PART IV.
SIM BURNS'S WIFE: A PRAIRIE HEROINE A tale of toil that's never done I tell; Of life where love's a fleeting wing Above the woman's hopeless hell Of ceaseless, year-round journeying.
SIM BURNS'S WIFE.
I.
Lucretia Burns had never been handsome, even in her days of early girlhood, and now she was middle-aged, distorted with work and child-bearing, and looking faded and worn as one of the boulders that lay beside the pasture fence near where she sat milking a large white cow.
She had no shawl or hat and no shoes, for it was still muddy in the little yard, where the cattle stood patiently fighting the flies and mosquitoes swarming into their skins, already wet with blood.

The evening was oppressive with its heat, and a ring of just-seen thunder-heads gave premonitions of an approaching storm.
She rose from the cow's side at last, and, taking her pails of foaming milk, staggered toward the gate.

The two pails hung from her lean arms, her bare feet slipped on the filthy ground, her greasy and faded calico dress showed her tired, swollen ankles, and the mosquitoes swarmed mercilessly on her neck and bedded themselves in her colorless hair.
The children were quarreling at the well, and the sound of blows could be heard.

Calves were querulously calling for their milk, and little turkeys, lost in a tangle of grass, were piping plaintively.
The sun just setting struck through a long, low rift like a boy peeping beneath the eaves of a huge roof.

Its light brought out Lucretia's face as she leaned her sallow forehead on the top bar of the gate and looked toward the west.
It was a pitifully worn, almost tragic face--long, thin, sallow, hollow-eyed.