Chapter XII A Nebraska Dugout
With the roar of a tornado the prairie fire swept down upon them.
The high grass, dry as tinder after the long hot spell, burned as if covered with turpentine.
The tall rosin-weeds and sunflowers, blazing like torches, sent up showers of sparks that the wind carried through the air, setting fresh fires and raining down upon the travelers, burning their clothes and singeing their faces and hair.
Once Mrs. Peniman’s calico apron caught fire, but she tore it off and trampled it under her feet.
At times it looked as if the wall of flame must leap the narrow boundary of burned-over ground and sweep down upon them, destroying them all in the roaring furnace that raced toward them.
The heat grew fiercer; the horses screamed and tugged at their halters, the cow bellowed pitifully, and the little pigs at the back of the wagon squealed as if the knife of the executioner were at their throats.
For a moment the flames seemed to fairly tower over them, hissing and crackling in its wrath.
Would it leap the back-fire?
The hearts of the pioneers almost stopped breathing. An agonized prayer went up from the hearts of the parents that they and their little ones might be spared.
Then the wall of flame flickered, fell—and swept on around them.
Their back-fire had saved them.
With cracked and parching lips they uttered prayers of thanksgiving, and worn out with the struggle let sacks and brooms drop from their nerveless hands and stood still.
They realized now for the first time the extent of their exhaustion. They felt the pain of their burned hands, their scorched faces, their parched and burning throats.
Daylight came before they were able to realize the fact that they were saved.
The broadening light revealed a sad and dismal prospect. If the prairie had seemed monotonous to them before in its sombre dress of grey, and brown, and green, it seemed desolate beyond all description now, covered as far as the eye could see with a pall of funereal blackness.
Suffering as they were with burns and thirst it was noon before the ground was cool enough so that they could drive over the still smoking prairies.
All the afternoon they drove, straining their eyes in every direction for the sight of a town, a house, a sign of shade and water.
As fast as possible they veered away from the burned district, and about sundown got out of the track of the fire and onto the brown dry prairies.
Back of them and far away to the south and east they could still see the devastating trail of the fire, but away to the north and west the wind had turned the direction of the flames and the prairie remained untouched by its fury.
It was a tremendous relief to escape from the scorched and blackened ground, the stifling smell of burned grass, the acrid smoke that made their eyes smart and water and their throats sting, and to drive out on the unscorched prairies, which, hot as they were, seemed cool in comparison.
It was nearing nightfall when they saw, not far away, a small column of smoke rising in the air. Joshua Peniman scanned it with eager eyes.
“It might be an Indian camp,” said his wife anxiously.
“White men or red we must have water to-night,” he said, and drove on.
As they drew nearer they saw a low, squat outline against a small rise in the ground, and from it rose a stove-pipe, from which the smoke they had seen was coming.
“What is it?” called Joe. “Is it an Indian’s hut?”
“No, thank God,” cried Joshua Peniman fervently; “no Indians live there. It must be a dugout, and if it is white people are living in it.”
He clucked to the horses and drove eagerly forward.
As they approached the low, dark object they saw that it had a roof, and that the sides were dug back in the rise of ground behind it. They could also see that it had two windows in front, and a door, which was thrown open as they drew nearer, and a tall, raw-boned red-haired woman with a good-natured freckled face stood framed in the opening.
“Wal of all things!” she ejaculated, “if it ain’t a bunch o’ emigrants! Hello, mister, where’d you come from?”
“From Ohio,” called out Joshua Peniman, and made all possible haste toward the dugout.
As the wagon drew up before the door she looked at its occupants, then laughed aloud.
“Fer th’ land sakes,” she cried; “what be ye? Air ye niggers or Mexicans or Portuguese, or what?”
“We’re Americans—and white,” said Mr. Peniman laughing, as he leaped from the wagon. “At least we were white once, and we hope to be again. We’ve just escaped with our lives from a terrible prairie fire, and are covered with its smoke and grime.”
“Lord save us!” ejaculated the woman. “Was you in the track o’ that fire? We been watchin’ it all day. We was skeered it might ketch us, but the wind wa’n’t in th’ right direction. Them prairie fires is terrible things. We mighty nigh got burned out last fall.”
“We used all the water we had fighting fire,” Mr. Peniman continued, “and are all suffering from thirst. I wonder if you could let us have a little drinking water?”
“Kin I? Wal I should say I could! Me an’ Jim never turned a thirsty man or woman or horse or dog away from our place yit! Git out, git out, all of ye! We’ve got a good well and you can have all the water ye want to drink and wash up, too, and I will say you sure do need it.”
The travelers came scrambling out of the wagon, and there were tears of relief and gratitude in Hannah Peniman’s eyes.
“Jim,” a husky-looking pioneer over six feet tall, with a good-humored sunburned face and a shock of tow-colored hair sticking up through a hole in his hat, came hurrying up at this moment, drawn from his work in his cornfield near by by the unwonted sight of a caravan of moving wagons before his door. As he came he cast a sharp, inquiring look at the company of sooty, grimy individuals gathered before his dugout.
“We aren’t quite such desperate characters as we appear,” saluted Joshua Peniman with his pleasant smile. “We have barely escaped with our lives from a prairie fire, had to use all the water we had, and have had no chance to wash. My name is Peniman—Joshua Peniman, a Quaker, from the Muskingum Valley in Ohio, and these are my wife and children.”
