The Jumping-Off Place by Marian Hurd McNeely

Author:Marian Hurd McNeely [Marian Hurd McNeely]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2017-08-31T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER VII

A MESSAGE FROM UNCLE JIM

THE golden days of June became the molten days of July. The sky was cloudless and the sun was a blinding glare. The winds that stirred the air were hotter than the air itself and seemed to be blown across a fiery furnace. The meadow-larks were silent, and the gardens on the breaking withered.

Three weeks of the blazing sunshine. The green carpet that had unrolled before them two months ago disappeared, and a dry mat of slippery hay covered the earth. The corn was no longer shiny and green; the blades were pale yellow and crinkled with heat. Nobody said, any more, that it was good corn weather. At first they had complained that it was too dry; then they had said that they must get rain; now they had stopped talking about it. The few homesteaders that drove by on the trail were so discouraged and blue that they frequently didn’t rein up their horses at all as they passed by.

Becky and Dick made a brave fight to save the garden. They shielded the sickly plants from the sun with cloths and tin cans; they hoed the earth around and around the roots; they carried pail after pail of water to the clearing. But the tendrils of the cucumbers burned away, the melon vines were seared, and the tomatoes hung their limp heads. One by one the leaves on the two transplanted trees turned yellow, withered, blew away. Even Castor and Pollux looked ready to die, though each day Becky loosened the dirt around their roots, and each night she carried water from the creek to pour around them.

“I just can’t bear to lose them,” she said. “They’re the only green thing I can see from the window.”

“Wish we’d had a picture taken of the claim before everything dried up,” said Joan. “Our place looks almost as bad as the Welpses, now. If we had a contest there wouldn’t be anything to show for all that work we did.”

“I’d just as soon the Welps would get the land, if this is the kind of summers they have in Tripp County. I don’t think this is much of a place to live,” growled Phil.

The children no longer sought their old haunts. It was too hot to play near the little homestead; the prairie dog town blazed under the fierce sun; the creek was drying up. The last time they had played there water stood only in the deeper pools, and in one of the shallower basins Phil had counted twelve small striped snakes wriggling over one another in a vain attempt to get beneath the water. It was too hot to play; too hot to work. The children hung about in the shadow cast by the barn, listlessly trying and discarding schemes for comfort, and quarreling with each other. Becky’s nerves, already frayed by the heat, were more and more worn by the discord. The tiny kitchen was almost unbearable in the middle part of the day, and out of it came nothing that was appetizing.

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