The House That Shadows Built (1928)

THE SOD HOUSE 6i by now; it seemed that the whole prairie was gone. They had abandoned hope when rain began to fall. It turned in an hour to snow, to a belated blizzard. Now that the weather had intervened to save him, the neighbour took the adventures of the greenhorns as a joke and offered them a haven for the night in his barn. Next morning Morris and Herman drove through the snow to Devil’s Lake, bought more tar paper, and incidentally filed their claims. Then they rebuilt the shack. After this lively first week, there were no more accidents or incidents. They built a sod house in the side of a hill, broke forty acres, and planted it in potatoes. The bank, they found, was lending money to bona-fide settlers. So they went into debt for the price of agricultural machinery and a cow. In the late summer Mrs. Kaufmann and the children came on from Chicago. The potatoes, the cow, and Samuel’s steady remittances kept them alive through that winter. Meantime, Morris Kohn found a way to supplement the family income. All this time, Indians were drifting back and forth down the trails, bringing furs; Morris mentioned this fact in his letters to Samuel. Thereupon Samuel and a friend in the fur trade raised a little money and sent it to Morris, together with some expert information on qualities and prices. Through a temperature that sank sometimes to ten degrees below zero, Morris drove their single farm wagon into the Turtle