Chapter: For the first three years after John Bergson's death, the affairs
of his family prospered. Then came the hard times that brought
every one on the Divide to the brink of despair; three years of
drouth and failure, the last struggle of a wild soil against the
encroaching plowshare. The first of these fruitless summers the
Bergson boys bore courageously. The failure of the corn crop made
labor cheap. Lou and Oscar hired two men and put in bigger crops
than ever before. They lost everything they spent. The whole
country was discouraged. Farmers who were already in debt had to
give up their land. A few foreclosures demoralized the county.
The settlers sat about on the wooden sidewalks in the little town
and told each other that the country was never meant for men to live
in; the thing to do was to get back to Iowa, to Illinois, to any
place that had been proved habitable. The Bergson boys, certainly,
would have been happier with their uncle Otto, in the bakery shop
in Chicago. Like most of their neighbors, they were meant to follow
in paths already marked out for them, not to break trails in a new
country. A steady job, a few holidays, nothing to think about, and
they would have been very happy. It was no fault of theirs that
they had been dragged into the wilderness when they were little
boys. A pioneer should have imagination, should be able to enjoy
the idea of things more than the things themselves.

The second of these barren summers was passing. One September
afternoon Alexandra had gone over to the garden across the draw to
dig sweet potatoes--they had been thriving upon the weather that
was fatal to everything else. But when Carl Linstrum came up the
garden rows to find her, she was not working. She was standing
lost in thought, leaning upon her pitchfork, her sunbonnet lying
beside her on the ground. The dry garden patch smelled of drying
vines and was strewn with yellow seed-cucumbers and pumpkins and
citrons. At one end, next the rhubarb, grew feathery asparagus,
with red berries. Down the middle of the garden was a row of
gooseberry and currant bushes. A few tough zenias and marigolds
and a row of scarlet sage bore witness to the buckets of water
that Mrs. Bergson had carried there after sundown, against the
prohibition of her sons. Carl came quietly and slowly up the garden
path, looking intently at Alexandra. She did not hear him. She was
standing perfectly still, with that serious ease so characteristic
of her. Her thick, reddish braids, twisted about her head, fairly
burned in the sunlight. The air was cool enough to make the warm
sun pleasant on one's back and shoulders, and so clear that the
eye could follow a hawk up and up, into the blazing blue depths of
the sky. Even Carl, never a very cheerful boy, and considerably
darkened by these last two bitter years, loved the country on days
like this, felt something strong and young and wild come out of
it, that laughed at care.

"Alexandra," he said as he approached her, "I want to talk to you.
Let's sit down by the gooseberry bushes." He picked up her sack
of potatoes and they crossed the garden. "Boys gone to town?" he
asked as he sank down on the warm, sun-baked earth. "Well, we have
made up our minds at last, Alexandra. We are really going away."

She looked at him as if she were a little frightened. "Really,
Carl? Is it settled?"

"Yes, father has heard from St. Louis, and they will give him back
his old job in the cigar factory. He must be there by the first
of November. They are taking on new men then. We will sell the
place for whatever we can get, and auction the stock. We haven't
enough to ship. I am going to learn engraving with a German engraver
there, and then try to get work in Chicago."

Alexandra's hands dropped in her lap. Her eyes became dreamy and
filled with tears.

Carl's sensitive lower lip trembled. He scratched in the soft earth
beside him with a stick. "That's all I hate about it, Alexandra,"
he said slowly. "You've stood by us through so much and helped
father out so many times, and now it seems as if we were running
off and leaving you to face the worst of it. But it isn't as if
we could really ever be of any help to you. We are only one more
drag, one more thing you look out for and feel responsible for.
Father was never meant for a farmer, you know that. And I hate
it. We'd only get in deeper and deeper."

"Yes, yes, Carl, I know. You are wasting your life here. You are
able to do much better things. You are nearly nineteen now, and
I wouldn't have you stay. I've always hoped you would get away.
But I can't help feeling scared when I think how I will miss
you--more than you will ever know." She brushed the tears from her
cheeks, not trying to hide them.

