War Comes to the Big Bend Read online

  “But Father never owned the land. We have had three bad years. If the wheat fails this summer . . . we lose the land, that’s all.”

  “Are you an . . . American?” queried Anderson slowly, as if treading on dangerous ground.

  “I am,” snapped Kurt. “My mother was American. She’s dead. Father is German. He’s old. He’s rabid since the President declared war. He’ll never change.”

  “That’s hell. What’re you goin’ to do if your country calls you?”

  “Go!” replied Kurt with flashing eyes. “I wanted to enlist. Father and I quarreled over that until I had to give in. He’s hard . . . he’s impossible . . . I’ll wait for the draft and hope I’m called.”

  “Boy, it’s that spirit Germany’s roused an’ the best I can say is, God help her! Have you a brother?”

  “No. I’m all Father has.”

  “Well, it makes a tough place for him an’ you, too. Humor him. He’s old. An’ when you’re called . . . go an’ fight. You’ll come back.”

  “If I only know that . . . it wouldn’t be so hard.”

  “Hard? It sure is hard. But it’ll be the makin’ of a great country. It’ll weed out the riff-raff . . . See here, Kurt, I’m goin’ to give you a hunch. Have you had any dealin’s with the IWW?”

  “Yes, last harvest we had trouble, but nothing serious. When I was in Spokane last month, I heard a good deal. Strangers have approached us here, too . . . mostly aliens. I have no use for them, but they always get Father’s ear. And now . . . to tell the truth, I’m worried.”

  “Boy, you need to be,” replied Anderson earnestly. “We’re all worried. I’m goin’ to let you read over the laws of that IWW organization. You’re to keep mum now, mind you. I belong to the Chamber of Commerce in Spokane. Somebody got hold of these by-laws of this so-called labor union. We’ve had copies made, an’ every honest farmer in the Northwest is goin’ to read them. But carryin’ one around is dangerous, I reckon, these days. Here.” Anderson hesitated a moment, peered cautiously around, and then, slipping folded sheets of paper from his inside coat pocket, he evidently made ready to hand them to Kurt.

  “Lenore, where’s the driver?” he asked.

  “He’s under the car,” replied the girl.

  Kurt thrilled at the soft sound of her voice. It was something to have been haunted by a girl’s face for a year and then suddenly to hear her voice.

  “He’s new to me . . . that driver . . . an’ I ain’t trustin’ any new men these days,” went on Anderson. “Here now, Dorn. Read that. An’ if you don’t get red-headed . . .” Without finishing his last muttered remark, he opened the sheets of manuscript and spread them out to the young man.

  Curiously, and with a little rush of excitement, Kurt began to read. The very first rule of the IWW aimed to abolish capital. Kurt read on with slowly growing amaze, consternation, and anger. When he had finished, his look, without speech, was a question Anderson hastened to answer.

  “It’s straight goods,” he declared. “Them’s the sure enough rules of that gang. We made certain before we acted. Now how do they strike you?”

  “Why that’s no labor union,” replied Kurt hotly. “They’re outlaws, thieves, blackmailers, pirates. I . . . I don’t know what!”

  “Dorn, we’re up against a bad outfit an’ the Northwest will see hell this summer. There’s trouble in Montana an’ Idaho. Strangers . . . tramps I’d call them . . . are driftin’ into Washington from all over. We must organize to meet them, to prevent them gettin’ a hold out here. It’s a labor union, mostly aliens, with dishonest an’ unscrupulous leaders, some of them Americans. They aim to take advantage of the war situation. In the newspaper they rave about shorter hours, more pay, acknowledgment of the union. But any fool would see, if he read them laws I showed you, that this IWW is not straight.”

  “Mister Anderson, what steps have you taken down in your country?” queried Kurt.

  “So far all I’ve done was to hire my hands for a year, give them high wages, an’ caution them when strangers come around to feed them an’ be civil an’ send them on.”

  “But we can’t do that up here in the Big Bend,” said Dorn seriously. “We need, say, a hundred thousand men in harvest time and not ten thousand all the rest of the year.”

