on the Divide. They come on like an epidemic in the hot wind season.
Those scorching dusty winds that blow up over the bluffs from Kansas
seem to dry up the blood in men’s veins as they do the sap in the
corn leaves. Whenever the yellow scorch creeps down over the tender
inside leaves about the ear, then the coroners prepare for active
duty; for the oil of the country is burned out and it does not take
long for the flame to eat up the wick. It causes no great sensation
there when a Dane is found swinging to his own windmill tower, and
most of the Poles after they have become too careless and
discouraged to shave themselves keep their razors to cut their
throats with.
It may be that the next generation on the Divide will be very happy,
but the present one came too late in life. It is useless for men
that have cut hemlocks among the mountains of Sweden for forty years
to try to be happy in a country as flat and gray and as naked as the
sea. It is not easy for men that have spent their youths fishing in
the Northern seas to be content with following a plow, and men that
have served in the Austrian army hate hard work and coarse clothing
and the loneliness of the plains, and long for marches and
excitement and tavern company and pretty barmaids. After a man has
passed his fortieth birthday it is not easy for him to change the
habits and conditions of his life. Most men bring with them to the
Divide only the dregs of the lives that they have squandered in
other lands and among other peoples.
Canute Canuteson was as mad as any of them, but his madness did not
take the form of suicide or religion but of alcohol. He had always
taken liquor when he wanted it, as all Norwegians do, but after his
first year of solitary life he settled down to it steadily. He
exhausted whisky after a while, and went to alcohol, because its
effects were speedier and surer. He was a big man with a terrible
amount of resistant force, and it took a great deal of alcohol even
to move him. After nine years of drinking, the quantities he could
take would seem fabulous to an ordinary drinking man. He never let
it interfere with his work, he generally drank at night and on
Sundays. Every night, as soon as his chores were done, he began to
drink. While he was able to sit up he would play on his mouth harp
or hack away at his window sills with his jack knife. When the
liquor went to his head he would lie down on his bed and stare out
of the window until he went to sleep. He drank alone and in solitude
not for pleasure or good cheer, but to forget the awful loneliness
and level of the Divide. Milton made a sad blunder when he put
mountains in hell. Mountains postulate faith and aspiration. All
mountain peoples are religious. It was the cities of the plains
that, because of their utter lack of spirituality and the mad
caprice of their vice, were cursed of God.
Alcohol is perfectly consistent in its effects upon man. Drunkenness
is merely an exaggeration. A foolish man drunk becomes maudlin; a
bloody man, vicious; a coarse man, vulgar. Canute was none of these,
but he was morose and gloomy, and liquor took him through all the
hells of Dante. As he lay on his giant’s bed all the horrors of this
world and every other were laid bare to his chilled senses. He was a
man who knew no joy, a man who toiled in silence and bitterness. The
skull and the serpent were always before him, the symbols of eternal
futileness and of eternal hate.
When the first Norwegians near enough to be called neighbors came,
Canute rejoiced, and planned to escape from his bosom vice. But he
was not a social man by nature and had not the power of drawing out
the social side of other people. His new neighbors rather feared him
because of his great strength and size, his silence and his lowering
brows. Perhaps, too, they knew that he was mad, mad from the eternal
treachery of the plains, which every spring stretch green and rustle
with the promises of Eden, showing long grassy lagoons full of clear
water and cattle whose hoofs are stained with wild roses. Before
autumn the lagoons are dried up, and the ground is burnt dry and
hard until it blisters and cracks open.
So instead of becoming a friend and neighbor to the men that settled
about him, Canute became a mystery and a terror. They told awful
stories of his size and strength and of the alcohol he drank. They
said that one night, when he went out to see to his horses just
before he went to bed, his steps were unsteady and the rotten planks
of the floor gave way and threw him behind the feet of a fiery young
stallion. His foot was caught fast in the floor, and the nervous
horse began kicking frantically. When Canute felt the blood
trickling down in his eyes from a scalp wound in his head, he roused
himself from his kingly indifference, and with the quiet stoical
courage of a drunken man leaned forward and wound his arms about the
horse’s hind legs and held them against his breast with crushing
embrace. All through the darkness and cold of the night he lay
there, matching strength against strength. When little Jim Peterson
went over the next morning at four o’clock to go with him to the
Blue to cut wood, he found him so, and the horse was on its fore
knees, trembling and whinnying with fear. This is the story the
Norwegians tell of him, and if it is true it is no wonder that they
feared and hated this Holder of the Heels of Horses.
One spring there moved to the next “eighty” a family that made a
great change in Canute’s life. Ole Yensen was too drunk most of the
time to be afraid of any one, and his wife Mary was too garrulous to
be afraid of any one who listened to her talk, and Lena, their
pretty daughter, was not afraid of man nor devil. So it came about
that Canute went over to take his alcohol with Ole oftener than he
took it alone. After a while the report spread that he was going to
marry Yensen’s daughter, and the Norwegian girls began to tease Lena
about the great bear she was going to keep house for. No one could
quite see how the affair had come about, for Canute’s tactics of
courtship were somewhat peculiar. He apparently never spoke to her
at alclass="underline" he would sit for hours with Mary chattering on one side of
him and Ole drinking on the other and watch Lena at her work. She
teased him, and threw flour in his face and put vinegar in his
coffee, but he took her rough jokes with silent wonder, never even
smiling. He took her to church occasionally, but the most watchful
and curious people never saw him speak to her. He would sit staring
at her while she giggled and flirted with the other men.
Next spring Mary Lee went to town to work in a steam laundry. She
came home every Sunday, and always ran across to Yensens to startle
Lena with stories of ten cent theaters, firemen’s dances, and all
the other esthetic delights of metropolitan life. In a few weeks
Lena’s head was completely turned, and she gave her father no rest
until he let her go to town to seek her fortune at the ironing
board. From the time she came home on her first visit she began to
treat Canute with contempt. She had bought a plush cloak and kid
gloves, had her clothes made by the dress-maker, and assumed airs
and graces that made the other women of the neighborhood cordially
detest her. She generally brought with her a young man from town who
waxed his mustache and wore a red necktie, and she did not even
introduce him to Canute.
The neighbors teased Canute a good deal until he knocked one of them