At night, before I went to sleep, I often
found myself in a sledge drawn by three horses, dashing through a country
that looked something like Nebraska and something like Virginia.
IX
THE first snowfall came early in December. I remember how the world looked
from our sitting-room window as I dressed behind the stove that morning:
the low sky was like a sheet of metal; the blond cornfields had faded out
into ghostliness at last; the little pond was frozen under its stiff
willow bushes. Big white flakes were whirling over everything and
disappearing in the red grass.
Beyond the pond, on the slope that climbed to the cornfield, there was,
faintly marked in the grass, a great circle where the Indians used to
ride. Jake and Otto were sure that when they galloped round that ring the
Indians tortured prisoners, bound to a stake in the center; but
grandfather thought they merely ran races or trained horses there.
Whenever one looked at this slope against the setting sun, the circle
showed like a pattern in the grass; and this morning, when the first light
spray of snow lay over it, it came out with wonderful distinctness, like
strokes of Chinese white on canvas. The old figure stirred me as it had
never done before and seemed a good omen for the winter.
As soon as the snow had packed hard I began to drive about the country in
a clumsy sleigh that Otto Fuchs made for me by fastening a wooden
goods-box on bobs.
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