S STRICKEN 396

XXXI. MAIN TRAVELLED ROADS 410

XXXII. THE SPIRIT OF REVOLT 421

XXXIII. THE END OF THE SUNSET TRAIL 433

XXXIV. WE GO TO CALIFORNIA 440

XXXV. THE HOMESTEAD IN THE VALLEY 455

A SON OF THE MIDDLE BORDER [Illustration]

A Son of the Middle Border

CHAPTER I

Home from the War

All of this universe known to me in the year 1864 was bounded by the
wooded hills of a little Wisconsin coulee, and its center was the
cottage in which my mother was living alone--my father was in the war.
As I project myself back into that mystical age, half lights cover most
of the valley. The road before our doorstone begins and ends in vague
obscurity--and Granma Green's house at the fork of the trail stands on
the very edge of the world in a sinister region peopled with bears and
other menacing creatures. Beyond this point all is darkness and terror.

It is Sunday afternoon and my mother and her three children, Frank,
Harriet and I (all in our best dresses) are visiting the Widow Green,
our nearest neighbor, a plump, jolly woman whom we greatly love. The
house swarms with stalwart men and buxom women and we are all sitting
around the table heaped with the remains of a harvest feast. The women
are "telling fortunes" by means of tea-grounds. Mrs. Green is the
seeress. After shaking the cup with the grounds at the bottom, she turns
it bottom side up in a saucer. Then whirling it three times to the right
and three times to the left, she lifts it and silently studies the
position of the leaves which cling to the sides of the cup, what time we
all wait in breathless suspense for her first word.

"A soldier is coming to you!" she says to my mother. "See," and she
points into the cup. We all crowd near, and I perceive a leaf with a
stem sticking up from its body like a bayonet over a man's shoulder. "He
is almost home," the widow goes on. Then with sudden dramatic turn she
waves her hand toward the road, "Heavens and earth!" she cries. "There's
Richard now!"

We all turn and look toward the road, and there, indeed, is a soldier
with a musket on his back, wearily plodding his way up the low hill just
north of the gate. He is too far away for mother to call, and besides I
think she must have been a little uncertain, for he did not so m