will forget it together, the French woman and all.” He held his
fiddle under his chin a moment, where it had lain so often, then put
it across his knee and broke it through the middle. He pulled off
his old boot, held the gun between his knees with the muzzle against
his forehead, and pressed the trigger with his toe.
In the morning Antone found him stiff, frozen fast in a pool of
blood. They could not straighten him out enough to fit a coffin, so
they buried him in a pine box. Before the funeral Antone carried to
town the fiddle-bow which Peter had forgotten to break. Antone was
very thrifty, and a better man than his father had been.
The Mahogany Tree
, May 21, 1892
On the Divide
Near Rattlesnake Creek, on the side of a little draw stood Canute’s
shanty. North, east, south, stretched the level Nebraska plain of
long rust-red grass that undulated constantly in the wind. To the
west the ground was broken and rough, and a narrow strip of timber
wound along the turbid, muddy little stream that had scarcely
ambition enough to crawl over its black bottom. If it had not been
for the few stunted cottonwoods and elms that grew along its banks,
Canute would have shot himself years ago. The Norwegians are a
timber-loving people, and if there is even a turtle pond with a few
plum bushes around it they seem irresistibly drawn toward it.
As to the shanty itself, Canute had built it without aid of any
kind, for when he first squatted along the banks of Rattlesnake
Creek there was not a human being within twenty miles. It was built
of logs split in halves, the chinks stopped with mud and plaster.
The roof was covered with earth and was supported by one gigantic
beam curved in the shape of a round arch. It was almost impossible
that any tree had ever grown in that shape. The Norwegians used to
say that Canute had taken the log across his knee and bent it into
the shape he wished. There were two rooms, or rather there was one
room with a partition made of ash saplings interwoven and bound
together like big straw basket work. In one corner there was a cook
stove, rusted and broken. In the other a bed made of unplaned planks
and poles. It was fully eight feet long, and upon it was a heap of
dark bed clothing. There was a chair and a bench of colossal
proportions. There was an ordinary kitchen cupboard with a few
cracked dirty dishes in it, and beside it on a tall box a tin
wash-basin. Under the bed was a pile of pint flasks, some broken,
some whole, all empty. On the wood box lay a pair of shoes of almost
incredible dimensions. On the wall hung a saddle, a gun, and some
ragged clothing, conspicuous among which was a suit of dark cloth,
apparently new, with a paper collar carefully wrapped in a red silk
handkerchief and pinned to the sleeve. Over the door hung a wolf and
a badger skin, and on the door itself a brace of thirty or forty
snake skins whose noisy tails rattled ominously every time it
opened. The strangest things in the shanty were the wide
window-sills. At first glance they looked as though they had been
ruthlessly hacked and mutilated with a hatchet, but on closer
inspection all the notches and holes in the wood took form and
shape. There seemed to be a series of pictures. They were, in a
rough way, artistic, but the figures were heavy and labored, as
though they had been cut very slowly and with very awkward
instruments. There were men plowing with little horned imps sitting
on their shoulders and on their horses’ heads. There were men
praying with a skull hanging over their heads and little demons
behind them mocking their attitudes. There were men fighting with
big serpents, and skeletons dancing together. All about these
pictures were blooming vines and foliage such as never grew in this
world, and coiled among the branches of the vines there was always
the scaly body of a serpent, and behind every flower there was a
serpent’s head. It was a veritable Dance of Death by one who had
felt its sting. In the wood box lay some boards, and every inch of
them was cut up in the same manner. Sometimes the work was very rude
and careless, and looked as though the hand of the workman had
trembled. It would sometimes have been hard to distinguish the men
from their evil geniuses but for one fact, the men were always grave
and were either toiling or praying, while the devils were always
smiling and dancing. Several of these boards had been split for
kindling and it was evident that the artist did not value his work
highly.
It was the first day of winter on the Divide. Canute stumbled into
his shanty carrying a basket of cobs, and after filling the stove,
sat down on a stool and crouched his seven foot frame over the fire,
staring drearily out of the window at the wide gray sky. He knew by
heart every individual clump of bunch grass in the miles of red
shaggy prairie that stretched before his cabin. He knew it in all
the deceitful loveliness of its early summer, in all the bitter
barrenness of its autumn. He had seen it smitten by all the plagues
of Egypt. He had seen it parched by drought, and sogged by rain,
beaten by hail, and swept by fire, and in the grasshopper years he
had seen it eaten as bare and clean as bones that the vultures have
left. After the great fires he had seen it stretch for miles and
miles, black and smoking as the floor of hell.
He rose slowly and crossed the room, dragging his big feet heavily
as though they were burdens to him. He looked out of the window into
the hog corral and saw the pigs burying themselves in the straw
before the shed. The leaden gray clouds were beginning to spill
themselves, and the snowflakes were settling down over the white
leprous patches of frozen earth where the hogs had gnawed even the
sod away. He shuddered and began to walk, tramping heavily with his
ungainly feet. He was the wreck of ten winters on the Divide and he
knew what they meant. Men fear the winters of the Divide as a child
fears night or as men in the North Seas fear the still dark cold of
the polar twilight.
His eyes fell upon his gun, and he took it down from the wall and
looked it over. He sat down on the edge of his bed and held the
barrel towards his face, letting his forehead rest upon it, and laid
his finger on the trigger. He was perfectly calm, there was neither
passion nor despair in his face, but the thoughtful look of a man
who is considering. Presently he laid down the gun, and reaching
into the cupboard, drew out a pint bottle of raw white alcohol.
Lifting it to his lips, he drank greedily. He washed his face in the
tin basin and combed his rough hair and shaggy blond beard. Then he
stood in uncertainty before the suit of dark clothes that hung on
the wall. For the fiftieth time he took them in his hands and tried
to summon courage to put them on. He took the paper collar that was
pinned to the sleeve of the coat and cautiously slipped it under his
rough beard, looking with timid expectancy into the cracked,
splashed glass that hung over the bench. With a short laugh he threw
it down on the bed, and pulling on his old black hat, he went out,
striking off across the level.
It was a physical necessity for him to get away from his cabin once
in a while. He had been there for ten years, digging and plowing and
sowing, and reaping what little the hail and the hot winds and the
frosts left him to reap. Insanity and suicide are very common things