Finally, I felt a large light hand laid softly on my head.
I looked up and saw Magnus Thorkelson bending over me.
"Forty acres," said he, "bane pretty big farm in Norvay. My fadder on
twenty acres, raise ten shildren. Not so gude land like dis. Vun of dem
shildern bane college professor, and vun a big man in leggislatur. Forty
acre bane gude farm, for gude farmer."
I turned over, wiped my sleeve across my eyes, and sat up.
"I guess I dropped asleep," I said.
"Yass," he said. "You bane sleep long time. I came back to ask if I stay
vith you. I halp you. You halp me. Ve halp each udder. Ve be neighbors
alvays. I get farm next you. I halp you build house, an' you halp me.
Maybe ve lif togedder till you git vooman, or I git vooman--if American
vooman marry Norwegian man. I stay?"
I took his hand and pressed it. After a few days' studying over it, I
made up my mind that in the kindness of his heart he had come back just
to comfort me. And all that he had said we would do, we did. Before long
we had a warm dugout barn built in the eastern slope of the hillside,
partly sheltered from the northwestern winds, and Magnus and I slept in
one end of it on the sweet hay we cut in the marsh while the cows ranged
on the prairie. Together we broke prairie, first on his land, then on
mine. Together we hauled lumber from the river for my first
little house.
If we first settlers in Iowa had possessed the sense the Lord gives to
most, we could have built better and warmer, and prettier houses than
the ones we put up, of the prairie sod which we ripped up in long black
ribbons of earth; but we all were from lands of forests, and it took a
generation to teach our prairie pioneers that a sod house is a good
house.
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