The Man from the Bitter Roots

Excerpt

I

Before He Grew Up

The little white “digger,” galloping with the stiff, short-legged jumps of the broken-down cow pony, stopped short as the boy riding him pulled sharply on the reins, and after looking hard at something which lay in a bare spot in the grass, slid from its fat back.

He picked up the rock which had attracted his eye, and turned it over and over in his hand. His pockets bulged with colored pebbles and odd-looking stones he had found in washouts and ravines. There was no great variety on the Iowa prairie, and he thought he knew them all, but he had never seen a rock like this.

He crossed his bare, tanned legs, and sat down to examine it more closely, while the lazy cow pony immediately went to sleep. The stone was heavy and black, with a pitted surface as polished as though some one had laboriously rubbed it smooth. Where did it come from? How did it get there? Involuntarily he looked up at the sky. Perhaps God had thrown it down to surprise him—to make him wonder. He smiled a little. God was a very real person to Bruce Burt. He had a notion that He kept close watch upon his movements through a large crack somewhere in the sky.

Yes, God must have tossed it down, for how else could a rock so different from every other rock be lying there as though it had just dropped? He wished he had not so long to wait before he could show it to his mother. He was tempted to say he saw it fall, but she might ask him “Honest Injun?” and he decided not. However, if God made crawfish go into their holes backward just to make boys laugh, and grasshoppers chew tobacco, why wouldn’t He——

The sound of prairie grass swishing about the legs of a galloping horse made him jump, startled, to his feet and thrust the strange rock into the front of his shirt. His father reined in, and demanded angrily:

“What you here for? Why didn’t you do as I told you?”

“I—I forgot. I got off to look at a funny rock. See, papa!” His black eye sparkled as he took it from his shirt front and held it up eagerly.

His father did not look at it.

“Get on your horse!” he said harshly. “I can’t trust you to do anything. We’re late as it is, and women don’t like people coming in on ’em at meal-time without warning.” He kicked his horse in the ribs, and galloped off.

The abashed look in the boy’s face changed to sullenness. He jumped on his pony and followed his father, but shortly he lowered his black lashes, and the tears slipped down his cheeks.

Why had he shown that rock, anyhow? he asked himself in chagrin. He might have known that his father wouldn’t look at it, that he didn’t look at anything or care about anything but horses and cattle. Certainly his father did not care about him. He could not remember when the stern man had given him a pat on the head, or a good-night kiss. The thought of his father kissing anybody startled him. It seemed to him that his father seldom spoke to him except to reprimand or ridicule him, and the latter was by far the worse....