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. Iwant 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 usu-ally 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 coun-try. 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 no-thing 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 conscious-ness 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 lit-tle wild things that crooned or buzzed in the sun. Under the long shaggy ridges, she felt the future stirring.