  “Sure you can’t. But you’ll have to organize somethin’. Up here in this desert you could have a heap of trouble, if that outfit got here strong enough. You’d better tell every farmer you can trust about this IWW.”

  “I’ve only one American neighbor and he lives six miles from here,” replied Dorn. “Olsen over there is a Swede, and not a naturalized citizen, but I believe he’s for the U.S., and there’s . . .”

  “Dad,” interrupted the girl. “I believe our driver is listening to your very uninteresting conversation.”

  She spoke demurely, with laughter in her low voice. It made Dorn dare to look at her and he met a blue glance that was instantly averted.

  Anderson growled, evidently some very hard names, under his breath; his look just then was full of characteristic Western spirit. Then he got up. “Lenore, I reckon your talk’ll be more interesting than mine,” he said dryly. “I’ll go see Dorn an’ get this business over.”

  “I’d rather go with you,” hurriedly replied Kurt, and then, apparently at a seeming discourtesy in his words, his face flamed, and he stammered: “I . . . I don’t mean that . . . But Father is in a bad mood. We just quarreled . . . I told you . . . about the war. And, Mister Anderson, I’m . . . I’m a little afraid he’ll . . .”

  “Well, son, I’m not afraid,” interrupted the rancher. “I’ll beard the old lion in his den. You talk to Lenore.”

  “Please don’t speak of the war,” said Kurt appealingly.

  “Not a word unless he starts roarin’ at Uncle Sam,” declared Anderson with a twinkle in his eyes, and turned toward the house.

  “He’ll roar, all right,” said Kurt, almost with a groan. He knew what an ordeal awaited the rancher and he hated the fact that it could not be avoided. Then Kurt was confused, astounded, infuriated with himself over a situation he had not brought about and could scarcely realize. He became conscious of pride and shame, and something as black and hopeless as despair.

  “Haven’t I seen you . . . before?” asked the girl.

  The query surprised and thrilled Kurt out of his self-centered thought. “I don’t know. Have you? Where?” he answered, facing her. It was a relief to find that she still averted her face.

  “At Berkeley, in California, the first time, and the second at Spokane, in front of the Davenport,” she replied.

  “First . . . and . . . second . . . You . . . you remembered both times!” he burst out incredulously.

  “Yes. I don’t see how I could have helped remembering.” Her laugh was low, musical, a little hurried, yet cool.

  Dorn was not familiar with girls. He had worked hard all his life, there among these desert hills, and during the four years his father had allowed him for education. He knew wheat, but nothing of the eternal feminine. So it was impossible for him to grasp that this girl was not wholly at her ease. Her words and the cool little laugh suddenly brought home to Kurt the immeasurable distance between him and a daughter of one of the richest ranchers in Washington.

  “You mean I . . . I was impertinent,” he began, struggling between shame and pride. “I . . . I stared at you . . . Oh, I wasn’t being rude . . . But, Miss Anderson, I . . . I didn’t mean to be. I didn’t think you saw me . . . at all. I don’t know what made me do that. It never happened before. I beg your pardon.”

  A subtle indefinable change, perceptible to Dorn, even in his confused state, came over the girl.

  “I did not say you were impertinent,” she returned. “I remembered seeing you . . . notice me, that is all.”

  Self-possessed, aloof, and kind, Miss Anderson now became an impenetrable mystery to Dorn. But that only accentuated the distance she had intimated lay between them. Her kindness stung him to rec
over his composure. He wished she had not been kind. What a singular chance that had brought her here to his home—the daughter of a man who came to demand a long unpaid debt. What a dispelling of the vague thing that had only been a dream. Dorn gazed away across the yellowing hills to the dim blue of the mountains where rolled Oregon. Despite the color, it was gray—like his future.

  “I heard you tell Father you had studied wheat,” said the girl presently, evidently trying to make conversation.

  “Yes, all my life,” replied Kurt. “I was born in that house. My study has mostly been under my father. Look at my hands.” He held out big strong hands scarred and knotted, with horny palms uppermost, and he laughed. “I can be proud of them, Miss Anderson . . . But I had a splendid year in California at the university and I graduated from the Washington State Agricultural College.”

  “You love wheat . . . the raising of it, I mean?” she inquired.

