Frontier and pioneer life -- Idaho -- Fiction; Siblings -- Fiction; Western stories
Harry, of course, rode out with Rob on Monday, taking her diploma and a
letter of recommendation from the principal of the school in the East
where she had taught. She was obliged to pass an examination before
being allowed to teach in Idaho, but she did that satisfactorily and
it was not difficult for the school board to believe in her general
fitness for the work--if "work" it could be called--she reflected after
seeing the textbooks and the fifteen children who were to be her pupils.
The winter's work being thus happily settled for them, Harry and Rob
gave their attention to the new house. He hauled the lumber at odd
times between haying and harvesting and on the first of October came
home with a last load of nails, shingles, windows and building paper,
ready to begin work.
The building of that "prove-up shack," as Rob would call it, was,
next to Harry's coming into Idaho, the most significant event in her
life. All her traditions had built the conviction that a home must be
something more than a weatherproof box containing the number of cubic
feet required by the homestead law and lighted by one window two and a
half feet square.
"I can't, I won't live in a--a shack like some I've seen," she
protested; "board walls so full of splinters you could curry a horse
against them and nothing but a row of nails for a closet. Why isn't it
just as cheap to make a pretty cottage of the same amount of wood?"
"Why, isn't it just as cheap to make a lace veil as a flour sack?
They're both made of cotton thread. I've figured on spending one
month's time and about two hundred dollars cash on this dwelling. Now
if you can show me where any style can be worked in for that sum of
money and labor--don't forget the labor--go ahead and make your plan."
This somewhat discouraging permission was quite enough for Harry. A
flood of sketches including dormer windows, pergolas, verandas and
colonial chimneys was the result offered for Rob's consideration.
"Now if I were an architect and you had a million dollars to spend we'd
show these old timers, wouldn't we?" he laughed. But nevertheless, he
did try to adapt his material to the spirit of Harry's wishes.
The eaves of the steep, gabled roof hung low; there were windows
wherever a free wall space allowed--big windows that gave the plain
rooms a set of ever-changing pictures of prairie and mountains. There
was even a little porch before the door--that door built of planks,
studded with nail-heads and twice the width of the ordinary mill-work
door, "so that when we get our piano, it will be easy to bring it
inside," explained Harry.
"You must be figuring on making money, real money," Rob teased.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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