led and uneasy.

CHAPTER XXXIII

The End of the Sunset Trail

In February while attending a conference of reformers in St. Louis I
received a letter from my mother which greatly disturbed me. "I wish I
could see you," she wrote. "I am not very well this winter, I can't go
out very often and I get very lonesome for my boys. If only you did not
live so far away!"

There was something in this letter which made all that I was doing in
the convention of no account, and on the following evening I took the
train for Columbia, the little village in which my parents were spending
the winter, filled with remorseful forebodings. My pain and
self-accusation would not let me rest. Something clutched my heart every
time I thought of my crippled mother prisoned in a Dakota shanty and no
express train was swift enough to satisfy my desire to reach her. The
letter had been forwarded to me and I was afraid that she might be
actually ill.

That ride next day from Sioux City to Aberdeen was one of the gloomiest
I had ever experienced. Not only was my conscience uneasy, it seemed
that I was being hurled into a region of arctic storms. A terrific
blizzard possessed the plain, and the engine appeared to fight its way
like a brave animal. All day it labored forward while the coaches behind
it swayed in the ever-increasing power of the tempest, their wheels
emitting squeals of pain as they ground through the drifts, and I
sitting in my overcoat with collar turned high above my ears, my hands
thrust deep in my pockets, sullenly counted the hours of my discomfort.
The windows, furred deep with frost, let in but a pallid half-light,
thus adding a mental dusk to the actual menace of the storm.

After each station the brakemen re-entered as if blown in by the blast,
and a vapor, white as a shower of flour, filled the door-way, behind
them. Occasionally as I cleared a space for a peephole through the rimy
panes, I caught momentary glimpses of a level, treeless earth, desolate
as the polar ocean swept by ferocious elemental warfare.

No life was to be seen save here and there a suffering steer or colt,
humped under the lee of a straw-stack. The streets of the small wooden
towns were deserted. No citizen was abroad, only the faint smoke of
chimneys testified to the presence of life beneath the roof-trees.

Occasionally a local passenger came in, puffing and whistling with loud
explosions of excited comment over the storm which he seeme