  “It must be that I do, though I never had such a thought. Wheat is so wonderful. No one can guess who has not known it. The clean, plump grain, the sowing in fallow ground, the long wait, the first tender green, and the change day by day to the deep waving fields of gold . . . then the harvest, hot, noisy, smoky, full of dust and chaff, and the great combine-harvesters with twenty-four horses . . . oh, I guess I do love it all . . . I worked in a Spokane flour mill, too, just to learn how flour is made. There is nothing in the world so white, so clean, so pure as flour made from the wheat of the hills.”

  “Next you’ll be telling me that you can bake bread,” she rejoined, and her laugh was low and sweet. Her eyes shone like soft blue gleams.

  “Indeed I can. I bake all the bread we use,” he said stoutly. “And I flatter myself I can beat any girl you know.”

  “You can beat mine, I’m sure. Before I went to college I did pretty well. But I learned too much there. Now my mother and sisters, and brother Jim, all the family except Dad, make fun of my bread.”

  “You have a brother? How old is he?”

  “One brother . . . Jim we call him. He . . . he is just past twenty-one.” She faltered the last few words.

  Kurt felt on common ground with her then. The sudden break in her voice, the change in her face, the shadowing of the blue eyes—these were eloquent.

  “Oh, it’s horrible . . . this need of war!” she exclaimed.

  “Yes,” he replied simply. “But maybe your bother will not be called.”

  “Called! Why, he refused to wait for the draft. He went and enlisted. Dad patted him on the back. He’s home now, but goes to training camp in September . . . If anything happens to him, it’ll kill Mother. Jim is her idol. It’d break my heart . . . Oh, I hate the very name of Germans!”

  “My father is German,” said Kurt. “He’s been fifty years in America . . . forty years here on this farm. He always hated England. Now he’s bitter against America . . . I can see a side you can’t see. But I don’t blame you . . . for what you said.”

  “Forgive me. I can’t conceive of meaning that against anyone who’s lived here so long . . . Oh, it must be hard for you.”

  “I’ll let my father think I’m forced to join the Army. But I’m going to fight against his people. We are a house divided against itself.”

  “Oh, what a pity.” The girl sighed and her eyes were brooding sorrow.

  A step sounded behind them. Mr. Anderson appeared, sombrero off, mopping a very red face. His eyes gleamed with angry glints; his mouth and chin were working. He flopped down with a great explosive breath.

  “Kurt, your old man is a . . . a . . . son-of-a-gun!” he exclaimed vociferously, and manifestly liberation of speech was a relief.

  The young man nodded seriously and knowingly. “I hope, sir . . . he . . . he . . .”

  “He did . . . you just bet your life . . . He called me a lot in German, but I know cuss words when I hear them. I tried to reason with him . . . told him I wanted my money . . . was here to help him get that money off the farm, some way or other. An’ he swore I was a capitalist . . . an enemy to labor an’ the Northwest . . . that I an’ my kind had caused the war.”

  Kurt gazed gravely into the face of the disturbed rancher. Miss Anderson had wide-open eyes of wonder.

  “Sure I could have stood all that,” went on Anderson, fuming. “But he ordered me out of the house. I got mad an’ couldn’t go. Then . . . by George! . . . he pulled my nose an’ called me a bloody Englishman.”

  Kurt groaned in the disgrace of the moment. But amazingly Miss Anderson burst into a silvery peal of laughter.

  “Oh, Dad . . . that’s . . . just too . . . good for . . . anything! You met your match at last. You know you always . . . boasted of your drop of English blood . . . And you’re sensitive . . . about your big nose.”

  “He must be over seventy,” growled Anderson as if seeking for some excuse to palliate his restraint. “I’m mad . . . but it was funny.” The working of his face finally set in the huge wrinkles of a laugh.

  Young Dorn struggled to repress his own mirth, but unguardedly he happened to meet the dancing blue eyes of the girl, merry, provocative, full of youth and fun, and that was too much for him. He laughed with them.

  “The joke’s on me,” said Anderson. “An’ I can take one . . . Now, young man, I think I gathered from your amiable dad that, if the crop of wheat was full, I’d get my money. Otherwise, I could take over the land. For my part I’d never do that, but the others interested might do it, even for the little money involved. I tried to buy them out so I’d have the whole mortgage. They would not sell.”

