern and repeating to himself the 101st Psalm.
It was only five o'clock of a mid-October day, but a storm had
come up in the afternoon, bringing black clouds, a cold wind and
torrents of rain. The old man wore his buffalo-skin coat, and
occasionally stopped to warm his fingers at the lantern. Suddenly
a woman burst into the shed, as if she had been blown in, accompanied by
a shower of rain-drops. It was Signa, wrapped in a man's overcoat
and wearing a pair of boots over her shoes. In time of trouble
Signa had come back to stay with her mistress, for she was the only
one of the maids from whom Alexandra would accept much personal
service. It was three months now since the news of the terrible
thing that had happened in Frank Shabata's orchard had first run
like a fire over the Divide. Signa and Nelse were staying on with
Alexandra until winter.

"Ivar," Signa exclaimed as she wiped the rain from her face, "do
you know where she is?"

The old man put down his cobbler's knife. "Who, the mistress?"

"Yes. She went away about three o'clock. I happened to look out
of the window and saw her going across the fields in her thin dress
and sun-hat. And now this storm has come on. I thought she was
going to Mrs. Hiller's, and I telephoned as soon as the thunder
stopped, but she had not been there. I'm afraid she is out somewhere
and will get her death of cold."

Ivar put on his cap and took up the lantern. "JA, JA, we will see.
I will hitch the boy's mare to the cart and go."

Signa followed him across the wagon-shed to the horses' stable.
She was shivering with cold and excitement. "Where do you suppose
she can be, Ivar?"

The old man lifted a set of single harness carefully from its peg.
"How should I know?"

"But you think she is at the graveyard, don't you?" Signa persisted.
"So do I. Oh, I wish she would be more like herself! I can't
believe it's Alexandra Bergson come to this, with no head about
anything. I have to tell her when to eat and when to go to bed."

"Patience, patience, sister," muttered Ivar as he settled the bit
in the horse's mouth. "When the eyes of the flesh are shut, the
eyes of the spirit are open. She will have a message from those
who are gone, and that will bring her peace. Until then we must
bear with her. You and I are the only ones who have weight with
her. She trusts us."

"How awful it's been these last three months." Signa held the
lantern so that he could see to buckle the straps. "It don't seem
right that we must all be so miserable. Why do we all have to be
punished? Seems to me like good times would never come again."

Ivar expressed himself in a deep sigh, but said nothing. He stooped
and took a sandburr from his toe.

"Ivar," Signa asked suddenly, "will you tell me why you go barefoot?
All the time I lived here in the house I wanted to ask you. Is it
for a penance, or what?"

"No, sister. It is for the indulgence of the body. From my youth
up I have had a strong, rebellious body, and have been subject to
every kind of temptation. Even in age my temptations are prolonged.
It was necessary to make some allowances; and the feet, as I
understand it, are free members. There is no divine prohibition
for them in the Ten Commandments. The hands, the tongue, the eyes,
the heart, all the bodily desires we are commanded to subdue; but
the feet are free members. I indulge them without harm to any
one, even to trampling in filth when my desires are low. They are
quickly cleaned again."

Signa did not laugh. She looked thoughtful as she followed Ivar out
to the wagon-shed and held the shafts up for him, while he backed
in the mare and buckled the hold-backs. "You have been a good
friend to the mistress, Ivar," she murmured.

"And you, God be with you," replied Ivar as he clambered into the
cart and put the lantern under the oilcloth lap-cover. "Now for
a ducking, my girl," he said to the mare, gathering up the reins.

As they emerged from the shed, a stream of water, running off the
thatch, struck the mare on the neck. She tossed her head indignantly,
then struck out bravely on the soft ground, slipping back again and
again as she climbed the hill to the main road. Between the rain
and the darkness Ivar could see very little, so he let Emil's mare
have the rein, keeping her head in the right direction. When the
ground was level, he turned her out of the dirt road upon the sod,
where she was able to trot without slipping.

Before Ivar reached the graveyard, three miles from the house,
the storm had spent itself, and the downpour had died into a soft,
dripping rain. The sky and the land were a dark smoke color, and
seemed to be coming together, like two waves. When Ivar stopped
at the gate and swung out his lantern, a white figure rose from
beside John Bergson's white stone.

The old man sprang to the ground and shuffled toward the gate
calling, "Mistress, mistress!"

Alexandra hurried to meet him and put her hand on his shoulder.
"TYST! Ivar. There's nothing to be worried about. I'm sorry if
I've scared you all. I didn't notice the storm till it was on me,
and I couldn't walk against it. I'm glad you've come. I am so
tired I didn't know how I'd ever get home."

Ivar swung the lantern up so that it shone in her face. "GUD!
You are enough to frighten us, mistress. You look like a drowned
woman. How could you do such a thing!"

Groaning and mumbling he led her out of the gate and helped her
into the cart, wrapping her in the dry blankets on which he had
been sitting.

Alexandra smiled at his solicitude. "Not much use in that, Ivar.
You will only shut the wet in. I don't feel so cold now; but I'm
heavy and numb. I'm glad you came."

Ivar turned the mare and urged her into a sliding trot. Her feet
sent back a continual spatter of mud.

Alexandra spoke to the old man as they jogged along through the
sullen gray twilight of the storm. "Ivar, I think it has done me
good to get cold clear through like this, once. I don't believe
I shall suffer so much any more. When you get so near the dead,
they seem more real than the living. Worldly thoughts leave one.
Ever since Emil died, I've suffered so when it rained. Now that
I've been out in it with him, I shan't dread it. After you once
get cold clear through, the feeling of the rain on you is sweet.
It seems to bring back feelings you had when you were a baby. It
carries you back into the dark, before you were born; you can't
see things, but they come to you, somehow, and you know them and
aren't afraid of them. Maybe it's like that with the dead. If
they feel anything at all, it's the old things, before they were
born, that comfort people like the feeling of their own bed does
when they are little."

"Mistress," said Ivar reproachfully, "those are bad thoughts. The
dead are in Paradise."

Then he hung his head, for he did not believe that Emil was in
Paradise.

When they got home, Signa had a fire burning in the sitting-room
stove. She undressed Alexandra and gave her a hot footbath, while
Ivar made ginger tea in the kitchen. When Alexandra was in bed,
wrapped in hot blankets, Ivar came in with his tea and saw that
she drank it. Signa asked permission to sleep on the slat lounge
outside her door. Alexandra endured their attentions patiently,
but she was glad when they put out the lamp and left her. As she
lay alone in the dark, it occurred to her for the first time that
perhaps she was actually tired of life. All the physical operations
of life seemed difficult and painful. She longed to be free from
her own body, which ached and was so heavy. And longing itself
was heavy: she yearned to be free of that.

As she lay with her eyes closed, she had again, more vividly than
for many years, the old illusion of her girlhood, of being lifted
and carried lightly by some one very strong. He was with her
a long while this time, and carried her very far, and in his arms
she felt free from pain. When he laid her down on her bed again,
she opened her eyes, and, for the first time in her life, she saw
him, saw him clearly, though the room was dark, and his face was
covered. He was standing in the doorway of her room. His white
cloak was thrown over his face, and his head was bent a little
forward. His shoulders seemed as strong as the foundations of the
world. His right arm, bared from the elbow, was dark and gleaming,
like bronze, and she knew at once that it was the arm of the
mightiest of all lovers. She knew at last for whom it was she had
waited, and where he would carry her. That, she told herself, was
very well. Then she went to sleep.

Alexandra wakened in the morning with nothing worse than a hard cold
and a stiff shoulder. She kept her bed for several days, and it
was during that time that she formed a resolution to go to Lincoln
to see Frank Shabata. Ever since she last saw him in the courtroom,
Frank's haggard face and wild eyes had haunted her. The trial had
lasted only three days. Frank had given himself up to the police
in Omaha and pleaded guilty of killing without malice and without
premeditation. The gun was, of course, against him, and the judge
had given him the full sentence,--ten years. He had now been in
the State Penitentiary for a month.

Frank was the only one, Alexandra told herself, for whom anything
could be done. He had been less in the wrong than any of them,
and he was paying the heaviest penalty. She often felt that she
herself had been more to blame than poor Frank. From the time the
Shabatas had first moved to the neighboring farm, she had omitted
no opportunity of throwing Marie and Emil together. Because she
knew Frank was surly about doing little things to help his wife,
she was always sending Emil over to spade or plant or carpenter
for Marie. She was glad to have Emil see as much as possible of an
intelligent, city-bred girl like their neighbor; she noticed that
it improved his manners. She knew that Emil was fond of Marie, but
it had never occurred to her that Emil's feeling might be different
from her own. She wondered at herself now, but she had never
thought of danger in that direction. If Marie had been unmarried,--oh,
yes! Then she would have kept her eyes open. But the mere fact that
she was Shabata's wife, for Alexandra, settled everything. That she was
beautiful, impulsive, barely two years older than Emil, these facts had
had no weight with Alexandra. Emil was a good boy, and only bad boys
ran after married women.

Now, Alexandra could in a measure realize that Marie was, after
all, Marie; not merely a "married woman." Sometimes, when Alexandra
thought of her, it was with an aching tenderness. The moment she
had reached them in the orchard that morning, everything was clear
to her. There was something about those two lying in the grass,
something in the way Marie had settled her cheek on Emil's shoulder,
that told her everything. She wondered then how they could have
helped loving each other; how she could have helped knowing that
they must. Emil's cold, frowning face, the girl's content--Alexandra
had felt awe of them, even in the first shock of her grief.

The idleness of those days in bed, the relaxation of body which
attended them, enabled Alexandra to think more calmly than she had
done since Emil's death. She and Frank, she told herself, were left
out of that group of friends who had been overwhelmed by disaster.
She must certainly see Frank Shabata. Even in the courtroom her
heart had grieved for him. He was in a strange country, he had no
kinsmen or friends, and in a moment he had ruined his life. Being
what he was, she felt, Frank could not have acted otherwise. She
could understand his behavior more easily than she could understand
Marie's. Yes, she must go to Lincoln to see Frank Shabata.

