cake for us every day, unless, for a change, she made my favourite
pudding, striped with currants and boiled in a bag.

Next to getting warm and keeping warm, dinner and supper were the most
interesting things we had to think about. Our lives centred around
warmth and food and the return of the men at nightfall. I used to
wonder, when they came in tired from the fields, their feet numb and
their hands cracked and sore, how they could do all the chores so
conscientiously: feed and water and bed the horses, milk the cows, and
look after the pigs. When supper was over, it took them a long while
to get the cold out of their bones. While grandmother and I washed the
dishes and grandfather read his paper upstairs, Jake and Otto sat on
the long bench behind the stove, 'easing' their inside boots, or rubbing
mutton tallow into their cracked hands.

Every Saturday night we popped corn or made taffy, and Otto Fuchs used
to sing, 'For I Am a Cowboy and Know I've Done Wrong,' or, 'Bury Me Not
on the Lone Prairee.' He had a good baritone voice and always led the
singing when we went to church services at the sod schoolhouse.

I can still see those two men sitting on the bench; Otto's close-clipped
head and Jake's shaggy hair slicked flat in front by a wet comb. I can
see the sag of their tired shoulders against the whitewashed wall. What
good fellows they were, how much they knew, and how many things they had
kept faith with!

Fuchs had been a cowboy, a stage-driver, a bartender, a miner; had
wandered all over that great Western country and done hard work
everywhere, though, as grandmother said, he had nothing to show for it.
Jake was duller than Otto. He could scarcely read, wrote even his name
with difficulty, and he had a violent temper which sometimes made him
behave like a crazy man--tore him all to pieces and actually made him
ill. But he was so soft-hearted that anyone could impose upon him. If
he, as he said, 'forgot himself' and swore before grandmother, he went
about depressed and shamefaced all day. They were both of them jovial
about the cold in winter and the heat in summer, always ready to work
overtime and to meet emergencies. It was a matter of pride with them
not to spare themselves. Yet they were the sort of men who never get on,
somehow, or do anything but work hard for a dollar or two a day.

On those bitter, starlit nights, as we sat around the old stove that fed
us and warmed us and kept us cheerful, we co