  “Mister Anderson, you’re a square man, and I’ll do . . .” declared Kurt.

  “Come out an’ show me the wheat,” interrupted Anderson. “Lenore, do you want to go with us?”

  “I do,” replied the daughter, and she took up her hat to put it on.

  Kurt led them through the yard, out past the old barn, to the edge of the open slope, where the wheat stretched away, down and up, as far as the eye could see.

  Chapter Two

  “We’ve got over sixteen hundred acres in fallow ground, a half section in rye, another half in wheat . . . Turkey Red . . . and this section, you see, six hundred and forty acres in Bluestem,” said Kurt.

  Anderson’s keen eyes swept from near at hand to far away, down the gentle billowy slope and up the far hillside. The wheat was two feet high, beginning to be thick and heavy at the heads, as if struggling to burst. A fragrant dry wheaty smell, mingled with dust, came on the soft summer breeze and a faint silken rustle. The greenish, almost blue color near at hand gradually in the distance grew lighter, and then yellow, and finally took on a tinge of gold. There was a spirit in that vast wheat field.

  “Dorn, it’s the finest wheat I’ve seen,” declared Anderson, with the admiration of the farmer who aspired high. “In fact, it’s the only fine field of wheat I’ve seen since we left the foothills. How is that?”

  “Late spring and dry weather,” replied Dorn. “Most of the farmers’ reports are poor. If we get rain over the Big Bend country, we’ll have only an average yield this year. If we don’t get rain . . . then a flat failure.”

  Miss Anderson evinced an interest in the subject and she wanted to know why this particular field, identical with all the others for miles around, should have a promise of a magnificent crop when the others had no promise at all.

  “This section lay fallow a long time,” replied Dorn. “Snow lasted here on this north slope quite a while. My father used a method of soil cultivation intended to conserve moisture. The seed wheat was especially selected. And if we have rain during the next ten days, this section of Bluestem will yield fifty bushels to the acre.”

  “Fifty bushels!” ejaculated Anderson.

  “Bluestem? Why do you call it that when it’s green and yellow?” queried the girl.

  “It’s a name. There are many varieties of wheat. Bluestem is best here in this desert country because it resists drought, it produces large yield, it does not break, and the
flour mills rate it very high. Bluestem is not good in wet soils.”

  Anderson tramped along the edge of the field, peering down, here and there pulling a shaft of wheat and examining it. The girl gazed with dreamy eyes across the undulating sea. And Dorn watched her.

  “We have a ranch . . . thousands of acres, but not like this,” she said.

  “What’s the difference?” asked Dorn.

  She appeared pensive and in doubt. “I hardly know. What would you call this . . . this scene?”

  “Why, I call it the desert of wheat. But no one else does,” he replied.

  “I named Father’s ranch Many Waters. I think those names tell the difference.”

  “Isn’t my desert beautiful?”

  “No. It has a sameness . . . a monotony that would drive me mad. It looks as if the whole world had gone to wheat. It makes me think . . . oppresses me. All this means that we live by wheat alone. These bare hills! They’re too open to wind and sun and snow. They look like the toil of ages.”

  “Miss Anderson, there is such a thing as love for the earth . . . the bare brown earth. You know we came from dust and to dust we return. These fields are human to my father. And they have come to speak to me . . . a language I don’t understand yet. But I mean . . . what you see . . . the growing wheat here . . . the field of clods over there . . . the wind and dust and glare and heat . . . the eternal sameness of the open space . . . these are the things around which my life has centered, and when I go away from them, I am not content.”

  Anderson came back to the young couple, carrying some heads of wheat in his hand. “Smut!” he exclaimed, showing both diseased and healthy specimens of wheat. “Had to hunt hard to find that. Smut is the bane of all wheat growers. I never saw so little of it as there is here. In fact, we know scarcely nothin’ about smut an’ its cure, if there is any. You farmers who raise only grain have got the work down to a science. This Bluestem is not bearded wheat like Turkey Red. Has that beard anythin’ to do with smut?”