The day after Emil's funeral, Alexandra had written to Carl Linstrum;
a single page of notepaper, a bare statement of what had happened.
She was not a woman who could write much about such a thing, and
about her own feelings she could never write very freely. She knew
that Carl was away from post-offices, prospecting somewhere in the
interior. Before he started he had written her where he expected
to go, but her ideas about Alaska were vague. As the weeks went
by and she heard nothing from him, it seemed to Alexandra that
her heart grew hard against Carl. She began to wonder whether she
would not do better to finish her life alone. What was left of
life seemed unimportant.

Late in the afternoon of a brilliant October day, Alexandra Bergson,
dressed in a black suit and traveling-hat, alighted at the Burlington
depot in Lincoln. She drove to the Lindell Hotel, where she had
stayed two years ago when she came up for Emil's Commencement. In
spite of her usual air of sureness and self-possession, Alexandra
felt ill at ease in hotels, and she was glad, when she went to the
clerk's desk to register, that there were not many people in the
lobby. She had her supper early, wearing her hat and black jacket
down to the dining-room and carrying her handbag. After supper
she went out for a walk.

It was growing dark when she reached the university campus. She
did not go into the grounds, but walked slowly up and down the
stone walk outside the long iron fence, looking through at the young
men who were running from one building to another, at the lights
shining from the armory and the library. A squad of cadets were
going through their drill behind the armory, and the commands of
their young officer rang out at regular intervals, so sharp and
quick that Alexandra could not understand them. Two stalwart girls
came down the library steps and out through one of the iron gates.
As they passed her, Alexandra was pleased to hear them speaking
Bohemian to each other. Every few moments a boy would come running
down the flagged walk and dash out into the street as if he were
rushing to announce some wonder to the world. Alexandra felt a
great tenderness for them all. She wished one of them would stop
and speak to her. She wished she could ask them whether they had
known Emil.

As she lingered by the south gate she actually did encounter one
of the boys. He had on his drill cap and was swinging his books
at the end of a long strap. It was dark by this time; he did not
see her and ran against her. He snatched off his cap and stood
bareheaded and panting. "I'm awfully sorry," he said in a bright,
clear voice, with a rising inflection, as if he expected her to
say something.

"Oh, it was my fault!" said Alexandra eagerly. "Are you an old
student here, may I ask?"

"No, ma'am. I'm a Freshie, just off the farm. Cherry County.
Were you hunting somebody?"

"No, thank you. That is--" Alexandra wanted to detain him. "That
is, I would like to find some of my brother's friends. He graduated
two years ago."

"Then you'd have to try the Seniors, wouldn't you? Let's see; I
don't know any of them yet, but there'll be sure to be some of them
around the library. That red building, right there," he pointed.

"Thank you, I'll try there," said Alexandra lingeringly.

"Oh, that's all right! Good-night." The lad clapped his cap on
his head and ran straight down Eleventh Street. Alexandra looked
after him wistfully.

She walked back to her hotel unreasonably comforted. "What a nice
voice that boy had, and how polite he was. I know Emil was always
like that to women." And again, after she had undressed and was
standing in her nightgown, brushing her long, heavy hair by the
electric light, she remembered him and said to herself, "I don't
think I ever heard a nicer voice than that boy had. I hope he
will get on well here. Cherry County; that's where the hay is so
fine, and the coyotes can scratch down to water."

At nine o'clock the next morning Alexandra presented herself
at the warden's office in the State Penitentiary. The warden was
a German, a ruddy, cheerful-looking man who had formerly been a
harness-maker. Alexandra had a letter to him from the German banker
in Hanover. As he glanced at the letter, Mr. Schwartz put away
his pipe.

"That big Bohemian, is it? Sure, he's gettin' along fine," said
Mr. Schwartz cheerfully.

"I am glad to hear that. I was afraid he might be quarrelsome and
get himself into more trouble. Mr. Schwartz, if you have time, I
would like to tell you a little about Frank Shabata, and why I am
interested in him."

The warden listened genially while she told him briefly something
of Frank's history and character, but he did not seem to find
anything unusual in her account.

"Sure, I'll keep an eye on him. We'll take care of him all right,"
he said, rising. "You can talk to him here, while I go to see to
things in the kitchen. I'll have him sent in. He ought to be done
washing out his cell by this time. We have to keep 'em clean, you
know."

The warden paused at the door, speaking back over his shoulder to
a pale young man in convicts' clothes who was seated at a desk in
the corner, writing in a big ledger.

"Bertie, when 1037 is brought in, you just step out and give this
lady a chance to talk."

The young man bowed his head and bent over his ledger again.

When Mr. Schwartz disappeared, Alexandra thrust her black-edged
handkerchief nervously into her handbag. Coming out on the streetcar
she had not had the least dread of meeting Frank. But since she
had been here the sounds and smells in the corridor, the look of the
men in convicts' clothes who passed the glass door of the warden's
office, affected her unpleasantly.

The warden's clock ticked, the young convict's pen scratched
busily in the big book, and his sharp shoulders were shaken every
few seconds by a loose cough which he tried to smother. It was easy
to see that he was a sick man. Alexandra looked at him timidly,
but he did not once raise his eyes. He wore a white shirt under
his striped jacket, a high collar, and a necktie, very carefully
tied. His hands were thin and white and well cared for, and he had
a seal ring on his little finger. When he heard steps approaching
in the corridor, he rose, blotted his book, put his pen in the rack,
and left the room without raising his eyes. Through the door he
opened a guard came in, bringing Frank Shabata.

"You the lady that wanted to talk to 1037? Here he is. Be on your
good behavior, now. He can set down, lady," seeing that Alexandra
remained standing. "Push that white button when you're through
with him, and I'll come."

The guard went out and Alexandra and Frank were left alone.

Alexandra tried not to see his hideous clothes. She tried to look
straight into his face, which she could scarcely believe was his.
It was already bleached to a chalky gray. His lips were colorless,
his fine teeth looked yellowish. He glanced at Alexandra sullenly,
blinked as if he had come from a dark place, and one eyebrow twitched
continually. She felt at once that this interview was a terrible
ordeal to him. His shaved head, showing the conformation of his
skull, gave him a criminal look which he had not had during the
trial.

Alexandra held out her hand. "Frank," she said, her eyes filling
suddenly, "I hope you'll let me be friendly with you. I understand
how you did it. I don't feel hard toward you. They were more to
blame than you."

Frank jerked a dirty blue handkerchief from his trousers pocket.
He had begun to cry. He turned away from Alexandra. "I never
did mean to do not'ing to dat woman," he muttered. "I never mean
to do not'ing to dat boy. I ain't had not'ing ag'in' dat boy. I
always like dat boy fine. An' then I find him--" He stopped. The
feeling went out of his face and eyes. He dropped into a chair
and sat looking stolidly at the floor, his hands hanging loosely
between his knees, the handkerchief lying across his striped leg.
He seemed to have stirred up in his mind a disgust that had paralyzed
his faculties.

"I haven't come up here to blame you, Frank. I think they were
more to blame than you." Alexandra, too, felt benumbed.

Frank looked up suddenly and stared out of the office window. "I
guess dat place all go to hell what I work so hard on," he said
with a slow, bitter smile. "I not care a damn." He stopped and
rubbed the palm of his hand over the light bristles on his head
with annoyance. "I no can t'ink without my hair," he complained.
"I forget English. We not talk here, except swear."

Alexandra was bewildered. Frank seemed to have undergone a change
of personality. There was scarcely anything by which she could
recognize her handsome Bohemian neighbor. He seemed, somehow, not
altogether human. She did not know what to say to him.

"You do not feel hard to me, Frank?" she asked at last.

Frank clenched his fist and broke out in excitement. "I not feel
hard at no woman. I tell you I not that kind-a man. I never hit
my wife. No, never I hurt her when she devil me something awful!"
He struck his fist down on the warden's desk so hard that he
afterward stroked it absently. A pale pink crept over his neck and
face. "Two, t'ree years I know dat woman don' care no more 'bout
me, Alexandra Bergson. I know she after some other man. I know
her, oo-oo! An' I ain't never hurt her. I never would-a done
dat, if I ain't had dat gun along. I don' know what in hell make
me take dat gun. She always say I ain't no man to carry gun. If
she been in dat house, where she ought-a been--But das a foolish
talk."

Frank rubbed his head and stopped suddenly, as he had stopped
before. Alexandra felt that there was something strange in the way
he chilled off, as if something came up in him that extinguished
his power of feeling or thinking.

"Yes, Frank," she said kindly. "I know you never meant to hurt
Marie."

Frank smiled at her queerly. His eyes filled slowly with tears.
"You know, I most forgit dat woman's name. She ain't got no name
for me no more. I never hate my wife, but dat woman what make me
do dat--Honest to God, but I hate her! I no man to fight. I
don' want to kill no boy and no woman. I not care how many men
she take under dat tree. I no care for not'ing but dat fine boy
I kill, Alexandra Bergson. I guess I go crazy sure 'nough."

Alexandra remembered the little yellow cane she had found in Frank's
clothes-closet. She thought of how he had come to this country a
gay young fellow, so attractive that the prettiest Bohemian girl
in Omaha had run away with him. It seemed unreasonable that life
should have landed him in such a place as this. She blamed Marie
bitterly. And why, with her happy, affectionate nature, should
she have brought destruction and sorrow to all who had loved her,
even to poor old Joe Tovesky, the uncle who used to carry her about
so proudly when she was a little girl? That was the strangest thing
of all. Was there, then, something wrong in being warm-hearted
and impulsive like that? Alexandra hated to think so. But there
was Emil, in the Norwegian graveyard at home, and here was Frank
Shabata. Alexandra rose and took him by the hand.

"Frank Shabata, I am never going to stop trying until I get you
pardoned. I'll never give the Governor any peace. I know I can
get you out of this place."

Frank looked at her distrustfully, but he gathered confidence from
her face. "Alexandra," he said earnestly, "if I git out-a here,
I not trouble dis country no more. I go back where I come from;
see my mother."

Alexandra tried to withdraw her hand, but Frank held on to it
nervously. He put out his finger and absently touched a button
on her black jacket. "Alexandra," he said in a low tone, looking
steadily at the button, "you ain' t'ink I use dat girl awful bad
before--"

"No, Frank. We won't talk about that," Alexandra said, pressing
his hand. "I can't help Emil now, so I'm going to do what I can
for you. You know I don't go away from home often, and I came up
here on purpose to tell you this."

