The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer

  CHAPTER XIII

  IMAGINATIONS RUN AMUCK

  I decided to utilize some of my spare time by doing a little freightingfrom Oristown to Calias. Accordingly, one fair morning I started for theformer town. It began raining that evening, finally turning into a finesnow, and by morning a genuine South Dakota blizzard was raging. How thewind did screech across the prairie!

  I was driving the big horse and Jenny Mule to a wagon loaded with twotons of coal. They were not shod, and the hillsides had become slick andtreacherous with ice. At the foot of every hill Jenny Mule would lay herears back, draw herself up like a toad, when teased, and look up with agroan, while the big horse trotted on up the next slope, pulling hershare of the load.

  When the wind finally went down the mercury fell to 25 deg. below zero andmy wrists, face, feet, and ears were frost bitten when I arrived atCalias. As is always the case during such severe weather, the hotel wasfilled, and laughing, story telling, and good cheer prevailed. TheNicholson boys asked "how I made it" and I answered disgustedly that I'dhave made it all right if that Jennie Mule hadn't got faint hearted. Theremark was received as a good joke and my suffering and annoyances ofthe trip slipped away into the past. That remark also had the furthereffect of giving Jennie Mule immortality. She became the topic ofconversation and jest in hotel and postoffice lobbies, and even to thisday the story of the "faint hearted mule" often affords splendidentertainment at festive boards and banquet halls of the Little Crow,when told by a Nicholson.

  While working in the rain, the perspiration and the rain water hadcaused my body to become so badly galled, that I found considerabledifficulty in getting around. To add to this discomfiture Jenny Mule wasaffected with a touch of "Maudism" at times, especially while engaged ineating grain. One night when I had wandered thoughtlessly into the barn,she gave me such a wallop on the right shin as to impair that memberuntil I could hardly walk without something to hold to. As it had takena fourteen-hundred-mile walk to follow the plow in breaking the onehundred and twenty acres, I was about "all in" physically when it wasdone.

  As a means of recuperation I took a trip to Chicago. While there, the"call of the road" affected me; I got reinstated and ran a couple ofmonths to the coast. Four months of free life on the plains, however,had changed me. After one trip I came in and found a letter from Jessie,saying she was sick, and although she never said "come and see me" Itook it as an excuse and quit that P----n Company for good--and here itpasses out of the story--went down state to M--boro, and spent thehappiest week of my life.

  After I had returned to Dakota, however, I contracted an imaginationthat worked me into a state of jealously, concerning an individual whomade his home in M--boro, and with whom I suspicioned the object of myheart to be unduly friendly. I say, this is what I suspicioned. Therewas no particular proof, and I have been inclined to think, in afteryears, that it was more a case of an over-energetic imagination runamuck. I contended in my mind and in my letters to her as well, that Ishould not have thought anything of it, if the "man in the case" had alittle more promising future, but since his proficiency only earned himthe munificent sum of three dollars per week, I continued to fret andfume, until I at last resolved to suspend all communication with her.

  Now what I should have done when I reached this stage of imaginaryinsanity, was to have sent Miss Rooks a ticket, some money, and shewould have come to Dakota and married me, and together we would have"lived happy ever after." As I see it now, I was affected with an"idealism." Of course I was not aware of it at the time--no young soulis--until they have learned by bitter experience the folly of "theyshould not do thus and so", and, of course, there is the old excuse,"good intentions." Somewhere I read that the road to--not St. Peter--ispaved with good intentions. The result of my prolific imagination wasthat I carried out my resolutions, quit writing, and emotionally livedrather unhappily thereafter, for some time at least.