Over Prairie Trails by Frederick Philip Grove Read Free Book Online Page A

over mile after mile of fabled distance; now and then the rumble of car on rail will stop, the quiet awakens you, lights flash their piercing darts, a voice calls out; it is a well known stop on your journey and then the rumbling resumes, you doze again, to be awakened again, and so on. And when you get up in the morning – there she lies, the goal of your dreams the resplendent city….
    My goal was my “home,” and mildly startling, at least one such mid-nightly awakening came. I had kept peering about for a landmark, a light. Somewhere here in thosefarmhouses which I saw with my mind’s eye, people were sitting around their fireside, chatting or reading. Lamps shed their homely light; roof and wall kept the fog-spook securely out: nothing as comfortable then as to listen to stories of being lost on the marsh, or to tell them…. But between those people and myself the curtain had fallen – no sign of their presence, no faintest gleam of their light and warmth! They did not know of the stranger passing outside, his whole being a-yearn with the desire for wife and child. I listened intently – no sound of man or beast, no soughing of wind in stems or rustling of the very last leaves that were now fast falling…. And then the startling neighing of Dan, my horse! This was the third trip he made with me, and I might have known and expected it, but it always came as a surprise. Whenever we passed that second farm, he stopped and raising his head, with a sideways motion, neighed a loud and piercing call. And now he had stopped and done it again. He knew where we were. I lowered my whip and patted his rump. How did he know? And why did he do it? Was there a horse on this farmstead which he had known in former life? Or was it a man? Or did he merely feel that it was about time to put in for the night? I enquired later on, but failed to discover any reason for his behaviour.
    Now came that angling road past the “White Range Line House.” I relied on the horses entirely. This “Range Line House” was inhabited now – a settler was putting in winter-residence so he might not lose his claim. He had taken down the clapboards that closed the windows, and always had I so far seen a light in the house.
    It seemed to me that in this corner of the marsh the fog was less dense than it had been farther south, and the horses, once started, were swinging along, though in a leisurely way, yet without hesitation. Another half hour passed.Once, at a bend in the trail, the rays from the powerful tractor searchlight, sweeping sideways past the horses, struck a wetly glistening, greyish stone to the right of the road. I knew that stone. Yes, surely the fog must be thinning, or I could not have seen it. I could now also dimly make out the horses’ heads, as they nodded up and down….
    And then, like a phantom, way up in the mist, I made out a blacker black in the black – the majestic poplars north of the “Range Line House.” Not that I could really see them or pick out the slightest detail – no! But it seemed to my searching eyes as if there was a quiet pool in the slow flow of the fog – as the water in a slow flowing stream will come to rest when it strikes the stems of a willow submerged at its margin. I was trying even at the time to decide how much of what I seemed to divine rather than to perceive was imagination and how much reality. And I was just about ready to contend that I also saw to the north something like the faintest possible suggestion of an eddy, such as would form in the flowing water below a pillar or a rock – when I was rudely shaken up and jolted.
    Trap, trap, I heard the horses’ feet on the culvert. Crash! And Peter went stumbling down. Then a violent lurch of the buggy, I holding on – Peter rallied, and then, before I had time to get a firmer grasp on the lines, both horses bolted again. It took me some time to realize what had happened. It was the culvert, of course; it had broken down, and lucky I