I The train drew out of the great Van Buren Street depot at 4.30 of a dark day in late October. A tall young man, with a timid look in his eyes, was almost the last passenger to get on, and his pale face wore a worried look as he dropped into an empty seat […]

Matilda Bent was dying; there was no doubt of that now, if there had been before. The gruff old physician–one of the many overworked and underpaid country doctors–shook his head and pushed by Joe Bent, her husband, as he passed through the room which served as dining-room, sitting-room, and parlor. The poor fellow slouched back […]

I A man and a woman were pacing up and down the wintry station platform, waiting for a train. On every side the snow lay a stained and crumpled blanket, with here and there a light or a chimney to show the village sleeping beneath. The sky was a purple-black hemisphere, out of which the […]

The train was ambling across the hot, russet plain. The wind, strong and warm and dry, sweeping up from the south, carried with it the subtle odor of September grass and gathered harvests. Out of the unfenced roads the dust arose in long lines, like smoke from some hidden burning which the riven earth revealed. […]

A funeral is a depressing affair under the best circumstances, but a funeral in a lonely farm-house in March, the roads full of slush, the ragged gray clouds leaping the sullen hills like eagles, is tragic. The teams arrived splashed with mud, the women blue with cold under their scanty cotton-quilt lap robes, their hats […]

I Albert Lohr was studying the motion of the ropes and lamps, and listening to the rumble of the wheels and the roar of the ferocious wind against the pane of glass that his head touched. It was the midnight train from Marion rushing toward Warsaw like some savage thing unchained, creaking, shrieking, and clattering […]

I They were threshing on Farmer Jennings’s place when Daddy made his very characteristic appearance. Milton, a boy of thirteen, was gloomily holding sacks for the measurer, and the glory of the October day was dimmed by the suffocating dust, and poisoned by the smarting beards and chaff which had worked their way down his […]

I Lucretia Burns had never been handsome, even in her days of early girlhood, and now she was middle-aged, distorted with work and child-bearing, and looking faded and worn as one of the boulders that lay beside the pasture fence near where she sat milking a large white cow. She had no shawl or hat […]

Sunday is the day for courtship on the prairie. It has also the piety of cleanliness. It allows the young man to get back to a self-respecting sweetness of person, and enables the girls to look as nature intended, dainty and sweet as posies. The change from everyday clothing on the part of young workmen […]

I Old man Bacon was pinching forked barbs on a wire fence one rainy day in July, when his neighbor Jennings came along the road on his way to town. Jennings never went to town except when it rained too hard to work outdoors, his neighbors said; and of old man Bacon it was said […]

I The yellow March sun lay powerfully on the bare Iowa prairie, where the ploughed fields were already turning warm and brown, and only here and there in a corner or on the north side of the fence did the sullen drifts remain, and they were so dark and low that they hardly appeared to […]

They lay on the cliff where the warm sun fell. Beneath them were rocks, lichen-spotted above, and orange and russet and pink beneath. Around the headland the ocean ravened with roaring breath, flinging itself ceaselessly on the land, only to fall back with clutching snarl over the pebbles. The smell of hot cedars was in […]

The seminary buildings stood not far from the low, lodgelike railway station, and a path led through a gap in the fence across the meadow. People were soberly converging toward its central building, as if proceeding to church. Among the people who alighted from the two o’clock train were Professor Blakesly and his wife and […]

I. THE PRISONED SOUL. The Capitol swarmed with people. Groups of legislators tramped noisily along the corridors, laughing loudly, gesticulating with pointed fingers or closed fists. Squads of ragged, wondering, and wistful-eyed negroes, splashed with orange-colored mud from the fields, moved timidly on from magnificence to magnificence, keeping close to each other, solemn and silent. […]

Beyond his necessity, a tired man is not apt to be polite. This Mrs. Miner had generalized from long experience with her husband. She knew at a distance, by the way he wore his hat when he came in out of the field, whether he was in a peculiarly savage mood, or only in his […]

She was in the box; he was far above in the gallery. He looked down and across and saw her sitting there fair as a flower and robed like a royal courtesan in flame and snow. Like a red torch flamed the ruby in her hair. Her shoulders were framed in her cloak, white as […]

–the tenderfoot hay-roller from theprairies–still tries his luck in someabandoned tunnel–sternly toiling forhis sweetheart far away. The only passenger in the car who really interested me was a burly young fellow who sat just ahead of me, and who seemed to be something more than a tourist, for the conductor greeted him pleasantly and the […]

–mounted wanderer, horseman of the restless heart,still rides from place to place, contemptuous of gold,carrying in his parfleche all the vanishing traditionsof the West. THE TRAIL TRAMPKELLEY AFOOT I Kelley was in off the range and in profound disgust with himself, for after serving honorably as line-rider and later as cow-boss for ten years or […]

–the murderer still seeks forgetfulness inthe solitude, building his cabin in the shadowof great peaks. The road that leads to the historic north shoulder of Solidor is lonely now. The stages that once crawled painfully upward through its flowery meadows are playhouses for the children of Silver Plume, and the brakes that once howled so […]

–the reckless cowboy on his watch-eyed broncostill lopes across the grassy foot-hills–or holdshis milling herd in the high parks. I The post-office at Eagle River was so small that McCoy and his herders always spoke of the official within as “the Badger,” saying that he must surely back into his den for lack of room […]