The warden at the glass door looked in inquiringly. Alexandra
nodded, and he came in and touched the white button on his desk.
The guard appeared, and with a sinking heart Alexandra saw Frank
led away down the corridor. After a few words with Mr. Schwartz,
she left the prison and made her way to the street-car. She had
refused with horror the warden's cordial invitation to "go through
the institution." As the car lurched over its uneven roadbed, back
toward Lincoln, Alexandra thought of how she and Frank had been
wrecked by the same storm and of how, although she could come out
into the sunlight, she had not much more left in her life than
he. She remembered some lines from a poem she had liked in her
schooldays:--

   Henceforth the world will only be
   A wider prison-house to me,--

and sighed. A disgust of life weighed upon her heart; some such
feeling as had twice frozen Frank Shabata's features while they
talked together. She wished she were back on the Divide.

When Alexandra entered her hotel, the clerk held up one finger
and beckoned to her. As she approached his desk, he handed her a
telegram. Alexandra took the yellow envelope and looked at it in
perplexity, then stepped into the elevator without opening it. As
she walked down the corridor toward her room, she reflected that
she was, in a manner, immune from evil tidings. On reaching her
room she locked the door, and sitting down on a chair by the dresser,
opened the telegram. It was from Hanover, and it read:--

   Arrived Hanover last night. Shall wait here until you come.
   Please hurry. CARL LINSTRUM.

Alexandra put her head down on the dresser and burst into tears.

The next afternoon Carl and Alexandra were walking across the fields
from Mrs. Hiller's. Alexandra had left Lincoln after midnight,
and Carl had met her at the Hanover station early in the morning.
After they reached home, Alexandra had gone over to Mrs. Hiller's
to leave a little present she had bought for her in the city. They
stayed at the old lady's door but a moment, and then came out to
spend the rest of the afternoon in the sunny fields.

Alexandra had taken off her black traveling suit and put on
a white dress; partly because she saw that her black clothes made
Carl uncomfortable and partly because she felt oppressed by them
herself. They seemed a little like the prison where she had worn
them yesterday, and to be out of place in the open fields. Carl
had changed very little. His cheeks were browner and fuller. He
looked less like a tired scholar than when he went away a year ago,
but no one, even now, would have taken him for a man of business.
His soft, lustrous black eyes, his whimsical smile, would be less
against him in the Klondike than on the Divide. There are always
dreamers on the frontier.

Carl and Alexandra had been talking since morning. Her letter had
never reached him. He had first learned of her misfortune from
a San Francisco paper, four weeks old, which he had picked up in
a saloon, and which contained a brief account of Frank Shabata's
trial. When he put down the paper, he had already made up his
mind that he could reach Alexandra as quickly as a letter could;
and ever since he had been on the way; day and night, by the fastest
boats and trains he could catch. His steamer had been held back
two days by rough weather.

As they came out of Mrs. Hiller's garden they took up their talk
again where they had left it.

"But could you come away like that, Carl, without arranging things?
Could you just walk off and leave your business?" Alexandra asked.

Carl laughed. "Prudent Alexandra! You see, my dear, I happen to
have an honest partner. I trust him with everything. In fact,
it's been his enterprise from the beginning, you know. I'm in it
only because he took me in. I'll have to go back in the spring.
Perhaps you will want to go with me then. We haven't turned up
millions yet, but we've got a start that's worth following. But
this winter I'd like to spend with you. You won't feel that we
ought to wait longer, on Emil's account, will you, Alexandra?"

Alexandra shook her head. "No, Carl; I don't feel that way about
it. And surely you needn't mind anything Lou and Oscar say now.
They are much angrier with me about Emil, now, than about you.
They say it was all my fault. That I ruined him by sending him to
college."

"No, I don't care a button for Lou or Oscar. The moment I knew
you were in trouble, the moment I thought you might need me, it all
looked different. You've always been a triumphant kind of person."
Carl hesitated, looking sidewise at her strong, full figure. "But
you do need me now, Alexandra?"

She put her hand on his arm. "I needed you terribly when it
happened, Carl. I cried for you at night. Then everything seemed
to get hard inside of me, and I thought perhaps I should never care
for you again. But when I got your telegram yesterday, then--then
it was just as it used to be. You are all I have in the world,
you know."

Carl pressed her hand in silence. They were passing the Shabatas'
empty house now, but they avoided the orchard path and took one
that led over by the pasture pond.

"Can you understand it, Carl?" Alexandra murmured. "I have had
nobody but Ivar and Signa to talk to. Do talk to me. Can you
understand it? Could you have believed that of Marie Tovesky? I
would have been cut to pieces, little by little, before I would
have betrayed her trust in me!"

Carl looked at the shining spot of water before them. "Maybe she
was cut to pieces, too, Alexandra. I am sure she tried hard; they
both did. That was why Emil went to Mexico, of course. And he was
going away again, you tell me, though he had only been home three
weeks. You remember that Sunday when I went with Emil up to
the French Church fair? I thought that day there was some kind
of feeling, something unusual, between them. I meant to talk to
you about it. But on my way back I met Lou and Oscar and got so
angry that I forgot everything else. You mustn't be hard on them,
Alexandra. Sit down here by the pond a minute. I want to tell
you something."

They sat down on the grass-tufted bank and Carl told her how he had
seen Emil and Marie out by the pond that morning, more than a year
ago, and how young and charming and full of grace they had seemed
to him. "It happens like that in the world sometimes, Alexandra,"
he added earnestly. "I've seen it before. There are women who
spread ruin around them through no fault of theirs, just by being
too beautiful, too full of life and love. They can't help it.
People come to them as people go to a warm fire in winter. I used
to feel that in her when she was a little girl. Do you remember
how all the Bohemians crowded round her in the store that day, when
she gave Emil her candy? You remember those yellow sparks in her
eyes?"

Alexandra sighed. "Yes. People couldn't help loving her. Poor
Frank does, even now, I think; though he's got himself in such
a tangle that for a long time his love has been bitterer than his
hate. But if you saw there was anything wrong, you ought to have
told me, Carl."

Carl took her hand and smiled patiently. "My dear, it was something
one felt in the air, as you feel the spring coming, or a storm in
summer. I didn't SEE anything. Simply, when I was with those two
young things, I felt my blood go quicker, I felt--how shall I say
it?--an acceleration of life. After I got away, it was all too
delicate, too intangible, to write about."

Alexandra looked at him mournfully. "I try to be more liberal
about such things than I used to be. I try to realize that we are
not all made alike. Only, why couldn't it have been Raoul Marcel,
or Jan Smirka? Why did it have to be my boy?"

"Because he was the best there was, I suppose. They were both the
best you had here."

The sun was dropping low in the west when the two friends rose and
took the path again. The straw-stacks were throwing long shadows,
the owls were flying home to the prairie-dog town. When they came
to the corner where the pastures joined, Alexandra's twelve young
colts were galloping in a drove over the brow of the hill.

"Carl," said Alexandra, "I should like to go up there with you in
the spring. I haven't been on the water since we crossed the ocean,
when I was a little girl. After we first came out here I used
to dream sometimes about the shipyard where father worked, and a
little sort of inlet, full of masts." Alexandra paused. After a
moment's thought she said, "But you would never ask me to go away
for good, would you?"

"Of course not, my dearest. I think I know how you feel about this
country as well as you do yourself." Carl took her hand in both
his own and pressed it tenderly.

"Yes, I still feel that way, though Emil is gone. When I was on
the train this morning, and we got near Hanover, I felt something
like I did when I drove back with Emil from the river that time,
in the dry year. I was glad to come back to it. I've lived here
a long time. There is great peace here, Carl, and freedom....
I thought when I came out of that prison, where poor Frank is,
that I should never feel free again. But I do, here." Alexandra
took a deep breath and looked off into the red west.

"You belong to the land," Carl murmured, "as you have always said.
Now more than ever."

"Yes, now more than ever. You remember what you once said about
the graveyard, and the old story writing itself over? Only it is
we who write it, with the best we have."

They paused on the last ridge of the pasture, overlooking the
house and the windmill and the stables that marked the site of John
Bergson's homestead. On every side the brown waves of the earth
rolled away to meet the sky.

"Lou and Oscar can't see those things," said Alexandra suddenly.
"Suppose I do will my land to their children, what difference will
that make? The land belongs to the future, Carl; that's the way
it seems to me. How many of the names on the county clerk's plat
will be there in fifty years? I might as well try to will the
sunset over there to my brother's children. We come and go, but
the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand
it are the people who own it--for a little while."

Carl looked at her wonderingly. She was still gazing into the west,
and in her face there was that exalted serenity that sometimes came
to her at moments of deep feeling. The level rays of the sinking
sun shone in her clear eyes.

"Why are you thinking of such things now, Alexandra?"

"I had a dream before I went to Lincoln--But I will tell you about
that afterward, after we are married. It will never come true,
now, in the way I thought it might." She took Carl's arm and they
walked toward the gate. "How many times we have walked this path
together, Carl. How many times we will walk it again! Does it seem
to you like coming back to your own place? Do you feel at peace
with the world here? I think we shall be very happy. I haven't
any fears. I think when friends marry, they are safe. We don't
suffer like--those young ones." Alexandra ended with a sigh.

They had reached the gate. Before Carl opened it, he drew Alexandra
to him and kissed her softly, on her lips and on her eyes.

She leaned heavily on his shoulder. "I am tired," she murmured.
"I have been very lonely, Carl."

They went into the house together, leaving the Divide behind them,
under the evening star. Fortunate country, that is one day to
receive hearts like Alexandra's into its bosom, to give them out
again in the yellow wheat, in the rustling corn, in the shining
eyes of youth!