"But, Alexandra," he said sadly and wistfully, "I've never been
any real help to you, beyond sometimes trying to keep the boys in
a good humor."

Alexandra smiled and shook her head. "Oh, it's not that. Nothing
like that. It's by understanding me, and the boys, and mother,
that you've helped me. I expect that is the only way one person
ever really can help another. I think you are about the only one
that ever helped me. Somehow it will take more courage to bear
your going than everything that has happened before."

Carl looked at the ground. "You see, we've all depended so on you,"
he said, "even father. He makes me laugh. When anything comes up
he always says, 'I wonder what the Bergsons are going to do about
that? I guess I'll go and ask her.' I'll never forget that time,
when we first came here, and our horse had the colic, and I ran
over to your place--your father was away, and you came home with me
and showed father how to let the wind out of the horse. You were
only a little girl then, but you knew ever so much more about farm
work than poor father. You remember how homesick I used to get,
and what long talks we used to have coming from school? We've
someway always felt alike about things."

"Yes, that's it; we've liked the same things and we've liked them
together, without anybody else knowing. And we've had good times,
hunting for Christmas trees and going for ducks and making our plum
wine together every year. We've never either of us had any other
close friend. And now--" Alexandra wiped her eyes with the corner
of her apron, "and now I must remember that you are going where
you will have many friends, and will find the work you were meant
to do. But you'll write to me, Carl? That will mean a great deal
to me here."

"I'll write as long as I live," cried the boy impetuously. "And
I'll be working for you as much as for myself, Alexandra. I want
to do something you'll like and be proud of. I'm a fool here, but
I know I can do something!" He sat up and frowned at the red grass.

Alexandra sighed. "How discouraged the boys will be when they
hear. They always come home from town discouraged, anyway. So
many people are trying to leave the country, and they talk to our
boys and make them low-spirited. I'm afraid they are beginning to
feel hard toward me because I won't listen to any talk about going.
Sometimes I feel like I'm getting tired of standing up for this
country."

"I won't tell the boys yet, if you'd rather not."

"Oh, I'll tell them myself, to-night, when they come home. They'll
be talking wild, anyway, and no good comes of keeping bad news.
It's all harder on them than it is on me. Lou wants to get married,
poor boy, and he can't until times are better. See, there goes the
sun, Carl. I must be getting back. Mother will want her potatoes.
It's chilly already, the moment the light goes."

Alexandra rose and looked about. A golden afterglow throbbed in
the west, but the country already looked empty and mournful. A dark
moving mass came over the western hill, the Lee boy was bringing in
the herd from the other half-section. Emil ran from the windmill
to open the corral gate. From the log house, on the little rise
across the draw, the smoke was curling. The cattle lowed and
bellowed. In the sky the pale half-moon was slowly silvering.
Alexandra and Carl walked together down the potato rows. "I have
to keep telling myself what is going to happen," she said softly.
"Since you have been here, ten years now, I have never really been
lonely. But I can remember what it was like before. Now I shall
have nobody but Emil. But he is my boy, and he is tender-hearted."

That night, when the boys were called to supper, they sat down
moodily. They had worn their coats to town, but they ate in their
striped shirts and suspenders. They were grown men now, and, as
Alexandra said, for the last few years they had been growing more
and more like themselves. Lou was still the slighter of the two,
the quicker and more intelligent, but apt to go off at half-cock.
He had a lively blue eye, a thin, fair skin (always burned red to
the neckband of his shirt in summer), stiff, yellow hair that would
not lie down on his head, and a bristly little yellow mustache,
of which he was very proud. Oscar could not grow a mustache; his
pale face was as bare as an egg, and his white eyebrows gave it an
empty look. He was a man of powerful body and unusual endurance;
the sort of man you could attach to a corn-sheller as you would
an engine. He would turn it all day, without hurrying, without
slowing down. But he was as indolent of mind as he was unsparing
of his body. His love of routine amounted to a vice. He worked
like an insect, always doing the same thing over in the same way,
regardless of whether it was best or no. He felt that there was
a sovereign virtue in mere bodily toil, and he rather liked to
do things in the hardest way. If a field had once been in corn,
he couldn't bear to put it into wheat. He liked to begin his
corn-planting at the same time every year, whether the season were
backward or forward. He seemed to feel that by his own irreproachable
regularity he would clear himself of blame and reprove the weather.
When the wheat crop failed, he threshed the straw at a dead loss
to demonstrate how little grain there was, and thus prove his case
against Providence.

