Page:West of Dodge (1926).pdf/162

 Their minds ran to planks, out of which they built little coops, sides and roofs often of the same material, so frail, so unstable, so temporary in appearance, as to give the impression that a horde of squatters had come to camp there a little while in some speculative design, and that autumn would see them vanish away again, taking their raw little houses with them, never to return.

There were some—and these were not few—too poor to spare the money for planks. These burrowed into hillsides, making holes which they roofed over with poles and sod, heaping earth over all until it seemed an effort to disguise their lodgment, either in craftiness or shame. Stovepipes were thrust out of the rounded roofs of these bank-side dwellings; sometimes there was a tiny window beside the door or, if not a window independent of that opening, a pane or two let into the panels. More often there was not a gleam of glass.

To such homes as these men had brought their wives and children; old wives and young, children puny and strong, adolescent, infantile, just crossing the line of puberty. There were widows with strong sons, wifeless men with long-backed daughters, broken home-forces which must unite in course to rear a new and strange race in this unsheltered land. What would the young be like, nurtured on the hardships of that bleak highland plain, housed in the caves and thin board huts which seemed so pitifully insufficient in the temporary quiescence of a land so cruel that no man remembered a kindness at its threshold?

It eluded him. The picture swirled unformed, as denying in its elusiveness as the blue smoky distances of that unfathomable land. Out of all this fervor of beginning,