ith strength for the trip,
and good old Bill could carry them both.

A few days later when we asked Ma about the harrowing experience she
laughed and said, "Oh, it wasn't so bad. Pa and I talked over our whole
life in those three days, telling each other about our young days; Pa
telling me about some girls he used to spark that I never woulda heard
about if it hadn't been for that blizzard.... I told him about my first
husband ... he's the one who left me the ant-tic broach ... we did get
pretty cold toward the last.

"I burned up every old mail-order catalog I had saved. I always told Pa
they would come in handy.... What? Afraid we would freeze to death?
Well, we woulda gone together."

* * * * *

The blizzard was over, but the snow lay deep all over the prairie and
the great cold lasted so that few of the settlers ventured outside their
shacks. For days there was no hauling done. The trails that had been
worn since spring were buried deep and the drifts were treacherous.
There were many homesteaders over the Reservation who were running out
of fuel.

Now, if ever, was a time for cooperation, and _The Wand_ printed a list
of those who could spare fuel; they would share with those in need of
it. They brought what they could to the settlement and pooled it,
chopping up all the poles and posts they could find into stovewood, and
taking home small loads to tide them over.

With the fury of that storm, one of the hardest blizzards the frontier
had experienced, the winter spent itself. Under the soft warm breath of
a chinook the snow disappeared like magic, melting into the soil,
preparing it for the onslaught of the plow.

[Illustration]

XII

A NEW AMERICA

Ida Mary and I came through the winter stronger than we had ever been
before, but we welcomed the spring with grateful hearts. Only poets can
describe the electric, sweet quality of spring, but only the young, as
we were young that year, receive the full impact of its beauty. The
deep, cloudless blue of western skies, the vivid colors after the dead
white of winter, were fresh revelations, as though we had never known
them before.

One spring day I was making up the paper, while the Christophersons'
little tow-headed boy watched me.

"Are you going to be a printer when you grow up, Heine?"

"Nope. I don't want no little types," he replied. "I like traction
machines better--they go. My Pa's got one."

A tractor com