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: Shortly after Emil's death, Signa worries to Ivar that Alexandra has gone out in the rain. Ivar knows he will find her at the graveyard and hitches up a horse. Signa asks him why he doesn't wear shoes and he explains that the Bible governs all the body but the feet, so he lets them do as they wish. Signa responds to this enigmatic reply by saying that he is a good friend to his mistress. At the graveyard Ivar sees Alexandra rise from her father's grave. She tells Ivar that she feels better about Emil after the rain: she feels as though being dead must be just like before you were born. Ivar reproaches her for doubting that the dead are in heaven, but than stops, for he does not believe these dead are in heaven. At home, Signa comforts Alexandra and puts her to bed as if she were a child. As Alexandra drifts to sleep, she has her old dream. She feels that she opens her eyes and sees her rescuer in a white cloak with his face covered. "His right arm, bared from the elbow, was dark and gleaming, like bronze, and she knew at once that it was the arm of the mightiest of all lovers." The next morning Alexandra wakes with a bad cold, which keeps her in bed for several days. She decides to go see Frank Shabata, who is serving ten years in Lincoln. His trial had been quick, for he had given himself up to the police and confessed. Alexandra feels that Frank is "less in the wrong than any of them, and...was paying the heaviest penalty," and feels him to be her last link to the people she cared for most. She has written Carl Linstrum without receiving an answer-probably due to his remote location-and her heart slowly closes to him. Alexandra blames herself for encouraging Emil and Marie's friendship, recalling that she had thought of Marie as a married woman beyond the possibility of a love affair. At the same time, Alexandra knows that the two couldn't have helped loving each other. In Lincoln, Alexandra stays at the hotel she used when Emil graduated from college. After a day of searching foolishly for students who might have known Emil, Alexandra goes to see Frank the next morning. She tries to tell the warden, Mr. Schwartz, about Frank's situation, but he finds nothing unusual in it. Alexandra waits in the miserable prison while Mr. Schwartz fetches Frank. When he appears, Frank's appearance-shaved head and prison clothes-horrifies Alexandra. He look like a criminal and stares with glassy eyes. Alexandra expresses her sympathy for him as Frank rambles oddly, declaring that he doesn't blame Marie. Alexandra both blames and exculpates Marie, believing that her sin is unforgivable yet unable to think of Marie as wrong. As she rises to leave, Alexandra tells Frank that she is going to pursue a governor's pardon. Frank catches her hand and asks her whether she thinks he drove Marie to it, but Alexandra cuts him off. Back at her hotel, Alexandra receives a telegram from Carl Linstrum, who returned after reading about the murder in a newspaper. Early the next morning she meets Carl in Hanover and they return to her home. Carl explains to Alexandra that he is doing well as a prospector and wishes Alexandra to come with him to Alaska. She tells him she doesn't want to wait any longer, and they decide that they need each other, despite her brother's insults and oppositions. Alexandra asks Carl if he understands how Marie and Emil's love happened, because she still cannot. Carl says that he's sure Emil and Marie tried terribly hard to resist temptation, and that that's why Emil left for Mexico and was leaving again. He insists that she isn't to blame for cultivating their connection; she merely "spread ruin around them through no fault of " and consoles her in her grief and confusion. Alexandra tells Carl that she will follow him to Alaska in the spring, but that she wants to come back to the Divide, saying that despite her misfortunes the land still makes her feel "free." She thinks aloud that Lou and Oscar don't feel the way that she does about the land, but she might as well leave it to their children, for the land truly belongs only to those who "love it and understand it." She looks out into the sun and when Carl asks what she's thinking, she tells him she's thinking of a dream she had before, one that can't come true now, which she will tell him about after their marriage. She says that she knows they will be happy, for their marriage is based on friendship, not the feelings of "those young ones." Carl reaches out and kisses her lips and eyes. She leans on him and tells him she's tired and she's been very lonely. They walk into her house together, out of the Divide.


prompt:
Chapter: One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover,
anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown
away. A mist of fine snowflakes was curling and eddying about the
cluster of low drab buildings huddled on the gray prairie, under
a gray sky. The dwelling-houses were set about haphazard on the
tough prairie sod; some of them looked as if they had been moved in
overnight, and others as if they were straying off by themselves,
headed straight for the open plain. None of them had any appearance
of permanence, and the howling wind blew under them as well as over
them. The main street was a deeply rutted road, now frozen hard,
which ran from the squat red railway station and the grain "elevator"
at the north end of the town to the lumber yard and the horse pond
at the south end. On either side of this road straggled two uneven
rows of wooden buildings; the general merchandise stores, the two
banks, the drug store, the feed store, the saloon, the post-office.
The board sidewalks were gray with trampled snow, but at two o'clock
in the afternoon the shopkeepers, having come back from dinner,
were keeping well behind their frosty windows. The children were
all in school, and there was nobody abroad in the streets but a
few rough-looking countrymen in coarse overcoats, with their long
caps pulled down to their noses. Some of them had brought their
wives to town, and now and then a red or a plaid shawl flashed out
of one store into the shelter of another. At the hitch-bars along
the street a few heavy work-horses, harnessed to farm wagons,
shivered under their blankets. About the station everything was
quiet, for there would not be another train in until night.

On the sidewalk in front of one of the stores sat a little Swede
boy, crying bitterly. He was about five years old. His black cloth
coat was much too big for him and made him look like a little old
man. His shrunken brown flannel dress had been washed many times
and left a long stretch of stocking between the hem of his skirt
and the tops of his clumsy, copper-toed shoes. His cap was pulled
down over his ears; his nose and his chubby cheeks were chapped and
red with cold. He cried quietly, and the few people who hurried
by did not notice him. He was afraid to stop any one, afraid to
go into the store and ask for help, so he sat wringing his long
sleeves and looking up a telegraph pole beside him, whimpering, "My
kitten, oh, my kitten! Her will fweeze!" At the top of the pole
crouched a shivering gray kitten, mewing faintly and clinging
desperately to the wood with her claws. The boy had been left
at the store while his sister went to the doctor's office, and in
her absence a dog had chased his kitten up the pole. The little
creature had never been so high before, and she was too frightened
to move. Her master was sunk in despair. He was a little country
boy, and this village was to him a very strange and perplexing
place, where people wore fine clothes and had hard hearts. He
always felt shy and awkward here, and wanted to hide behind things
for fear some one might laugh at him. Just now, he was too unhappy
to care who laughed. At last he seemed to see a ray of hope: his
sister was coming, and he got up and ran toward her in his heavy
shoes.

His sister was a tall, strong girl, and she walked rapidly and
resolutely, as if she knew exactly where she was going and what she
was going to do next. She wore a man's long ulster (not as if it
were an affliction, but as if it were very comfortable and belonged
to her; carried it like a young soldier), and a round plush cap,
tied down with a thick veil. She had a serious, thoughtful face,
and her clear, deep blue eyes were fixed intently on the distance,
without seeming to see anything, as if she were in trouble. She
did not notice the little boy until he pulled her by the coat.
Then she stopped short and stooped down to wipe his wet face.

"Why, Emil! I told you to stay in the store and not to come out.
What is the matter with you?"

"My kitten, sister, my kitten! A man put her out, and a dog chased
her up there." His forefinger, projecting from the sleeve of his
coat, pointed up to the wretched little creature on the pole.

"Oh, Emil! Didn't I tell you she'd get us into trouble of some
kind, if you brought her? What made you tease me so? But there,
I ought to have known better myself." She went to the foot of the
pole and held out her arms, crying, "Kitty, kitty, kitty," but the
kitten only mewed and faintly waved its tail. Alexandra turned
away decidedly. "No, she won't come down. Somebody will have to
go up after her. I saw the Linstrums' wagon in town. I'll go and
see if I can find Carl. Maybe he can do something. Only you must
stop crying, or I won't go a step. Where's your comforter? Did
you leave it in the store? Never mind. Hold still, till I put
this on you."

She unwound the brown veil from her head and tied it about his
throat. A shabby little traveling man, who was just then coming out
of the store on his way to the saloon, stopped and gazed stupidly
at the shining mass of hair she bared when she took off her veil;
two thick braids, pinned about her head in the German way, with a
fringe of reddish-yellow curls blowing out from under her cap. He
took his cigar out of his mouth and held the wet end between the
fingers of his woolen glove. "My God, girl, what a head of hair!"
he exclaimed, quite innocently and foolishly. She stabbed him with
a glance of Amazonian fierceness and drew in her lower lip--most
unnecessary severity. It gave the little clothing drummer such a
start that he actually let his cigar fall to the sidewalk and went
off weakly in the teeth of the wind to the saloon. His hand was
still unsteady when he took his glass from the bartender. His
feeble flirtatious instincts had been crushed before, but never
so mercilessly. He felt cheap and ill-used, as if some one had
taken advantage of him. When a drummer had been knocking about in
little drab towns and crawling across the wintry country in dirty
smoking-cars, was he to be blamed if, when he chanced upon a fine
human creature, he suddenly wished himself more of a man?

While the little drummer was drinking to recover his nerve, Alexandra
hurried to the drug store as the most likely place to find Carl
Linstrum. There he was, turning over a portfolio of chromo "studies"
which the druggist sold to the Hanover women who did china-painting.
Alexandra explained her predicament, and the boy followed her to
the corner, where Emil still sat by the pole.

"I'll have to go up after her, Alexandra. I think at the depot
they have some spikes I can strap on my feet. Wait a minute." Carl
thrust his hands into his pockets, lowered his head, and darted up
the street against the north wind. He was a tall boy of fifteen,
slight and narrow-chested. When he came back with the spikes,
Alexandra asked him what he had done with his overcoat.

"I left it in the drug store. I couldn't climb in it, anyhow.
Catch me if I fall, Emil," he called back as he began his ascent.
Alexandra watched him anxiously; the cold was bitter enough on the
ground. The kitten would not budge an inch. Carl had to go to
the very top of the pole, and then had some difficulty in tearing
her from her hold. When he reached the ground, he handed the cat
to her tearful little master. "Now go into the store with her,
Emil, and get warm." He opened the door for the child. "Wait a
minute, Alexandra. Why can't I drive for you as far as our place?
It's getting colder every minute. Have you seen the doctor?"

"Yes. He is coming over to-morrow. But he says father can't
get better; can't get well." The girl's lip trembled. She looked
fixedly up the bleak street as if she were gathering her strength
to face something, as if she were trying with all her might to
grasp a situation which, no matter how painful, must be met and
dealt with somehow. The wind flapped the skirts of her heavy coat
about her.