Lou, on the other hand, was fussy and flighty; always planned to
get through two days' work in one, and often got only the least
important things done. He liked to keep the place up, but he never
got round to doing odd jobs until he had to neglect more pressing
work to attend to them. In the middle of the wheat harvest, when
the grain was over-ripe and every hand was needed, he would stop
to mend fences or to patch the harness; then dash down to the
field and overwork and be laid up in bed for a week. The two boys
balanced each other, and they pulled well together. They had been
good friends since they were children. One seldom went anywhere,
even to town, without the other.

To-night, after they sat down to supper, Oscar kept looking at Lou
as if he expected him to say something, and Lou blinked his eyes
and frowned at his plate. It was Alexandra herself who at last
opened the discussion.

"The Linstrums," she said calmly, as she put another plate of hot
biscuit on the table, "are going back to St. Louis. The old man
is going to work in the cigar factory again."

At this Lou plunged in. "You see, Alexandra, everybody who can
crawl out is going away. There's no use of us trying to stick it
out, just to be stubborn. There's something in knowing when to
quit."

"Where do you want to go, Lou?"

"Any place where things will grow," said Oscar grimly.

Lou reached for a potato. "Chris Arnson has traded his half-section
for a place down on the river."

"Who did he trade with?"

"Charley Fuller, in town."

"Fuller the real estate man? You see, Lou, that Fuller has a head
on him. He's buying and trading for every bit of land he can get
up here. It'll make him a rich man, some day."

"He's rich now, that's why he can take a chance."

"Why can't we? We'll live longer than he will. Some day the land
itself will be worth more than all we can ever raise on it."

Lou laughed. "It could be worth that, and still not be worth
much. Why, Alexandra, you don't know what you're talking about.
Our place wouldn't bring now what it would six years ago. The
fellows that settled up here just made a mistake. Now they're
beginning to see this high land wasn't never meant to grow nothing
on, and everybody who ain't fixed to graze cattle is trying to
crawl out. It's too high to farm up here. All the Americans are
skinning out. That man Percy Adams, north of town, told me that
he was going to let Fuller take his land and stuff for four hundred
dollars and a ticket to Chicago."

"There's Fuller again!" Alexandra exclaimed. "I wish that man
would take me for a partner. He's feathering his nest! If only
poor people could learn a little from rich people! But all these
fellows who are running off are bad farmers, like poor Mr. Linstrum.
They couldn't get ahead even in good years, and they all got into
debt while father was getting out. I think we ought to hold on as
long as we can on father's account. He was so set on keeping this
land. He must have seen harder times than this, here. How was it
in the early days, mother?"

Mrs. Bergson was weeping quietly. These family discussions always
depressed her, and made her remember all that she had been torn
away from. "I don't see why the boys are always taking on about
going away," she said, wiping her eyes. "I don't want to move
again; out to some raw place, maybe, where we'd be worse off than
we are here, and all to do over again. I won't move! If the rest
of you go, I will ask some of the neighbors to take me in, and stay
and be buried by father. I'm not going to leave him by himself
on the prairie, for cattle to run over." She began to cry more
bitterly.

The boys looked angry. Alexandra put a soothing hand on her mother's
shoulder. "There's no question of that, mother. You don't have
to go if you don't want to. A third of the place belongs to you
by American law, and we can't sell without your consent. We only
want you to advise us. How did it use to be when you and father
first came? Was it really as bad as this, or not?"

"Oh, worse! Much worse," moaned Mrs. Bergson. "Drouth, chince-bugs,
hail, everything! My garden all cut to pieces like sauerkraut. No
grapes on the creek, no nothing. The people all lived just like
coyotes."

