Chapter: AFTER dinner the next day I said good-bye and drove back to Hastings to
take the train for Black Hawk. Antonia and her children gathered round my
buggy before I started, and even the little ones looked up at me with
friendly faces. Leo and Ambrosch ran ahead to open the lane gate. When I
reached the bottom of the hill, I glanced back. The group was still there
by the windmill. Antonia was waving her apron.

At the gate Ambrosch lingered beside my buggy, resting his arm on the
wheel-rim. Leo slipped through the fence and ran off into the pasture.

"That's like him," his brother said with a shrug. "He's a crazy kid. Maybe
he's sorry to have you go, and maybe he's jealous. He's jealous of anybody
mother makes a fuss over, even the priest."

I found I hated to leave this boy, with his pleasant voice and his fine
head and eyes. He looked very manly as he stood there without a hat, the
wind rippling his shirt about his brown neck and shoulders.

"Don't forget that you and Rudolph are going hunting with me up on the
Niobrara next summer," I said. "Your father's agreed to let you off after
harvest."

He smiled. "I won't likely forget. I've never had such a nice thing
offered to me before. I don't know what makes you so nice to us boys," he
added, blushing.

"Oh, yes you do!" I said, gathering up my reins.

He made no answer to this, except to smile at me with unabashed pleasure
and affection as I drove away.



My day in Black Hawk was disappointing. Most of my old friends were dead
or had moved away. Strange children, who meant nothing to me, were playing
in the Harlings' big yard when I passed; the mountain ash had been cut
down, and only a sprouting stump was left of the tall Lombardy poplar that
used to guard the gate. I hurried on. The rest of the morning I spent with
Anton Jelinek, under a shady cottonwood tree in the yard behind his
saloon. While I was having my mid-day dinner at the hotel, I met one of
the old lawyers who was still in practice, and he took me up to his office
and talked over the Cutter case with me. After that, I scarcely knew how
to put in the time until the night express was due.

I took a long walk north of the town, out into the pastures where the land
was so rough that it had never been ploughed up, and the long red grass of
early times still grew shaggy over the draws and hillocks. Out there I
felt at home again. Overhead the sky was that indescribable blue of
autumn; bright and shadowless, hard as enamel. To the south I could see
the dun-shaded river bluffs that used to look so big to me, and all about
stretched drying cornfields, of the pale-gold color I remembered so well.
Russian thistles were blowing across the uplands and piling against the
wire fences like barricades. Along the cattle paths the plumes of
golden-rod were already fading into sun-warmed velvet, gray with gold
threads in it. I had escaped from the curious depression that hangs over
little towns, and my mind was full of pleasant things; trips I meant to
take with the Cuzak boys, in the Bad Lands and up on the Stinking Water.
There were enough Cuzaks to play with for a long while yet. Even after the
boys grew up, there would always be Cuzak himself! I meant to tramp along
a few miles of lighted streets with Cuzak.

As I wandered over those rough pastures, I had the good luck to stumble
upon a bit of the first road that went from Black Hawk out to the north
country; to my grandfather's farm, then on to the Shimerdas' and to the
Norwegian settlement. Everywhere else it had been ploughed under when the
highways were surveyed; this half-mile or so within the pasture fence was
all that was left of that old road which used to run like a wild thing
across the open prairie, clinging to the high places and circling and
doubling like a rabbit before the hounds. On the level land the tracks had
almost disappeared--were mere shadings in the grass, and a stranger would
not have noticed them. But wherever the road had crossed a draw, it was
easy to find. The rains had made channels of the wheel-ruts and washed
them so deep that the sod had never healed over them. They looked like
gashes torn by a grizzly's claws, on the slopes where the farm wagons used
to lurch up out of the hollows with a pull that brought curling muscles on
the smooth hips of the horses. I sat down and watched the haystacks turn
rosy in the slanting sunlight.

This was the road over which Antonia and I came on that night when we got
off the train at Black Hawk and were bedded down in the straw, wondering
children, being taken we knew not whither. I had only to close my eyes to
hear the rumbling of the wagons in the dark, and to be again overcome by
that obliterating strangeness. The feelings of that night were so near
that I could reach out and touch them with my hand. I had the sense of
coming home to myself, and of having found out what a little circle man's
experience is. For Antonia and for me, this had been the road of Destiny;
had taken us to those early accidents of fortune which predetermined for
us all that we can ever be. Now I understood that the same road was to
bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the
precious, the incommunicable past.

 The next morning, Jim wakes up in the barn and acts as if he is still asleep so he can watch Leo at play. He goes out and joins Antonia who tells him all about her daughter Martha who is married to a very industrious young farmer and has a fine baby. Antonia tells him that she wouldnt have married Cusak if he hadnt accepted Martha, but he did as if she were his own. That afternoon Cusak and the eldest son Rudolph arrive home. They tell Antonia and the others all that they have seen in town. Jim notices that Antonia and her husband seem to be on terms of easy friendliness. At dinner, Cusak tells his son to tell the story of the Cutters. The had continued to argue, but the arguments got worse as they aged. He was always afraid she would give his money to her relatives when he died. One day he went and bought a gun and told the shop owner he planned to kill a dog and an old cat, too. That afternoon, passersby heard two shots, one of which was shot out of the window. They rushed inside to find him lying dying with a gunshot to the head. He told them to go in and see that his wife was dead so his will, not hers would be the valid one. They did so and when he was assured that his own wishes would be carried out, he died. After dinner, Jim and Cusak walk in the orchard together. He tells Jim his life story. He had been a furrier in Vienna but had spent all his money every night on the sparkling night life. He went to New York and unwittingly worked as a replacement worker during a strike and was later blacklisted. Then he went to Florida to grow oranges as he had always wanted to. He came to Nebraska to visit his cousin Anton Jelinek and when he saw Antonia he knew he wanted to marry her. He tells Jim life on the farm has been hard for him especially at first, but that Antonia always makes life better. Jim notices that Cusak is really more suited to city life and is lonesome out on the farm. He realizes that many times a life is right for one person, but not for two. He asks Cusak about it and he says that although he used to get lonesome, now he is having fun with his boys and that Antonia makes his life good. He is amazed that he has been away from Vienna for twenty-six years.