Carl did not say anything, but she felt his sympathy. He, too, was
lonely. He was a thin, frail boy, with brooding dark eyes, very
quiet in all his movements. There was a delicate pallor in his thin
face, and his mouth was too sensitive for a boy's. The lips had
already a little curl of bitterness and skepticism. The two friends
stood for a few moments on the windy street corner, not speaking
a word, as two travelers, who have lost their way, sometimes stand
and admit their perplexity in silence. When Carl turned away he
said, "I'll see to your team." Alexandra went into the store to
have her purchases packed in the egg-boxes, and to get warm before
she set out on her long cold drive.

When she looked for Emil, she found him sitting on a step of the
staircase that led up to the clothing and carpet department. He
was playing with a little Bohemian girl, Marie Tovesky, who was
tying her handkerchief over the kitten's head for a bonnet. Marie
was a stranger in the country, having come from Omaha with her mother
to visit her uncle, Joe Tovesky. She was a dark child, with brown
curly hair, like a brunette doll's, a coaxing little red mouth, and
round, yellow-brown eyes. Every one noticed her eyes; the brown
iris had golden glints that made them look like gold-stone, or, in
softer lights, like that Colorado mineral called tiger-eye.

The country children thereabouts wore their dresses to their
shoe-tops, but this city child was dressed in what was then called
the "Kate Greenaway" manner, and her red cashmere frock, gathered
full from the yoke, came almost to the floor. This, with her
poke bonnet, gave her the look of a quaint little woman. She had
a white fur tippet about her neck and made no fussy objections when
Emil fingered it admiringly. Alexandra had not the heart to take
him away from so pretty a playfellow, and she let them tease the
kitten together until Joe Tovesky came in noisily and picked up
his little niece, setting her on his shoulder for every one to see.
His children were all boys, and he adored this little creature.
His cronies formed a circle about him, admiring and teasing the
little girl, who took their jokes with great good nature. They
were all delighted with her, for they seldom saw so pretty and
carefully nurtured a child. They told her that she must choose
one of them for a sweetheart, and each began pressing his suit and
offering her bribes; candy, and little pigs, and spotted calves.
She looked archly into the big, brown, mustached faces, smelling
of spirits and tobacco, then she ran her tiny forefinger delicately
over Joe's bristly chin and said, "Here is my sweetheart."

The Bohemians roared with laughter, and Marie's uncle hugged her
until she cried, "Please don't, Uncle Joe! You hurt me." Each
of Joe's friends gave her a bag of candy, and she kissed them all
around, though she did not like country candy very well. Perhaps
that was why she bethought herself of Emil. "Let me down, Uncle
Joe," she said, "I want to give some of my candy to that nice little
boy I found." She walked graciously over to Emil, followed by her
lusty admirers, who formed a new circle and teased the little boy
until he hid his face in his sister's skirts, and she had to scold
him for being such a baby.

The farm people were making preparations to start for home. The
women were checking over their groceries and pinning their big red
shawls about their heads. The men were buying tobacco and candy
with what money they had left, were showing each other new boots and
gloves and blue flannel shirts. Three big Bohemians were drinking
raw alcohol, tinctured with oil of cinnamon. This was said to
fortify one effectually against the cold, and they smacked their
lips after each pull at the flask. Their volubility drowned every
other noise in the place, and the overheated store sounded of
their spirited language as it reeked of pipe smoke, damp woolens,
and kerosene.

Carl came in, wearing his overcoat and carrying a wooden box with
a brass handle. "Come," he said, "I've fed and watered your team,
and the wagon is ready." He carried Emil out and tucked him down
in the straw in the wagonbox. The heat had made the little boy
sleepy, but he still clung to his kitten.

"You were awful good to climb so high and get my kitten, Carl.
When I get big I'll climb and get little boys' kittens for them,"
he murmured drowsily. Before the horses were over the first hill,
Emil and his cat were both fast asleep.

Although it was only four o'clock, the winter day was fading. The
road led southwest, toward the streak of pale, watery light that
glimmered in the leaden sky. The light fell upon the two sad young
faces that were turned mutely toward it: upon the eyes of the girl,
who seemed to be looking with such anguished perplexity into the
future; upon the sombre eyes of the boy, who seemed already to be
looking into the past. The little town behind them had vanished as
if it had never been, had fallen behind the swell of the prairie,
and the stern frozen country received them into its bosom. The
homesteads were few and far apart; here and there a windmill gaunt
against the sky, a sod house crouching in a hollow. But the great
fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little
beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes.
It was from facing this vast hardness that the boy's mouth had
become so bitter; because he felt that men were too weak to make
any mark here, that the land wanted to be let alone, to preserve
its own fierce strength, its peculiar, savage kind of beauty, its
uninterrupted mournfulness.

The wagon jolted along over the frozen road. The two friends had
less to say to each other than usual, as if the cold had somehow
penetrated to their hearts.

"Did Lou and Oscar go to the Blue to cut wood to-day?" Carl asked.

"Yes. I'm almost sorry I let them go, it's turned so cold. But
mother frets if the wood gets low." She stopped and put her hand
to her forehead, brushing back her hair. "I don't know what is to
become of us, Carl, if father has to die. I don't dare to think
about it. I wish we could all go with him and let the grass grow
back over everything."

Carl made no reply. Just ahead of them was the Norwegian graveyard,
where the grass had, indeed, grown back over everything, shaggy and
red, hiding even the wire fence. Carl realized that he was not a
very helpful companion, but there was nothing he could say.

"Of course," Alexandra went on, steadying her voice a little, "the
boys are strong and work hard, but we've always depended so on
father that I don't see how we can go ahead. I almost feel as if
there were nothing to go ahead for."

"Does your father know?"

"Yes, I think he does. He lies and counts on his fingers all day.
I think he is trying to count up what he is leaving for us. It's
a comfort to him that my chickens are laying right on through the
cold weather and bringing in a little money. I wish we could keep
his mind off such things, but I don't have much time to be with
him now."

"I wonder if he'd like to have me bring my magic lantern over some
evening?"

Alexandra turned her face toward him. "Oh, Carl! Have you got
it?"

"Yes. It's back there in the straw. Didn't you notice the box
I was carrying? I tried it all morning in the drug-store cellar,
and it worked ever so well, makes fine big pictures."

"What are they about?"

"Oh, hunting pictures in Germany, and Robinson Crusoe and funny
pictures about cannibals. I'm going to paint some slides for it
on glass, out of the Hans Andersen book."

Alexandra seemed actually cheered. There is often a good deal of
the child left in people who have had to grow up too soon. "Do
bring it over, Carl. I can hardly wait to see it, and I'm sure it
will please father. Are the pictures colored? Then I know he'll
like them. He likes the calendars I get him in town. I wish I
could get more. You must leave me here, mustn't you? It's been
nice to have company."

Carl stopped the horses and looked dubiously up at the black sky.
"It's pretty dark. Of course the horses will take you home, but
I think I'd better light your lantern, in case you should need it."

He gave her the reins and climbed back into the wagon-box, where
he crouched down and made a tent of his overcoat. After a dozen
trials he succeeded in lighting the lantern, which he placed in
front of Alexandra, half covering it with a blanket so that the
light would not shine in her eyes. "Now, wait until I find my box.
Yes, here it is. Good-night, Alexandra. Try not to worry." Carl
sprang to the ground and ran off across the fields toward the Linstrum
homestead. "Hoo, hoo-o-o-o!" he called back as he disappeared over
a ridge and dropped into a sand gully. The wind answered him like
an echo, "Hoo, hoo-o-o-o-o-o!" Alexandra drove off alone. The
rattle of her wagon was lost in the howling of the wind, but her
lantern, held firmly between her feet, made a moving point of light
along the highway, going deeper and deeper into the dark country.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: Welcome to Part I, which is on-the-nosedly titled "The Wild Land." The novel opens with a description of Hanover, a made-up town somewhere on the Nebraska prairie. We're not exactly talking prime real estate, here. Think Wizard of Oz, just without all those Technicolor parts. It's winter, it's freezing cold, and everything is gray, gray, gray. The narrator depicts Hanover as a town that was built on the fly, without "any appearance of permanence;" houses are scattered here and there . The children are in school, and only a few wayward figures can be seen walking about. A little country boy, Emil Bergson, is crying in the cold. He's wearing what looks like grandpa's hand-me-downs. Turns out his little kitten has climbed up a telegraph pole and can't get down. Emil isn't used to being in town, and he's impatient for his sister, Alexandra Bergson, to come back from the doctor's office. Alexandra returns, wearing a long man's overcoat "like a young soldier" . She asks Emil why he's crying and he explains about the kitten. Alexandra decides they need some help. She goes to find her friend Carl Linstrum, to see if he can do the job. When she takes off the veil she's wearing and wraps it around her brother's head, a "shabby little traveling man" makes a comment about her golden locks. She gives him a fierce, don't-mess-with-me look. She finds Carl in the drug store and brings him to the rescue scene. Carl climbs up the pole and brings down the kitten. He asks Alexandra whether she's been to the doctor. Alexandra holds back tears, saying that the doctor doesn't think her father has much time left to live. Carl is a "thin, frail boy, with brooding dark eyes" . Though Carl doesn't respond to Alexandra, the narrator lets us know he sympathizes with her. Carl offers to give Alexandra a ride as far as his house. Alexandra looks for Emil and finds him playing with a little Bohemian girl, Marie Tovesky, in the country store. Marie is described as a little girl from the city, who looks like a "brunette doll" . She's the center of attention, and especially loved by her uncle, Joe Tovesky. Alexandra lets Marie and Emil continue to play with the kitten, until Marie's uncle comes to take her. Before she leaves, she tries to give Emil some candy, but he hides his face shyly in his sister's skirts. Carl comes back to take Alexandra and Emil home. The horse drawn wagon takes the three of them away from the town and onto the frozen prairie, toward their homestead. Alexandra talks to Carl about her dying dad. She mentions how worried he is about leaving his children and wife behind in such difficult times. Carl offers to bring over his magic lantern to help cheer everyone up. Alexandra is excited by the idea. Carl lights the lantern on the wagon, then gets off and walks home. Alexandra and Emil drive the rest of the way to the Bergson homestead.


prompt:
Chapter: On one of the ridges of that wintry waste stood the low log house
in which John Bergson was dying. The Bergson homestead was easier
to find than many another, because it overlooked Norway Creek, a
shallow, muddy stream that sometimes flowed, and sometimes stood
still, at the bottom of a winding ravine with steep, shelving sides
overgrown with brush and cottonwoods and dwarf ash. This creek
gave a sort of identity to the farms that bordered upon it. Of all
the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human
landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening. The
houses on the Divide were small and were usually tucked away
in low places; you did not see them until you came directly upon
them. Most of them were built of the sod itself, and were only
the unescapable ground in another form. The roads were but faint
tracks in the grass, and the fields were scarcely noticeable. The
record of the plow was insignificant, like the feeble scratches on
stone left by prehistoric races, so indeterminate that they may,
after all, be only the markings of glaciers, and not a record of
human strivings.