Oscar got up and tramped out of the kitchen. Lou followed him.
They felt that Alexandra had taken an unfair advantage in turning
their mother loose on them. The next morning they were silent and
reserved. They did not offer to take the women to church, but went
down to the barn immediately after breakfast and stayed there all
day. When Carl Linstrum came over in the afternoon, Alexandra
winked to him and pointed toward the barn. He understood her and
went down to play cards with the boys. They believed that a very
wicked thing to do on Sunday, and it relieved their feelings.

Alexandra stayed in the house. On Sunday afternoon Mrs. Bergson
always took a nap, and Alexandra read. During the week she read
only the newspaper, but on Sunday, and in the long evenings of
winter, she read a good deal; read a few things over a great many
times. She knew long portions of the "Frithjof Saga" by heart,
and, like most Swedes who read at all, she was fond of Longfellow's
verse,--the ballads and the "Golden Legend" and "The Spanish Student."
To-day she sat in the wooden rocking-chair with the Swedish Bible
open on her knees, but she was not reading. She was looking
thoughtfully away at the point where the upland road disappeared
over the rim of the prairie. Her body was in an attitude of perfect
repose, such as it was apt to take when she was thinking earnestly.
Her mind was slow, truthful, steadfast. She had not the least
spark of cleverness.

All afternoon the sitting-room was full of quiet and sunlight.
Emil was making rabbit traps in the kitchen shed. The hens were
clucking and scratching brown holes in the flower beds, and the
wind was teasing the prince's feather by the door.

That evening Carl came in with the boys to supper.

"Emil," said Alexandra, when they were all seated at the table,
"how would you like to go traveling? Because I am going to take
a trip, and you can go with me if you want to."

The boys looked up in amazement; they were always afraid of
Alexandra's schemes. Carl was interested.

"I've been thinking, boys," she went on, "that maybe I am too set
against making a change. I'm going to take Brigham and the buckboard
to-morrow and drive down to the river country and spend a few days
looking over what they've got down there. If I find anything good,
you boys can go down and make a trade."

"Nobody down there will trade for anything up here," said Oscar
gloomily.

"That's just what I want to find out. Maybe they are just as
discontented down there as we are up here. Things away from home
often look better than they are. You know what your Hans Andersen
book says, Carl, about the Swedes liking to buy Danish bread and
the Danes liking to buy Swedish bread, because people always think
the bread of another country is better than their own. Anyway,
I've heard so much about the river farms, I won't be satisfied till
I've seen for myself."

Lou fidgeted. "Look out! Don't agree to anything. Don't let them
fool you."

Lou was apt to be fooled himself. He had not yet learned to keep
away from the shell-game wagons that followed the circus.

After supper Lou put on a necktie and went across the fields to
court Annie Lee, and Carl and Oscar sat down to a game of checkers,
while Alexandra read "The Swiss Family Robinson" aloud to her mother
and Emil. It was not long before the two boys at the table neglected
their game to listen. They were all big children together, and they
found the adventures of the family in the tree house so absorbing
that they gave them their undivided attention.




Alexandra and Emil spent five days down among the river farms,
driving up and down the valley. Alexandra talked to the men about
their crops and to the women about their poultry. She spent a
whole day with one young farmer who had been away at school, and
who was experimenting with a new kind of clover hay. She learned
a great deal. As they drove along, she and Emil talked and planned.
At last, on the sixth day, Alexandra turned Brigham's head northward
and left the river behind.

"There's nothing in it for us down there, Emil. There are a few
fine farms, but they are owned by the rich men in town, and couldn't
be bought. Most of the land is rough and hilly. They can always
scrape along down there, but they can never do anything big. Down
there they have a little certainty, but up with us there is a big
chance. We must have faith in the high land, Emil. I want to hold
on harder than ever, and when you're a man you'll thank me." She
urged Brigham forward.

When the road began to climb the first long swells of the Divide,
Alexandra hummed an old Swedish hymn, and Emil wondered why his
sister looked so happy. Her face was so radiant that he felt shy
about asking her. For the first time, perhaps, since that land
emerged from the waters of geologic ages, a human face was set toward
it with love and yearning. It seemed beautiful to her, rich and
strong and glorious. Her eyes drank in the breadth of it, until
her tears blinded her. Then the Genius of the Divide, the great,
free spirit which breathes across it, must have bent lower than
it ever bent to a human will before. The history of every country
begins in the heart of a man or a woman.

