"Cather, Willa - O Pioneers!" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cather Willa Sibert)

to find than many another, because it over-
looked Norway Creek, a shallow, muddy stream
that sometimes flowed, and sometimes stood
still, at the bottom of a winding ravine with
steep, shelving sides overgrown with brush and
cottonwoods and dwarf ash. This creek gave a
sort of identity to the farms that bordered upon
it. Of all the bewildering things about a new
country, the absence of human landmarks is
one of the most depressing and disheartening.
The houses on the Divide were small and were
usually tucked away in low places; you did not
see them until you came directly upon them.
Most of them were built of the sod itself, and
were only the unescapable ground in another
form. The roads were but faint tracks in the
grass, and the fields were scarcely noticeable.
The record of the plow was insignificant, like
the feeble scratches on stone left by prehistoric
races, so indeterminate that they may, after all,
be only the markings of glaciers, and not a rec-
ord of human strivings.

In eleven long years John Bergson had made
but little impression upon the wild land he had
come to tame. It was still a wild thing that had
its ugly moods; and no one knew when they
were likely to come, or why. Mischance hung
over it. Its Genius was unfriendly to man. The
sick man was feeling this as he lay looking out
of the window, after the doctor had left him,
on the day following Alexandra's trip to town.
There it lay outside his door, the same land, the
same lead-colored miles. He knew every ridge
and draw and gully between him and the
horizon. To the south, his plowed fields; to the
east, the sod stables, the cattle corral, the pond,
--and then the grass.

Bergson went over in his mind the things
that had held him back. One winter his cattle
had perished in a blizzard. The next summer
one of his plow horses broke its leg in a prairie-
dog hole and had to be shot. Another summer he
lost his hogs from cholera, and a valuable
stallion died from a rattlesnake bite. Time and
again his crops had failed. He had lost two
children, boys, that came between Lou and
Emil, and there had been the cost of sickness
and death. Now, when he had at last struggled