In eleven long years John Bergson had made but little impression
upon the wild land he had come to tame. It was still a wild thing
that had its ugly moods; and no one knew when they were likely to
come, or why. Mischance hung over it. Its Genius was unfriendly
to man. The sick man was feeling this as he lay looking out of
the window, after the doctor had left him, on the day following
Alexandra's trip to town. There it lay outside his door, the same
land, the same lead-colored miles. He knew every ridge and draw
and gully between him and the horizon. To the south, his plowed
fields; to the east, the sod stables, the cattle corral, the
pond,--and then the grass.

Bergson went over in his mind the things that had held him back.
One winter his cattle had perished in a blizzard. The next summer
one of his plow horses broke its leg in a prairiedog hole and had
to be shot. Another summer he lost his hogs from cholera, and
a valuable stallion died from a rattlesnake bite. Time and again
his crops had failed. He had lost two children, boys, that came
between Lou and Emil, and there had been the cost of sickness and
death. Now, when he had at last struggled out of debt, he was
going to die himself. He was only forty-six, and had, of course,
counted upon more time.

Bergson had spent his first five years on the Divide getting into
debt, and the last six getting out. He had paid off his mortgages
and had ended pretty much where he began, with the land. He owned
exactly six hundred and forty acres of what stretched outside his
door; his own original homestead and timber claim, making three
hundred and twenty acres, and the half-section adjoining, the
homestead of a younger brother who had given up the fight, gone
back to Chicago to work in a fancy bakery and distinguish himself
in a Swedish athletic club. So far John had not attempted to
cultivate the second half-section, but used it for pasture land,
and one of his sons rode herd there in open weather.

John Bergson had the Old-World belief that land, in itself, is
desirable. But this land was an enigma. It was like a horse that
no one knows how to break to harness, that runs wild and kicks
things to pieces. He had an idea that no one understood how to
farm it properly, and this he often discussed with Alexandra. Their
neighbors, certainly, knew even less about farming than he did.
Many of them had never worked on a farm until they took up their
homesteads. They had been HANDWERKERS at home; tailors, locksmiths,
joiners, cigar-makers, etc. Bergson himself had worked in a
shipyard.

For weeks, John Bergson had been thinking about these things. His
bed stood in the sitting-room, next to the kitchen. Through the
day, while the baking and washing and ironing were going on, the
father lay and looked up at the roof beams that he himself had
hewn, or out at the cattle in the corral. He counted the cattle
over and over. It diverted him to speculate as to how much weight
each of the steers would probably put on by spring. He often called
his daughter in to talk to her about this. Before Alexandra was
twelve years old she had begun to be a help to him, and as she grew
older he had come to depend more and more upon her resourcefulness
and good judgment. His boys were willing enough to work, but when
he talked with them they usually irritated him. It was Alexandra
who read the papers and followed the markets, and who learned by
the mistakes of their neighbors. It was Alexandra who could always
tell about what it had cost to fatten each steer, and who could
guess the weight of a hog before it went on the scales closer than
John Bergson himself. Lou and Oscar were industrious, but he could
never teach them to use their heads about their work.

Alexandra, her father often said to himself, was like her
grandfather; which was his way of saying that she was intelligent.
John Bergson's father had been a shipbuilder, a man of considerable
force and of some fortune. Late in life he married a second time,
a Stockholm woman of questionable character, much younger than he,
who goaded him into every sort of extravagance. On the shipbuilder's
part, this marriage was an infatuation, the despairing folly of
a powerful man who cannot bear to grow old. In a few years his
unprincipled wife warped the probity of a lifetime. He speculated,
lost his own fortune and funds entrusted to him by poor seafaring
men, and died disgraced, leaving his children nothing. But when all
was said, he had come up from the sea himself, had built up a proud
little business with no capital but his own skill and foresight, and
had proved himself a man. In his daughter, John Bergson recognized
the strength of will, and the simple direct way of thinking things
out, that had characterized his father in his better days. He
would much rather, of course, have seen this likeness in one of
his sons, but it was not a question of choice. As he lay there
day after day he had to accept the situation as it was, and to be
thankful that there was one among his children to whom he could
entrust the future of his family and the possibilities of his
hard-won land.

The winter twilight was fading. The sick man heard his wife strike
a match in the kitchen, and the light of a lamp glimmered through
the cracks of the door. It seemed like a light shining far away.
He turned painfully in his bed and looked at his white hands, with
all the work gone out of them. He was ready to give up, he felt.
He did not know how it had come about, but he was quite willing to
go deep under his fields and rest, where the plow could not find
him. He was tired of making mistakes. He was content to leave the
tangle to other hands; he thought of his Alexandra's strong ones.

"DOTTER," he called feebly, "DOTTER!" He heard her quick step and
saw her tall figure appear in the doorway, with the light of the
lamp behind her. He felt her youth and strength, how easily she
moved and stooped and lifted. But he would not have had it again
if he could, not he! He knew the end too well to wish to begin
again. He knew where it all went to, what it all became.

His daughter came and lifted him up on his pillows. She called
him by an old Swedish name that she used to call him when she was
little and took his dinner to him in the shipyard.

"Tell the boys to come here, daughter. I want to speak to them."

"They are feeding the horses, father. They have just come back
from the Blue. Shall I call them?"

He sighed. "No, no. Wait until they come in. Alexandra, you will
have to do the best you can for your brothers. Everything will
come on you."

"I will do all I can, father."

"Don't let them get discouraged and go off like Uncle Otto. I want
them to keep the land."

"We will, father. We will never lose the land."

There was a sound of heavy feet in the kitchen. Alexandra went
to the door and beckoned to her brothers, two strapping boys of
seventeen and nineteen. They came in and stood at the foot of the
bed. Their father looked at them searchingly, though it was too
dark to see their faces; they were just the same boys, he told
himself, he had not been mistaken in them. The square head and
heavy shoulders belonged to Oscar, the elder. The younger boy was
quicker, but vacillating.

"Boys," said the father wearily, "I want you to keep the land
together and to be guided by your sister. I have talked to her
since I have been sick, and she knows all my wishes. I want no
quarrels among my children, and so long as there is one house there
must be one head. Alexandra is the oldest, and she knows my wishes.
She will do the best she can. If she makes mistakes, she will not
make so many as I have made. When you marry, and want a house of
your own, the land will be divided fairly, according to the courts.
But for the next few years you will have it hard, and you must all
keep together. Alexandra will manage the best she can."

Oscar, who was usually the last to speak, replied because he
was the older, "Yes, father. It would be so anyway, without your
speaking. We will all work the place together."

"And you will be guided by your sister, boys, and be good brothers
to her, and good sons to your mother? That is good. And Alexandra
must not work in the fields any more. There is no necessity now.
Hire a man when you need help. She can make much more with her
eggs and butter than the wages of a man. It was one of my mistakes
that I did not find that out sooner. Try to break a little more
land every year; sod corn is good for fodder. Keep turning the
land, and always put up more hay than you need. Don't grudge your
mother a little time for plowing her garden and setting out fruit
trees, even if it comes in a busy season. She has been a good
mother to you, and she has always missed the old country."

When they went back to the kitchen the boys sat down silently at
the table. Throughout the meal they looked down at their plates
and did not lift their red eyes. They did not eat much, although
they had been working in the cold all day, and there was a rabbit
stewed in gravy for supper, and prune pies.

John Bergson had married beneath him, but he had married a good
housewife. Mrs. Bergson was a fair-skinned, corpulent woman, heavy
and placid like her son, Oscar, but there was something comfortable
about her; perhaps it was her own love of comfort. For eleven years
she had worthily striven to maintain some semblance of household
order amid conditions that made order very difficult. Habit
was very strong with Mrs. Bergson, and her unremitting efforts to
repeat the routine of her old life among new surroundings had done
a great deal to keep the family from disintegrating morally and
getting careless in their ways. The Bergsons had a log house, for
instance, only because Mrs. Bergson would not live in a sod house.
She missed the fish diet of her own country, and twice every summer
she sent the boys to the river, twenty miles to the southward, to
fish for channel cat. When the children were little she used to
load them all into the wagon, the baby in its crib, and go fishing
herself.

Alexandra often said that if her mother were cast upon a desert
island, she would thank God for her deliverance, make a garden,
and find something to preserve. Preserving was almost a mania with
Mrs. Bergson. Stout as she was, she roamed the scrubby banks of
Norway Creek looking for fox grapes and goose plums, like a wild
creature in search of prey. She made a yellow jam of the insipid
ground-cherries that grew on the prairie, flavoring it with lemon
peel; and she made a sticky dark conserve of garden tomatoes. She
had experimented even with the rank buffalo-pea, and she could
not see a fine bronze cluster of them without shaking her head and
murmuring, "What a pity!" When there was nothing more to preserve,
she began to pickle. The amount of sugar she used in these processes
was sometimes a serious drain upon the family resources. She was
a good mother, but she was glad when her children were old enough
not to be in her way in the kitchen. She had never quite forgiven
John Bergson for bringing her to the end of the earth; but, now
that she was there, she wanted to be let alone to reconstruct her
old life in so far as that was possible. She could still take some
comfort in the world if she had bacon in the cave, glass jars on
the shelves, and sheets in the press. She disapproved of all her
neighbors because of their slovenly housekeeping, and the women
thought her very proud. Once when Mrs. Bergson, on her way to
Norway Creek, stopped to see old Mrs. Lee, the old woman hid in
the haymow "for fear Mis' Bergson would catch her barefoot."