Alexandra reached home in the afternoon. That evening she held
a family council and told her brothers all that she had seen and
heard.

"I want you boys to go down yourselves and look it over. Nothing
will convince you like seeing with your own eyes. The river land
was settled before this, and so they are a few years ahead of us,
and have learned more about farming. The land sells for three
times as much as this, but in five years we will double it. The
rich men down there own all the best land, and they are buying
all they can get. The thing to do is to sell our cattle and what
little old corn we have, and buy the Linstrum place. Then the next
thing to do is to take out two loans on our half-sections, and buy
Peter Crow's place; raise every dollar we can, and buy every acre
we can."

"Mortgage the homestead again?" Lou cried. He sprang up and began
to wind the clock furiously. "I won't slave to pay off another
mortgage. I'll never do it. You'd just as soon kill us all,
Alexandra, to carry out some scheme!"

Oscar rubbed his high, pale forehead. "How do you propose to pay
off your mortgages?"

Alexandra looked from one to the other and bit her lip. They had
never seen her so nervous. "See here," she brought out at last.
"We borrow the money for six years. Well, with the money we buy
a half-section from Linstrum and a half from Crow, and a quarter
from Struble, maybe. That will give us upwards of fourteen hundred
acres, won't it? You won't have to pay off your mortgages for six
years. By that time, any of this land will be worth thirty dollars
an acre--it will be worth fifty, but we'll say thirty; then you
can sell a garden patch anywhere, and pay off a debt of sixteen
hundred dollars. It's not the principal I'm worried about, it's
the interest and taxes. We'll have to strain to meet the payments.
But as sure as we are sitting here to-night, we can sit down here
ten years from now independent landowners, not struggling farmers
any longer. The chance that father was always looking for has
come."

Lou was pacing the floor. "But how do you KNOW that land is going
to go up enough to pay the mortgages and--"

"And make us rich besides?" Alexandra put in firmly. "I can't
explain that, Lou. You'll have to take my word for it. I KNOW,
that's all. When you drive about over the country you can feel it
coming."

Oscar had been sitting with his head lowered, his hands hanging
between his knees. "But we can't work so much land," he said
dully, as if he were talking to himself. "We can't even try. It
would just lie there and we'd work ourselves to death." He sighed,
and laid his calloused fist on the table.

Alexandra's eyes filled with tears. She put her hand on his
shoulder. "You poor boy, you won't have to work it. The men in
town who are buying up other people's land don't try to farm it.
They are the men to watch, in a new country. Let's try to do
like the shrewd ones, and not like these stupid fellows. I don't
want you boys always to have to work like this. I want you to be
independent, and Emil to go to school."

Lou held his head as if it were splitting. "Everybody will say we
are crazy. It must be crazy, or everybody would be doing it."

"If they were, we wouldn't have much chance. No, Lou, I was talking
about that with the smart young man who is raising the new kind
of clover. He says the right thing is usually just what everybody
don't do. Why are we better fixed than any of our neighbors? Because
father had more brains. Our people were better people than these
in the old country. We OUGHT to do more than they do, and see
further ahead. Yes, mother, I'm going to clear the table now."

Alexandra rose. The boys went to the stable to see to the stock,
and they were gone a long while. When they came back Lou played on
his DRAGHARMONIKA and Oscar sat figuring at his father's secretary
all evening. They said nothing more about Alexandra's project,
but she felt sure now that they would consent to it. Just before
bedtime Oscar went out for a pail of water. When he did not come
back, Alexandra threw a shawl over her head and ran down the path
to the windmill. She found him sitting there with his head in his
hands, and she sat down beside him.

"Don't do anything you don't want to do, Oscar," she whispered.
She waited a moment, but he did not stir. "I won't say any more
about it, if you'd rather not. What makes you so discouraged?"

