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Page 47
Frances told her to come again, whenever she was lonesome or wanted advice
about anything. Lena replied that she didn't believe she would ever get
lonesome in Black Hawk.
She lingered at the kitchen door and begged Antonia to come and see her
often. `I've got a room of my own at Mrs. Thomas's, with a carpet.'
Tony shuffled uneasily in her cloth slippers. `I'll come sometime, but
Mrs. Harling don't like to have me run much,' she said evasively.
`You can do what you please when you go out, can't you?' Lena asked in a
guarded whisper. `Ain't you crazy about town, Tony? I don't care what
anybody says, I'm done with the farm!' She glanced back over her shoulder
toward the dining-room, where Mrs. Harling sat.
When Lena was gone, Frances asked Antonia why she hadn't been a little more
cordial to her.
`I didn't know if your mother would like her coming here,' said Antonia,
looking troubled. `She was kind of talked about, out there.'
`Yes, I know. But mother won't hold it against her if she behaves well
here. You needn't say anything about that to the children. I guess Jim
has heard all that gossip?'
When I nodded, she pulled my hair and told me I knew too much, anyhow. We
were good friends, Frances and I.
I ran home to tell grandmother that Lena Lingard had come to town. We were
glad of it, for she had a hard life on the farm.
Lena lived in the Norwegian settlement west of Squaw Creek, and she used to
herd her father's cattle in the open country between his place and the
Shimerdas'. Whenever we rode over in that direction we saw her out among
her cattle, bareheaded and barefooted, scantily dressed in tattered
clothing, always knitting as she watched her herd. Before I knew Lena, I
thought of her as something wild, that always lived on the prairie, because
I had never seen her under a roof. Her yellow hair was burned to a ruddy
thatch on her head; but her legs and arms, curiously enough, in spite of
constant exposure to the sun, kept a miraculous whiteness which somehow
made her seem more undressed than other girls who went scantily clad. The
first time I stopped to talk to her, I was astonished at her soft voice and
easy, gentle ways. The girls out there usually got rough and mannish after
they went to herding. But Lena asked Jake and me to get off our horses and
stay awhile, and behaved exactly as if she were in a house and were
accustomed to having visitors. She was not embarrassed by her ragged
clothes, and treated us as if we were old acquaintances. Even then I
noticed the unusual colour of her eyes-- a shade of deep violet--and their
soft, confiding expression.
Chris Lingard was not a very successful farmer, and he had a large family.
Lena was always knitting stockings for little brothers and sisters, and
even the Norwegian women, who disapproved of her, admitted that she was a
good daughter to her mother. As Tony said, she had been talked about. She
was accused of making Ole Benson lose the little sense he had-- and that at
an age when she should still have been in pinafores.
Ole lived in a leaky dugout somewhere at the edge of the settlement. He
was fat and lazy and discouraged, and bad luck had become a habit with him.
After he had had every other kind of misfortune, his wife, `Crazy Mary,'
tried to set a neighbour's barn on fire, and was sent to the asylum at
Lincoln. She was kept there for a few months, then escaped and walked all
the way home, nearly two hundred miles, travelling by night and hiding in
barns and haystacks by day. When she got back to the Norwegian settlement,
her poor feet were as hard as hoofs. She promised to be good, and was
allowed to stay at home--though everyone realized she was as crazy as ever,
and she still ran about barefooted through the snow, telling her domestic
troubles to her neighbours.
Not long after Mary came back from the asylum, I heard a young Dane, who
was helping us to thresh, tell Jake and Otto that Chris Lingard's oldest
girl had put Ole Benson out of his head, until he had no more sense than
his crazy wife. When Ole was cultivating his corn that summer, he used to
get discouraged in the field, tie up his team, and wander off to wherever
Lena Lingard was herding. There he would sit down on the drawside and help
her watch her cattle. All the settlement was talking about it. The
Norwegian preacher's wife went to Lena and told her she ought not to allow
this; she begged Lena to come to church on Sundays. Lena said she hadn't a
dress in the world any less ragged than the one on her back. Then the
minister's wife went through her old trunks and found some things she had
worn before her marriage.
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