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: The narrator tells us some more about the Bergson homestead. Not exactly home sweet home, here--John Bergson, the father of Alexandra andEmil, has been toiling away in this wasteland for 11 years, without much to show for it. Plain and simple, the prairie land is "unfriendly to man" . Old man Bergson is on his deathbed, recounting all the hardships he's experienced in Nebraska. Only 46 years old and having just recently paid off his debts, his life is about to end. Like the rest of the farmers on the prairie, John's not a farmer by trade, but had a different job back in the Old World. He used to work in a shipyard. These aren't people who know a whole lot about farming, and let's face it: the prairie is no place for amateurs. John thinks about his daughter, Alexandra, and his two older sons, Lou and Oscar. Alexandra is the one who knows what's up on the farm, the one he's always been able to count on; she's smart. His two boys are hardworking, but dim-witted. Alexandra reminds him of his own father, a shipbuilder in Stockholm. He was a smart man who amassed a fortune in his lifetime, before squandering it all on his much younger, second wife. Then again, John would prefer to have a son who reflected some of his father's qualities. But he is happy to know that Alexandra will continue his hard work. John calls for his daughter in Swedish. He tells her in so many words that all the responsibility for the farm will fall on her when he's gone. He tells her never to abandon the land, no matter how bad things get. Lou and Oscar come in to see their father, too. John tells them to avoid fighting with each other and to listen to their sister, the eldest child. He tells them that the land will be divided fairly, according to the law, when they decide to marry. Finally, he tells them to hire a man to work the fields, so Alexandra can tend to her butter and eggs. And he tells them not to begrudge their mother her garden and fruit trees, which she plants to remind herself of the old country. The narrator turns to John Bergson's wife. Mrs. Bergson is lower class than her husband, John. She's a "corpulent woman, heavy and placid," who longs for Sweden, having never forgiven her husband for bringing her all the way to Nebraska. She insisted on living in a log house, instead of the sod houses most of their neighbors built. She tends to look down on other women, while they think she's proud. When she's not thinking about the homeland, she's preserving and pickling everything she can find.


prompt:
Chapter: One Sunday afternoon in July, six months after John Bergson's death,
Carl was sitting in the doorway of the Linstrum kitchen, dreaming
over an illustrated paper, when he heard the rattle of a wagon along
the hill road. Looking up he recognized the Bergsons' team, with
two seats in the wagon, which meant they were off for a pleasure
excursion. Oscar and Lou, on the front seat, wore their cloth hats
and coats, never worn except on Sundays, and Emil, on the second
seat with Alexandra, sat proudly in his new trousers, made from a
pair of his father's, and a pink-striped shirt, with a wide ruffled
collar. Oscar stopped the horses and waved to Carl, who caught up
his hat and ran through the melon patch to join them.

"Want to go with us?" Lou called. "We're going to Crazy Ivar's to
buy a hammock."

"Sure." Carl ran up panting, and clambering over the wheel sat
down beside Emil. "I've always wanted to see Ivar's pond. They
say it's the biggest in all the country. Aren't you afraid to go
to Ivar's in that new shirt, Emil? He might want it and take it
right off your back."

Emil grinned. "I'd be awful scared to go," he admitted, "if you
big boys weren't along to take care of me. Did you ever hear him
howl, Carl? People say sometimes he runs about the country howling
at night because he is afraid the Lord will destroy him. Mother
thinks he must have done something awful wicked."

Lou looked back and winked at Carl. "What would you do, Emil, if
you was out on the prairie by yourself and seen him coming?"

Emil stared. "Maybe I could hide in a badger-hole," he suggested
doubtfully.

"But suppose there wasn't any badger-hole," Lou persisted. "Would
you run?"

"No, I'd be too scared to run," Emil admitted mournfully, twisting
his fingers. "I guess I'd sit right down on the ground and say my
prayers."

The big boys laughed, and Oscar brandished his whip over the broad
backs of the horses.

"He wouldn't hurt you, Emil," said Carl persuasively. "He came
to doctor our mare when she ate green corn and swelled up most as
big as the water-tank. He petted her just like you do your cats.
I couldn't understand much he said, for he don't talk any English,
but he kept patting her and groaning as if he had the pain himself,
and saying, 'There now, sister, that's easier, that's better!'"

Lou and Oscar laughed, and Emil giggled delightedly and looked up
at his sister.

"I don't think he knows anything at all about doctoring," said
Oscar scornfully. "They say when horses have distemper he takes
the medicine himself, and then prays over the horses."

Alexandra spoke up. "That's what the Crows said, but he cured
their horses, all the same. Some days his mind is cloudy, like.
But if you can get him on a clear day, you can learn a great deal
from him. He understands animals. Didn't I see him take the horn
off the Berquist's cow when she had torn it loose and went crazy?
She was tearing all over the place, knocking herself against things.
And at last she ran out on the roof of the old dugout and her legs
went through and there she stuck, bellowing. Ivar came running
with his white bag, and the moment he got to her she was quiet and
let him saw her horn off and daub the place with tar."

Emil had been watching his sister, his face reflecting the sufferings
of the cow. "And then didn't it hurt her any more?" he asked.

Alexandra patted him. "No, not any more. And in two days they
could use her milk again."

The road to Ivar's homestead was a very poor one. He had settled
in the rough country across the county line, where no one lived but
some Russians,--half a dozen families who dwelt together in one long
house, divided off like barracks. Ivar had explained his choice
by saying that the fewer neighbors he had, the fewer temptations.
Nevertheless, when one considered that his chief business was
horse-doctoring, it seemed rather short-sighted of him to live in the
most inaccessible place he could find. The Bergson wagon lurched
along over the rough hummocks and grass banks, followed the bottom
of winding draws, or skirted the margin of wide lagoons, where the
golden coreopsis grew up out of the clear water and the wild ducks
rose with a whirr of wings.

Lou looked after them helplessly. "I wish I'd brought my gun,
anyway, Alexandra," he said fretfully. "I could have hidden it
under the straw in the bottom of the wagon."

"Then we'd have had to lie to Ivar. Besides, they say he can smell
dead birds. And if he knew, we wouldn't get anything out of him,
not even a hammock. I want to talk to him, and he won't talk sense
if he's angry. It makes him foolish."

Lou sniffed. "Whoever heard of him talking sense, anyhow! I'd
rather have ducks for supper than Crazy Ivar's tongue."

Emil was alarmed. "Oh, but, Lou, you don't want to make him mad!
He might howl!"

They all laughed again, and Oscar urged the horses up the crumbling
side of a clay bank. They had left the lagoons and the red grass
behind them. In Crazy Ivar's country the grass was short and gray,
the draws deeper than they were in the Bergsons' neighborhood,
and the land was all broken up into hillocks and clay ridges. The
wild flowers disappeared, and only in the bottom of the draws and
gullies grew a few of the very toughest and hardiest: shoestring,
and ironweed, and snow-on-the-mountain.

"Look, look, Emil, there's Ivar's big pond!" Alexandra pointed to
a shining sheet of water that lay at the bottom of a shallow draw.
At one end of the pond was an earthen dam, planted with green willow
bushes, and above it a door and a single window were set into the
hillside. You would not have seen them at all but for the reflection
of the sunlight upon the four panes of window-glass. And that was
all you saw. Not a shed, not a corral, not a well, not even a path
broken in the curly grass. But for the piece of rusty stovepipe
sticking up through the sod, you could have walked over the roof
of Ivar's dwelling without dreaming that you were near a human
habitation. Ivar had lived for three years in the clay bank,
without defiling the face of nature any more than the coyote that
had lived there before him had done.

When the Bergsons drove over the hill, Ivar was sitting in the
doorway of his house, reading the Norwegian Bible. He was a queerly
shaped old man, with a thick, powerful body set on short bow-legs.
His shaggy white hair, falling in a thick mane about his ruddy
cheeks, made him look older than he was. He was barefoot, but
he wore a clean shirt of unbleached cotton, open at the neck. He
always put on a clean shirt when Sunday morning came round, though
he never went to church. He had a peculiar religion of his own
and could not get on with any of the denominations. Often he did
not see anybody from one week's end to another. He kept a calendar,
and every morning he checked off a day, so that he was never in
any doubt as to which day of the week it was. Ivar hired himself
out in threshing and corn-husking time, and he doctored sick animals
when he was sent for. When he was at home, he made hammocks out
of twine and committed chapters of the Bible to memory.

Ivar found contentment in the solitude he had sought out for himself.
He disliked the litter of human dwellings: the broken food, the
bits of broken china, the old wash-boilers and tea-kettles thrown
into the sunflower patch. He preferred the cleanness and tidiness of
the wild sod. He always said that the badgers had cleaner houses
than people, and that when he took a housekeeper her name would
be Mrs. Badger. He best expressed his preference for his wild
homestead by saying that his Bible seemed truer to him there. If
one stood in the doorway of his cave, and looked off at the rough
land, the smiling sky, the curly grass white in the hot sunlight;
if one listened to the rapturous song of the lark, the drumming of
the quail, the burr of the locust against that vast silence, one
understood what Ivar meant.

On this Sunday afternoon his face shone with happiness. He closed
the book on his knee, keeping the place with his horny finger, and
repeated softly:--

  He sendeth the springs into the valleys, which run among the hills;

  They give drink to every beast of the field; the wild asses quench
  their thirst.

  The trees of the Lord are full of sap; the cedars of Lebanon which
  he hath planted;

  Where the birds make their nests: as for the stork, the fir trees
  are her house.

  The high hills are a refuge for the wild goats; and the rocks for
  the conies.

Before he opened his Bible again, Ivar heard the Bergsons' wagon
approaching, and he sprang up and ran toward it.

"No guns, no guns!" he shouted, waving his arms distractedly.

"No, Ivar, no guns," Alexandra called reassuringly.