"I dread signing my name to them pieces of paper," he said slowly.
"All the time I was a boy we had a mortgage hanging over us."

"Then don't sign one. I don't want you to, if you feel that way."

Oscar shook his head. "No, I can see there's a chance that way.
I've thought a good while there might be. We're in so deep now, we
might as well go deeper. But it's hard work pulling out of debt.
Like pulling a threshing-machine out of the mud; breaks your back.
Me and Lou's worked hard, and I can't see it's got us ahead much."

"Nobody knows about that as well as I do, Oscar. That's why I want
to try an easier way. I don't want you to have to grub for every
dollar."

"Yes, I know what you mean. Maybe it'll come out right. But signing
papers is signing papers. There ain't no maybe about that." He
took his pail and trudged up the path to the house.

Alexandra drew her shawl closer about her and stood leaning against
the frame of the mill, looking at the stars which glittered so
keenly through the frosty autumn air. She always loved to watch
them, to think of their vastness and distance, and of their ordered
march. It fortified her to reflect upon the great operations
of nature, and when she thought of the law that lay behind them,
she felt a sense of personal security. That night she had a new
consciousness of the country, felt almost a new relation to it.
Even her talk with the boys had not taken away the feeling that had
overwhelmed her when she drove back to the Divide that afternoon.
She had never known before how much the country meant to her. The
chirping of the insects down in the long grass had been like the
sweetest music. She had felt as if her heart were hiding down
there, somewhere, with the quail and the plover and all the little
wild things that crooned or buzzed in the sun. Under the long
shaggy ridges, she felt the future stirring.




PART II. Neighboring Fields

 After three years of prosperity, the Bergson family faces the second summer of what will be a three-year drought. Some farmers have had to foreclose on their farms and Alexandra knows that Oscar and Lou would rather be in Chicago working at their uncle's bakery than here. One afternoon Alexandra is picking sweet potatoes-the only crop that thrives in the draught-when Carl Linstrum approaches. He tells Alexandra that his family is giving up their farm. Alexandra says that she's not surprised but confesses that she will miss him terribly. He is her only close friend and she says that she'll have to accustom herself to loneliness after he leaves. She also tells him that his departure will discourage her brothers even more. That night Oscar and Lou return from a trip to town, and when Alexandra tells them that Carl and his family are leaving, they try to convince her to leave as well. They insist that it doesn't make sense to stay when everyone else is leaving. She points out that Charley Fuller, a rich man, is buying up abandoned homesteads as fast as possible, but the boys refuse to listen to her point. Alexandra suggests that they should stick it out for their father's sake. She asks her mother whether it was harder when they first came, and her mother weeps about how difficult everything was and refuses to move again. Feeling this appeal to their mother is unfair, the boys leave the kitchen. The next morning, a Sunday, instead of offering to take Alexandra and their mother to church, the brothers hide out in the barn. Carl Linstrum arrives and Alexandra sends him to the barn to cheer up her brothers. Though she usually reads on Sundays, today Alexandra just sits and thinks with the Bible in her lap. That night at dinner she agreed to take a trip to the river country with Emil in order to trade their homestead for one there, if the deal seems good. Everyone seems heartened by this idea, though Oscar doesn't think anyone will trade and Emil worries that Alexandra will be fooled into a bad deal. That night Alexandra reads aloud from the "Swiss Family Robinson," and they are a happy family once more. During the five days Alexandra and Emil spend on the river, they speak to many people, including one young man who is experimenting with clover hay. When they return Alexandra is more determined than ever to stick with their land. She looks over the Divide and a passionate love for this land rises within her. That evening at a "family council" Alexandra explains her plan to take out a second mortgage on their homestead and buy more prairie land. She tells them that rich men are buying up all the land that they can and that the farms on high land are better than the farms by the river. Oscar and Lou grumble that they don't want to have a mortgage hanging over their heads and Oscar insists they won't be able to work more land. Alexandra explains that they don't need to work it, just to keep it. She explains that they can succeed where others have failed because they are smarter. After the council, Alexandra looks up at the stars and, despite the fears of her brothers, feels her love of the land.