“Glad t’ meet ye, Mr. Peniman,” said the pioneer, extending a hairy, work-worn hand. “So you was in the track o’ that fire, was ye? Sa-ay, I wonder ye ever got out alive. It was sure a fire, all right. Me an’ the old woman been watchin’ it. Thought fer a spell it might come this way, but th’ wind favored us. Glad ye got through all right. Ye sure have got a likely-lookin’ family. My name’s Ward—Jim Ward. B’en out here goin’ on three years. Homesteaded a piece o’ land back here that ye can’t beat in the hull nation. Travelin’ across country? Be’n pretty hot, ain’t it? But that’s what makes good corn. We’re going to have a hummer of a crop this season. But come in, come in! Ye shore do look all tuckered out. Wife’ll git ye chairs, an’ I’ll go out an’ draw up some fresh water. I reckon ye must be dry.”
When the thirst of the family had been satisfied they felt greatly refreshed, and for the first time began to look about them. Mrs. Ward saw the curious glances the young people were casting about the queer-looking underground house and burst into a good-natured laugh.
“I’ll bet you folks ain’t never seen a dugout before,” she exclaimed jovially. “Well it’s sure a queer way to live, but me an’ Jim think it’s a good way—to begin with. We ain’t always goin’ to live this way, but a dugout’s safe from cyclones and blizzards and Indians, an’ it’s warm in winter an’ cool in summer—an’ what more does a pioneer want?”
“I see that it has great advantages,” said Joshua Peniman gazing with interest about the dwelling. “Do you see how it is done, Hannah? You see they have chosen a place where there is a rise in the ground, and have dug back into the earth so that the house is protected on every side but the front. You have had to build up side walls, of course, where the earth slopes away, and a front wall, but that was all. I see how safe and sheltered it must be, both from weather and possible enemies.”
“Yes, an’ a feller has to think a heap about both o’ them out here,” said Jim Ward, standing with his hands in his pockets and his legs wide apart as the travelers admired his dwelling.
The excavation, which was about twenty by thirty feet square, was dug back into the bank of a piece of rolling ground on the prairie, and made into a chamber about nine feet high. The entire rear part of the dwelling was protected by the embankment, and a part of the sides, while a stout, thick wall of sods was built up on the sides and in front, in which was let a door and two windows. An ivy-vine was trained up over the window casements, clean white curtains shaded the spotless panes, which had broad sills, upon which were placed pots of geraniums in full bloom.
The floor was made of matched flooring, and was as white as hands could make it, with braided rag rugs spread before the shining stove and the red-covered table, upon which were a Bible, a vase of wild-flowers, and a shining lamp. In a corner of the room was a large double bed, made up with a spotless blue-and-white patchwork counterpane, and “shams,” elaborately worked in red cotton, with “Good Night” on one pillow and “Good Morning” on the other. At the other end of the room was a shining cook-stove, with a tea-kettle steaming cozily upon it, and a row of packing cases, which had been placed one on top of another and cleverly converted into a kitchen cupboard.
“It’s wonderfully clean and cozy and comfortable-looking,” exclaimed Mrs. Peniman. “I wonder how you keep it so. I would not dream that a house just dug into the ground could be so attractive.”
“Lots of ’em ain’t,” vouchsafed Jim Ward. “Some of the folks that come out here is content to live like pigs. But me an’ Mary ain’t. She always was a good housekeeper, an’ she keeps this place so nice I sometimes almost forgit we live in a dugout.”
“Now you quit talkin’, Jim,” put in “Mary,” “and go an’ draw up a tubful o’ fresh water. I reckon these folks don’t want nothin’ so much in this world as a bath. I’ll set a wash-tub out in th’ back yard, an’ when it comes dark ye can all take a bath. I sh’d think ye could begin now with th’ little fellers.”
One after another the Peniman family slipped out and took their turn in the tub in the back yard, and it was indeed a cleansed and changed family that gathered at last on the “front stoop,” as Jim Ward facetiously called the hard, beaten place before the door.
When supper was over they sat on the “stoop” until the moon rose, listening eagerly to the many curious and interesting tales the pioneer homesteader and his wife had to tell.
“Has thee ever been troubled with Indians, friend Ward?” asked Joshua Peniman, a bit anxiously.
“No,” answered the pioneer, “we ain’t never had any trouble with ’em. A lot of the settlers has, but I’ve always figgered it was their own fault. We’ve been livin’ out here three years now, an’ we’ve never had a thing stolen or molested or a bit o’ trouble ourselves.”
“But why haven’t you?” demanded Joe, “when the others have?”
“Because I’ve always figgered on treatin’ the Indians like they was human. Some folks treats ’em worse’n dogs. Good land, this is their country, ain’t it? They was here first! Us folks that comes in now is just takin’ what they’ve owned for God knows how many years. Ain’t it so?”
“Yes,” said Joshua Peniman, “it is. I have always felt so. But we have so often been warned of danger——”
“An’ there is danger; don’t ye ever forgit that. Some o’ these here Indians is bad medicine. They’re mad about havin’ white settlers come in, an’ they’ll plug ye the fust chance they get. But I figger that Indians is jest like other folks. Some is bad an’ some good—they’re all just human. Me an’ Mary has always thought if we treated them all right they’d treat us right. So fur it’s worked all right.”
During the long talk that Mr. Peniman had with Jim Ward after the women and children had retired to get ready for bed, he discussed land and locations, and when the family set forth the next morning it was with the firm intention of going to the northwestern part of Nebraska, where the land along the Niobrara was particularly recommended, and where there were still thousands of acres of government land to be homesteaded upon for the choice.
They bade their kind host and hostess a reluctant good-bye, and having promised that they would write them when they had arrived at their destination they started on, turning to wave their hands again and again to the last white people they were to see for many a long day.