us a
child, and now she was a tall, strong young girl, although her fifteenth
birthday had just slipped by. I ran out and met her as she brought her
horses up to the windmill to water them. She wore the boots her father had
so thoughtfully taken off before he shot himself, and his old fur cap. Her
outgrown cotton dress switched about her calves, over the boot-tops. She
kept her sleeves rolled up all day, and her arms and throat were burned as
brown as a sailor's. Her neck came up strongly out of her shoulders, like
the bole of a tree out of the turf. One sees that draft-horse neck among
the peasant women in all old countries.

She greeted me gayly, and began at once to tell me how much ploughing she
had done that day. Ambrosch, she said, was on the north quarter, breaking
sod with the oxen.

"Jim, you ask Jake how much he ploughed to-day. I don't want that Jake get
more done in one day than me. I want we have very much corn this fall."

While the horses drew in the water, and nosed each other, and then drank
again, Antonia sat down on the windmill step and rested her head on her
hand. "You see the big prairie fire from your place last night? I hope
your grandpa ain't lose no stacks?"

"No, we did n't. I came to ask you something, Tony. Grandmother wants to
know if you can't go to the term of school that begins next week over at
the sod schoolhouse. She says there's a good teacher, and you'd learn a
lot."

Antonia stood up, lifting and dropping her shoulders as if they were
stiff. "I ain't got time to learn. I can work like mans now. My mother
can't say no more how Ambrosch do all and nobody to help him. I can work
as much as him. School is all right for little boys. I help make this land
one good farm."

She clucked to her team and started for the barn. I walked beside her,
feeling vexed. Was she going to grow up boastful like her mother, I
wondered? Before we reached the stable, I felt something tense in her
silence, and glancing up I saw that she was crying. She turned her face
from me and looked off at the red streak of dying light, over the dark
prairie.

I climbed up into the loft and threw down the hay for her, while she
unharnessed her team. We walked slowly back toward the house. Ambrosch had
come in from the north quarter, and was watering his oxen at the tank.

Antonia took my hand. "Sometime you will tell me all those nice things you
learn at the school, won't you, Jimmy?" she asked with a sudden rus