He dropped his arms and went up to the wagon, smiling amiably and
looking at them out of his pale blue eyes.

"We want to buy a hammock, if you have one," Alexandra explained,
"and my little brother, here, wants to see your big pond, where so
many birds come."

Ivar smiled foolishly, and began rubbing the horses' noses and
feeling about their mouths behind the bits. "Not many birds just
now. A few ducks this morning; and some snipe come to drink. But
there was a crane last week. She spent one night and came back the
next evening. I don't know why. It is not her season, of course.
Many of them go over in the fall. Then the pond is full of strange
voices every night."

Alexandra translated for Carl, who looked thoughtful. "Ask him,
Alexandra, if it is true that a sea gull came here once. I have
heard so."

She had some difficulty in making the old man understand.

He looked puzzled at first, then smote his hands together as he
remembered. "Oh, yes, yes! A big white bird with long wings and
pink feet. My! what a voice she had! She came in the afternoon
and kept flying about the pond and screaming until dark. She was
in trouble of some sort, but I could not understand her. She was
going over to the other ocean, maybe, and did not know how far it
was. She was afraid of never getting there. She was more mournful
than our birds here; she cried in the night. She saw the light
from my window and darted up to it. Maybe she thought my house
was a boat, she was such a wild thing. Next morning, when the sun
rose, I went out to take her food, but she flew up into the sky
and went on her way." Ivar ran his fingers through his thick hair.
"I have many strange birds stop with me here. They come from very
far away and are great company. I hope you boys never shoot wild
birds?"

Lou and Oscar grinned, and Ivar shook his bushy head. "Yes, I know
boys are thoughtless. But these wild things are God's birds. He
watches over them and counts them, as we do our cattle; Christ says
so in the New Testament."

"Now, Ivar," Lou asked, "may we water our horses at your pond and
give them some feed? It's a bad road to your place."

"Yes, yes, it is." The old man scrambled about and began to loose
the tugs. "A bad road, eh, girls? And the bay with a colt at
home!"

Oscar brushed the old man aside. "We'll take care of the horses,
Ivar. You'll be finding some disease on them. Alexandra wants to
see your hammocks."

Ivar led Alexandra and Emil to his little cave house. He had but
one room, neatly plastered and whitewashed, and there was a wooden
floor. There was a kitchen stove, a table covered with oilcloth,
two chairs, a clock, a calendar, a few books on the window-shelf;
nothing more. But the place was as clean as a cupboard.

"But where do you sleep, Ivar?" Emil asked, looking about.

Ivar unslung a hammock from a hook on the wall; in it was rolled
a buffalo robe. "There, my son. A hammock is a good bed, and in
winter I wrap up in this skin. Where I go to work, the beds are
not half so easy as this."

By this time Emil had lost all his timidity. He thought a cave a
very superior kind of house. There was something pleasantly unusual
about it and about Ivar. "Do the birds know you will be kind to
them, Ivar? Is that why so many come?" he asked.

Ivar sat down on the floor and tucked his feet under him. "See,
little brother, they have come from a long way, and they are very
tired. From up there where they are flying, our country looks dark
and flat. They must have water to drink and to bathe in before
they can go on with their journey. They look this way and that,
and far below them they see something shining, like a piece of glass
set in the dark earth. That is my pond. They come to it and are
not disturbed. Maybe I sprinkle a little corn. They tell the other
birds, and next year more come this way. They have their roads up
there, as we have down here."

Emil rubbed his knees thoughtfully. "And is that true, Ivar, about
the head ducks falling back when they are tired, and the hind ones
taking their place?"

"Yes. The point of the wedge gets the worst of it; they cut the
wind. They can only stand it there a little while--half an hour,
maybe. Then they fall back and the wedge splits a little, while
the rear ones come up the middle to the front. Then it closes up
and they fly on, with a new edge. They are always changing like
that, up in the air. Never any confusion; just like soldiers who
have been drilled."

Alexandra had selected her hammock by the time the boys came up
from the pond. They would not come in, but sat in the shade of
the bank outside while Alexandra and Ivar talked about the birds
and about his housekeeping, and why he never ate meat, fresh or
salt.

Alexandra was sitting on one of the wooden chairs, her arms resting
on the table. Ivar was sitting on the floor at her feet. "Ivar,"
she said suddenly, beginning to trace the pattern on the oilcloth
with her forefinger, "I came to-day more because I wanted to talk
to you than because I wanted to buy a hammock."

"Yes?" The old man scraped his bare feet on the plank floor.

"We have a big bunch of hogs, Ivar. I wouldn't sell in the spring,
when everybody advised me to, and now so many people are losing
their hogs that I am frightened. What can be done?"

Ivar's little eyes began to shine. They lost their vagueness.

"You feed them swill and such stuff? Of course! And sour milk?
Oh, yes! And keep them in a stinking pen? I tell you, sister,
the hogs of this country are put upon! They become unclean, like
the hogs in the Bible. If you kept your chickens like that, what
would happen? You have a little sorghum patch, maybe? Put a fence
around it, and turn the hogs in. Build a shed to give them shade,
a thatch on poles. Let the boys haul water to them in barrels,
clean water, and plenty. Get them off the old stinking ground, and
do not let them go back there until winter. Give them only grain
and clean feed, such as you would give horses or cattle. Hogs do
not like to be filthy."

The boys outside the door had been listening. Lou nudged his
brother. "Come, the horses are done eating. Let's hitch up and
get out of here. He'll fill her full of notions. She'll be for
having the pigs sleep with us, next."

Oscar grunted and got up. Carl, who could not understand what Ivar
said, saw that the two boys were displeased. They did not mind
hard work, but they hated experiments and could never see the use
of taking pains. Even Lou, who was more elastic than his older
brother, disliked to do anything different from their neighbors.
He felt that it made them conspicuous and gave people a chance to
talk about them.

Once they were on the homeward road, the boys forgot their ill-humor
and joked about Ivar and his birds. Alexandra did not propose any
reforms in the care of the pigs, and they hoped she had forgotten
Ivar's talk. They agreed that he was crazier than ever, and would
never be able to prove up on his land because he worked it so little.
Alexandra privately resolved that she would have a talk with Ivar
about this and stir him up. The boys persuaded Carl to stay for
supper and go swimming in the pasture pond after dark.

That evening, after she had washed the supper dishes, Alexandra
sat down on the kitchen doorstep, while her mother was mixing the
bread. It was a still, deep-breathing summer night, full of the
smell of the hay fields. Sounds of laughter and splashing came
up from the pasture, and when the moon rose rapidly above the bare
rim of the prairie, the pond glittered like polished metal, and
she could see the flash of white bodies as the boys ran about the
edge, or jumped into the water. Alexandra watched the shimmering
pool dreamily, but eventually her eyes went back to the sorghum
patch south of the barn, where she was planning to make her new
pig corral.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: John Bergson has been dead for six months. Carl Linstrum is at home, daydreaming in the kitchen, when he sees the Bergson children coming over the hill in their horse-drawn wagon. When Carl runs up to them, Lou calls out, saying they're heading over to Crazy Ivar's to buy a hammock. Carl climbs aboard. Lou tries to scare Emil, asking him what he'd do if he were alone on the prairie and saw Ivar coming for him. Carl comforts him by telling him that Ivar is harmless, and knows how to cure animals by talking to them. Oscar doubts he knows anything about doctoring animals. He probably takes the medicine himself and leaves the rest to God. Alexandra doesn't see it that way. She thinks Ivar's mind is cloudy sometimes, sure, but on the other hand, he definitely knows a lot about helping animals. Ivar's homestead is in one of the roughest, most inaccessible parts of the whole region. Almost no one else lives there, which is just the way Ivar likes it--that way, there are no "temptations" . When their wagon startles some ducks and they take to flight, Lou mentions that he wishes he'd brought his gun to hunt them. Alexandra remarks that then Ivar would get angry and they'd never sell them the hammock. Lou is indignant, but Emil is frightened of angering Ivar. The group makes it up the road to Ivar's, and glimpse the rough country where he lives. Only the toughest plants can make it here. Ivar lives in a sod house, dug out in the hillside. The dwelling is barely noticeable, until you see the light reflecting on the windows and a little rusty stovepipe sticking out. Ivar himself is about as strange as his house. It's Sunday, so he's wearing a clean shirt, but he never actually goes to church, since he can't agree with any of the denominations. His shaggy hair and sunburnt face make him look much older than he is. He prefers to live out here on his own, because he dislikes all the clutter associated with living around other human beings. Out in nature, he feels all the more connected to the Bible, which he reads and memorizes while he works. When he sees them, he runs to them, shouting at them to put away their guns. Once he's been reassured they don't have their guns with them this time, he's happy to see them. Ivar starts talking about the different waterfowl that have been to his pond lately. Carl tells Alexandra to ask Ivar, who doesn't speak English, whether it's true that a seagull once made it to their part of the country. Ivar remembers the seagull, and how it used to cry out in the night. Lou and Oscar tie up and water their horses, while Ivar leads Emil and Alexandra into his house to look at hammocks. Ivar's home, for being little more than a dugout cave, is nice and tidy. He sleeps in one of his own hammocks. Emil's fascinated by Ivar and his home, and starts asking him all sorts of questions about the birds that come to his pond. Meanwhile, Alexandra picks out a hammock, and while Lou and Oscar wait outside, she sits and continues to talk with Ivar. She admits that she actually came to speak with him, and not just to buy a hammock. Alexandra wants to know whether her family should sell their hogs, since a lot of the other families have been losing theirs to disease. Ivar is pretty darn enthusiastic when it comes to hogs, and he tells her that the best way to make sure they survive is to give them a better stall with fresh water and grains to eat. Lou and Oscar overhear what Ivar has to say about the hogs, and get annoyed. Though they work hard, the narrator tells us, they're not into innovation or trying new things. The last thing they want to do is stand out. On the way home, the boys joke about Ivar and laugh at his poor prospects. Privately, Alexandra decides to encourage Ivar to work his land, so he can make a living. Later, Alexandra sits on the kitchen doorstep with her mother, watching the boys swim in the pond and thinking about the new pig stall she wants to build.