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

out of debt, he was going to die himself. He
was only forty-six, and had, of course, counted
upon more time.

Bergson had spent his first five years on the
Divide getting into debt, and the last six getting
out. He had paid off his mortgages and had
ended pretty much where he began, with the
land. He owned exactly six hundred and forty
acres of what stretched outside his door; his own
original homestead and timber claim, making
three hundred and twenty acres, and the half-
section adjoining, the homestead of a younger
brother who had given up the fight, gone back
to Chicago to work in a fancy bakery and dis-
tinguish himself in a Swedish athletic club. So
far John had not attempted to cultivate the
second half-section, but used it for pasture
land, and one of his sons rode herd there in
open weather.

John Bergson had the Old-World belief that
land, in itself, is desirable. But this land was
an enigma. It was like a horse that no one
knows how to break to harness, that runs wild
and kicks things to pieces. He had an idea that
no one understood how to farm it properly, and
this he often discussed with Alexandra. Their
neighbors, certainly, knew even less about
farming than he did. Many of them had
never worked on a farm until they took up
their homesteads. They had been HANDWERKERS
at home; tailors, locksmiths, joiners, cigar-
makers, etc. Bergson himself had worked in a
shipyard.

For weeks, John Bergson had been thinking
about these things. His bed stood in the sitting-
room, next to the kitchen. Through the day,
while the baking and washing and ironing were
going on, the father lay and looked up at the
roof beams that he himself had hewn, or out at
the cattle in the corral. He counted the cattle
over and over. It diverted him to speculate as
to how much weight each of the steers would
probably put on by spring. He often called his
daughter in to talk to her about this. Before
Alexandra was twelve years old she had begun
to be a help to him, and as she grew older he
had come to depend more and more upon her