but they shall not part us. We have seen it all together, and we
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.
, May 21, 1892
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
